Abraham
Do I mythologize Lincoln? Certainly. But he was mythic. Abraham led the nation into a vast fratricidal war—a Greek myth multiplied by 500,000. He spent most of his Presidency wondering why the gods had cursed him, like Oedipus. Abraham wrote a note to himself after the Second Battle of Bull Run:
I am almost ready to say… that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.
And a few weeks later, Lincoln told an English Quaker that he believed “ God permits [the Civil War] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.”
Lincoln’s depression in the White House was partly the sense of being cursed. And his final resolution—“with malice towards none, and charity towards all…”—resembles the wise words of Oedipus at the finale of his tragedy.
It’s hard to picture butterflies being ill, but it must happen. I would love to be the first chiropractor to “adjust” butterflies.
I carry a small notebook. Today while I was shaving, I stopped to write: KEH times eight. That means I heard a crow say: “keh keh keh keh keh keh keh keh.”
The reason Lincoln seems so anomalous a president is that his election was a fluke. It occurred because for one year, America essentially had a parliamentary system. The Democratic Party split in two, and another group, the Constitutional Union Party, was formed. Thus Lincoln—an extremely tall, ungainly guy who could barely be described as a politician—was able to win, at the helm of the brand-new Republicans.
The crickets are getting louder every night. They’re developing a mob mentality.
History is the accounting of exceptions. Ordinary people are missing from history books, while unusual ones dominate: Alexander the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie. History is crowded with geniuses.
Grange and I lay in the grass this evening watching bats fly. These creatures swoop much differently than birds do. Theirs is mammalian flight—nervous and flickering—less direct than robins’ paths.
“I want a pet bat,” quoth Grange.
It’s surprising how few movies have been made about Abraham Lincoln—and fewer about George Washington. Watching either of these men move through a room makes us nervous. We are comfortable with them on postage stamps.
It’s summertime, and unfamiliar people are driving by—some in convertibles! Stone Ridge gets younger in the summer.
Now that I think of it, there are three types of flight: insect, bird and mammal. The first type is brief and local; the second arclike; the third twitching. (And there’s a fourth kind of flight—human. This consists of sitting in a chair, often with a seatbelt.)
What rock star is most similar to Abraham Lincoln? Definitely Leonard Cohen. (Bob Dylan is nothing like Lincoln—he’s much closer to Zachary Taylor.) In fact, if Lincoln lived today he might well be an Orthodox Jew practicing Zen Buddhism, like Mr. Cohen.
Early this morning I thought I heard mice, but it was my wife tiptoeing.
One of Abraham’s mysteries was his extraordinary fashion sense (including a beard, the first of any American Prez). I’ve never seen him in an ugly outfit. In photographs his clothing is always artfully rumpled like the shirts of models in Vogue. More proof that he was gay?
Sometimes when Winnie wants to be alone, she’ll lie on the bed with two pillows over her head. I saw her with pillows today.
“What were you thinking about?” I asked her later.
“My job.”
There is something absurd about Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd, beginning with their heights. She was 5’ 2”, he 6’ 4”. The comic motif of a tall person with a short one is ancient. When I was a kid, the comic strip Mutt and Jeff still appeared in certain provincial newspapers. Perhaps the most memorable pairing of short and tall is in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Hermia battles the willowy Helena. Helena calls Hermia a “puppet”, and the latter retorts:
Puppet? Why so? Ay, that way goes the game.
Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures; she hath urged her height;
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.
And are you grown so high in his esteem;
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak;
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.
It culminates with Helena shouting to Hermia:
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.
Abraham and Mary were a maypole and a dwarf. (Is it possible Abe married her as a joke?)
Of course, the polarities between Abe and Mary were more than merely physical: she was rich, he impoverished; she was educated, he unschooled.
I asked Winnie why the birds are so quiet in August. “In the spring, they’re staking out their territories and mating. Now they have nothing left to say,” she replied.
During the Vietnam war our nation was divided into “hawks” and “doves.” That terminology sounds so archaic today, like terms from the 12th century! Nowadays we have no words for those who support the war in Afghanistan, or oppose it.
A swift rain is falling, making a sound like thousands of mouths chewing.
Lincoln had the least education of any president and was the best writer—proof that schooling wrecks the poetic gift?
Winnie harvested 18 green beans from the garden today—they were sweet as syrup.
One reason photographs of Abraham Lincoln are so compelling is how early they occur in the history of photography. Seeing photographic documents of him is as incongruous as watching a video of Alexander The Great. The lineaments of Abe’s jaw and chin emerged from the forest; they don’t belong in a photo. Abe had a dignity that existed before people began “presenting” their faces.
The first president to be photographed was John Quincy Adams, but after his term of office, in 1843. He looked compact and nut-like, glaring out from a rocking chair, his hands clenched together—as if furious at the camera.
The trait that comes through most clearly in Lincoln’s photos is his omnipresent humor—his sense of the absurdity of being Abraham Lincoln.
Did Lincoln have a private humor—one he only shared with close pals? Richard Nixon would call up Bob Hope and beg him for racist jokes. Did Lincoln enjoy that kind of comedy? (It’s not impossible.) Or did he joke about the war dead when no one could hear?
Today I’m watching the wind, in the form of undulant willow fronds.
And this is a sonnet called: Lincoln Moves to Springfield (1837)
On April 15, Lincoln rode into
Springfield on a borrowed horse, all his
possessions in two saddlebags. He drew
up to the general store, A.Y. Ellis
& Co. and asked the price of a
mattress, sheets and a pillow. Joshua
Speed, one of the owners, reckoned the cost
as $17. “That is doubtless
fair, but I have not so much money,” Abe
replied. “I am here to try an experiment
as a lawyer.” Speed, who had seen Lincoln
give a speech, impulsively offered a
deal: to share his own room, and double bed,
with Abe. “Where is your room?” Lincoln said.
The room was upstairs, and what Speed actually said was: “I have a large room with a double bed up-stairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.”
Was he in love with Abe?
When Speed pointed to the winding stairs that led from the store to the second floor, Lincoln picked up his saddlebags and ascended. Shortly afterward he returned beaming with pleasure and announced, “Well Speed, I am moved!”
(That’s from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald.)
I know “experiment” is not a perfect rhyme for “Lincoln,” but it makes a key point, subliminally: that Lincoln was an experiment, within the experiment of the American Republic.
The last line has only nine syllables, to indicate the speed with which Abe embraced Speed. They lived together almost four years.
Today I sat in the woods, closing my eyes to better interrogate the silence. After a few minutes, I opened my eyelids to see a red fox speeding past, not twenty feet away—in mid leap.
George Washington was infatuated with war. One reason he became our first commander was that he appeared at the Continental Congress in full military uniform—the only uniform at the gathering. But Lincoln who presided over our most devastating war, had no stomach for fighting. He hated even hunting. Abraham spoke of his service in the Black Hawk War with irony and embarrassment. And he opposed the popular—and entirely imperialistic—Mexican War. A “wannabe warrior” birthed our nation, but a brooding pacifist brought us to maturity.
Today in Stone Ridge I came upon a large number of people— maybe twelve—gathered around a guy of 23 in red shorts and a t-shirt juggling three rubber balls. A tall woman pointed a camera at him. I asked a woman with a sharp nose and an iPod, “ Is this a movie shoot?”
“No, it’s a photography shoot.”
“What’s it for?”
“Fruit of the Loom.”
My friend Rex The Mystic told me: “Every tree is a soul: the former soul of a living person. But not the part we see; the real soul lives underground.”
Rex learned this from a Native American wise man.
Do crows have nests? If so, I imagine them filled with cigarettes, ashtrays and posters of The Ramones.
At the local vegetable stand, I bought two hot peppers that literally resemble parts of the Devil’s anatomy—his horns. They are bright red, maliciously curved.
Rereading this journal, I am embarrassed how unserious it is: summaries of comic books, facts from the New York Times Book Review, amateur sonnets.
But history is a collection of fragments. The jumble in an antique shop—paintings without titles, greenish vases, aging photographs, a book with a half-illegible name inscribed, slightly moldy quilts—that’s history, before it’s been domesticated by historians.
Besides, my first exposure to history was in comic books. As a kid, I owned the Classics Illustrated biography of Lincoln, and also one for Teddy Roosevelt. I read them over and over, but only remember one anecdote from each. They are: 1) When Lincoln was a boy he told his brother to muddy his feet, then Abe picked him up and held him upside down. The brother made tracks on the ceiling, and when their mother returned, they claimed a stranger had entered, walking on the ceiling. 2) Teddy Roosevelt was shot by an assassin, but he didn’t die, because he happened to have a lucky silver dollar in his pocket!
Watching a small, gray, manic moth today in the backyard was exhausting. There are millions of birdwatchers, but are there “mothwatchers”? Can anyone tell moths apart?
Suddenly I remember another story from Classics Illustrated: Lincoln’s greatest speech. This oration was so brilliant that all the reporters were dumbstruck—they took no notes. Thus the speech is entirely unrecorded. Is this true?
Grange and I were walking along our road when we heard a loud sound. Looking up, we saw a truck pulling a horse van. Suddenly we were staring at the asses of two horses, both with long tails. One was tan, one brown. This was as unexpected as a hooded cobra.
For decades, clocks in jewelry stores were always set to the time that Lincoln died: 7:22. (I guess not in the South, though.) As if our nation came to a halt, eternally, with Abraham’s killing.
Does anyone still follow this practice?
© Sparrow 2020
This is an excerpt from the novel Abraham by Sparrow, published by Autonomedia 2020.
Do I mythologize Lincoln? Certainly. But he was mythic. Abraham led the nation into a vast fratricidal war—a Greek myth multiplied by 500,000. He spent most of his Presidency wondering why the gods had cursed him, like Oedipus. Abraham wrote a note to himself after the Second Battle of Bull Run:
I am almost ready to say… that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.
And a few weeks later, Lincoln told an English Quaker that he believed “ God permits [the Civil War] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.”
Lincoln’s depression in the White House was partly the sense of being cursed. And his final resolution—“with malice towards none, and charity towards all…”—resembles the wise words of Oedipus at the finale of his tragedy.
It’s hard to picture butterflies being ill, but it must happen. I would love to be the first chiropractor to “adjust” butterflies.
I carry a small notebook. Today while I was shaving, I stopped to write: KEH times eight. That means I heard a crow say: “keh keh keh keh keh keh keh keh.”
The reason Lincoln seems so anomalous a president is that his election was a fluke. It occurred because for one year, America essentially had a parliamentary system. The Democratic Party split in two, and another group, the Constitutional Union Party, was formed. Thus Lincoln—an extremely tall, ungainly guy who could barely be described as a politician—was able to win, at the helm of the brand-new Republicans.
The crickets are getting louder every night. They’re developing a mob mentality.
History is the accounting of exceptions. Ordinary people are missing from history books, while unusual ones dominate: Alexander the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie. History is crowded with geniuses.
Grange and I lay in the grass this evening watching bats fly. These creatures swoop much differently than birds do. Theirs is mammalian flight—nervous and flickering—less direct than robins’ paths.
“I want a pet bat,” quoth Grange.
It’s surprising how few movies have been made about Abraham Lincoln—and fewer about George Washington. Watching either of these men move through a room makes us nervous. We are comfortable with them on postage stamps.
It’s summertime, and unfamiliar people are driving by—some in convertibles! Stone Ridge gets younger in the summer.
Now that I think of it, there are three types of flight: insect, bird and mammal. The first type is brief and local; the second arclike; the third twitching. (And there’s a fourth kind of flight—human. This consists of sitting in a chair, often with a seatbelt.)
What rock star is most similar to Abraham Lincoln? Definitely Leonard Cohen. (Bob Dylan is nothing like Lincoln—he’s much closer to Zachary Taylor.) In fact, if Lincoln lived today he might well be an Orthodox Jew practicing Zen Buddhism, like Mr. Cohen.
Early this morning I thought I heard mice, but it was my wife tiptoeing.
One of Abraham’s mysteries was his extraordinary fashion sense (including a beard, the first of any American Prez). I’ve never seen him in an ugly outfit. In photographs his clothing is always artfully rumpled like the shirts of models in Vogue. More proof that he was gay?
Sometimes when Winnie wants to be alone, she’ll lie on the bed with two pillows over her head. I saw her with pillows today.
“What were you thinking about?” I asked her later.
“My job.”
There is something absurd about Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd, beginning with their heights. She was 5’ 2”, he 6’ 4”. The comic motif of a tall person with a short one is ancient. When I was a kid, the comic strip Mutt and Jeff still appeared in certain provincial newspapers. Perhaps the most memorable pairing of short and tall is in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Hermia battles the willowy Helena. Helena calls Hermia a “puppet”, and the latter retorts:
Puppet? Why so? Ay, that way goes the game.
Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures; she hath urged her height;
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.
And are you grown so high in his esteem;
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak;
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.
It culminates with Helena shouting to Hermia:
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.
Abraham and Mary were a maypole and a dwarf. (Is it possible Abe married her as a joke?)
Of course, the polarities between Abe and Mary were more than merely physical: she was rich, he impoverished; she was educated, he unschooled.
I asked Winnie why the birds are so quiet in August. “In the spring, they’re staking out their territories and mating. Now they have nothing left to say,” she replied.
During the Vietnam war our nation was divided into “hawks” and “doves.” That terminology sounds so archaic today, like terms from the 12th century! Nowadays we have no words for those who support the war in Afghanistan, or oppose it.
A swift rain is falling, making a sound like thousands of mouths chewing.
Lincoln had the least education of any president and was the best writer—proof that schooling wrecks the poetic gift?
Winnie harvested 18 green beans from the garden today—they were sweet as syrup.
One reason photographs of Abraham Lincoln are so compelling is how early they occur in the history of photography. Seeing photographic documents of him is as incongruous as watching a video of Alexander The Great. The lineaments of Abe’s jaw and chin emerged from the forest; they don’t belong in a photo. Abe had a dignity that existed before people began “presenting” their faces.
The first president to be photographed was John Quincy Adams, but after his term of office, in 1843. He looked compact and nut-like, glaring out from a rocking chair, his hands clenched together—as if furious at the camera.
The trait that comes through most clearly in Lincoln’s photos is his omnipresent humor—his sense of the absurdity of being Abraham Lincoln.
Did Lincoln have a private humor—one he only shared with close pals? Richard Nixon would call up Bob Hope and beg him for racist jokes. Did Lincoln enjoy that kind of comedy? (It’s not impossible.) Or did he joke about the war dead when no one could hear?
Today I’m watching the wind, in the form of undulant willow fronds.
And this is a sonnet called: Lincoln Moves to Springfield (1837)
On April 15, Lincoln rode into
Springfield on a borrowed horse, all his
possessions in two saddlebags. He drew
up to the general store, A.Y. Ellis
& Co. and asked the price of a
mattress, sheets and a pillow. Joshua
Speed, one of the owners, reckoned the cost
as $17. “That is doubtless
fair, but I have not so much money,” Abe
replied. “I am here to try an experiment
as a lawyer.” Speed, who had seen Lincoln
give a speech, impulsively offered a
deal: to share his own room, and double bed,
with Abe. “Where is your room?” Lincoln said.
The room was upstairs, and what Speed actually said was: “I have a large room with a double bed up-stairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.”
Was he in love with Abe?
When Speed pointed to the winding stairs that led from the store to the second floor, Lincoln picked up his saddlebags and ascended. Shortly afterward he returned beaming with pleasure and announced, “Well Speed, I am moved!”
(That’s from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald.)
I know “experiment” is not a perfect rhyme for “Lincoln,” but it makes a key point, subliminally: that Lincoln was an experiment, within the experiment of the American Republic.
The last line has only nine syllables, to indicate the speed with which Abe embraced Speed. They lived together almost four years.
Today I sat in the woods, closing my eyes to better interrogate the silence. After a few minutes, I opened my eyelids to see a red fox speeding past, not twenty feet away—in mid leap.
George Washington was infatuated with war. One reason he became our first commander was that he appeared at the Continental Congress in full military uniform—the only uniform at the gathering. But Lincoln who presided over our most devastating war, had no stomach for fighting. He hated even hunting. Abraham spoke of his service in the Black Hawk War with irony and embarrassment. And he opposed the popular—and entirely imperialistic—Mexican War. A “wannabe warrior” birthed our nation, but a brooding pacifist brought us to maturity.
Today in Stone Ridge I came upon a large number of people— maybe twelve—gathered around a guy of 23 in red shorts and a t-shirt juggling three rubber balls. A tall woman pointed a camera at him. I asked a woman with a sharp nose and an iPod, “ Is this a movie shoot?”
“No, it’s a photography shoot.”
“What’s it for?”
“Fruit of the Loom.”
My friend Rex The Mystic told me: “Every tree is a soul: the former soul of a living person. But not the part we see; the real soul lives underground.”
Rex learned this from a Native American wise man.
Do crows have nests? If so, I imagine them filled with cigarettes, ashtrays and posters of The Ramones.
At the local vegetable stand, I bought two hot peppers that literally resemble parts of the Devil’s anatomy—his horns. They are bright red, maliciously curved.
Rereading this journal, I am embarrassed how unserious it is: summaries of comic books, facts from the New York Times Book Review, amateur sonnets.
But history is a collection of fragments. The jumble in an antique shop—paintings without titles, greenish vases, aging photographs, a book with a half-illegible name inscribed, slightly moldy quilts—that’s history, before it’s been domesticated by historians.
Besides, my first exposure to history was in comic books. As a kid, I owned the Classics Illustrated biography of Lincoln, and also one for Teddy Roosevelt. I read them over and over, but only remember one anecdote from each. They are: 1) When Lincoln was a boy he told his brother to muddy his feet, then Abe picked him up and held him upside down. The brother made tracks on the ceiling, and when their mother returned, they claimed a stranger had entered, walking on the ceiling. 2) Teddy Roosevelt was shot by an assassin, but he didn’t die, because he happened to have a lucky silver dollar in his pocket!
Watching a small, gray, manic moth today in the backyard was exhausting. There are millions of birdwatchers, but are there “mothwatchers”? Can anyone tell moths apart?
Suddenly I remember another story from Classics Illustrated: Lincoln’s greatest speech. This oration was so brilliant that all the reporters were dumbstruck—they took no notes. Thus the speech is entirely unrecorded. Is this true?
Grange and I were walking along our road when we heard a loud sound. Looking up, we saw a truck pulling a horse van. Suddenly we were staring at the asses of two horses, both with long tails. One was tan, one brown. This was as unexpected as a hooded cobra.
For decades, clocks in jewelry stores were always set to the time that Lincoln died: 7:22. (I guess not in the South, though.) As if our nation came to a halt, eternally, with Abraham’s killing.
Does anyone still follow this practice?
© Sparrow 2020
This is an excerpt from the novel Abraham by Sparrow, published by Autonomedia 2020.
Narrated by Sparrow
Narrated by Sparrow
POST RECITAL
TALK
TN: Hi Sparrow. Welcome back to The Strange Recital. I’m hoping you remember who we are.
SP: Yeah, I’m hoping I can remember who I am.
BR: These are strange times and memory can play tricks...
TN: Yes... Well... your book is written in the form of a diary by a chiropractor in Stone Ridge and seamlessly moves between his musings on Abraham Lincoln and his life with his wife, Winnie and three-year-old son, Grange. There’s a poetry to it. It was hard to pick an excerpt—there are gems everywhere, or diamonds that grow upon fungus, as I like to say.
SP: So what made you decide to choose the parts you chose?
BR: Well on the cover of the book is a close-up picture of Lincoln’s face, and across the top is written “Abraham” and beneath it “Sparrow”. And both those words have seven letters, so our excerpt would begin on page 77. It was a no brainer. But Sparrow, tell me a little about your writing process… you’re known for your very short poems, so how do you transition from those into a full novella with a fictional storyline?
SP: Well when I give a public reading I always read short poems. I get bored reading prose, and I want to know whether the poems are good or terrible, which you can tell when you read a tiny poem but if you read a long prose piece people seem to just fall asleep.
TN: Now you quote from an account about Lincoln arriving in Springfield, and sharing a bed with the owner of the local general store. So was he gay? Not that it really matters. I’ve heard differing opinions—from him definitely being gay, to that sharing a bed had a different cultural significance in those times and we shouldn’t project our modern viewpoints on to days gone by. But he did stay with Joshua Speed for four years, and I seem to recall that later on he used to share a bed with his Secretary of State. So what do you think?
SP: Well it happens that I met Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln, and Kushner is gay and he spent years thinking about Lincoln for this screenplay and I asked him if he thought Lincoln was gay and he said: “quite possibly.” So, I notice that I’m not that interested myself in whether or not Lincoln actually had sex with men. I could see possibly you could sleep in a bed for four and a half years with another guy in the nineteenth century and never occur to you that there’s any sexual possibilities there. Maybe they had sex every night. I guess I’m not that interested in Lincoln as a real person but I am interested in the fact that this guy named C.A. Tripp wrote a book in 2005 called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (posthumously published, not written, in 2005), which I believe is the first full length book to suggest that Lincoln was gay, and it made everybody in the Abraham Lincoln establishment of historians and Lincoln-lovers nervous. So I think that is interesting.
BR: Yeah, yeah. I’ve always been interested in the blurry boundary between an author’s “self” and the voice in which he or she writes, and what happens when one clearly chooses a narrative voice that is not oneself. So, why a chiropractor as a narrator?
SP: Well the narrator—Robert Klasson his name is, was originally a high school teacher in the first draft and I showed the manuscript to my friend, Larry Bush and he said: “Teachers always tell stories about being teachers.” And I couldn’t think of any stories about being a teacher to put in the book, so I just turned him into a chiropractor because chiropractors never talk about their work.
TN: What led you to present the book as a journal?
SP: Well you know, I was looking in my writings today and I noticed in a manuscript I wrote: “The journal is the art form of aristocrats and teenagers.” Which… I don’t know that has any relevance here. I mean, I think the journal is the easiest form to write. I mean it’s kind of the closest to writing a poem. It’s in the eternal present. My wife accuses me of living in the moment, and I also write in the moment. There’s some famous writer said: “ I could never write a novel because I could never write the sentence: Then Andry walked in the room.” And when you write a journal you don’t have to write: “Then Andry walked in the room.”
BR: We should mention that for the sake of an audio experience, we removed your date and time notations that give authenticity to the journal format on the page. So we made it timeless!
SP: Yeah… I mean I have this highly idiosyncratic method of notation, whereby the number twenty-four followed by the letter “E” indicates May 24th, because E is the fifth letter of the alphabet and May is the fifth month of the year, so when you’re reading the book you’re just constantly confronted by these mystifying notations—that you can’t figure out what they mean.
TN: Well going back to Abe… you write that: “The lineaments of Abe’s jaw and chin emerged from the forest; they don’t belong in a photo.” This is a very poetic statement. Can you say more?
SP: Well if you look at the very first photographs, peoples’ faces really look different. It’s like people sort of co-evolved, or devolved along with photography. For one thing, people didn’t smile all the time in the nineteenth century. And you know Lincoln had an extremely difficult life. He grew up poor, deep in the woods with this kind of merciless father. His mother died from drinking milk that was poisoned by the cow eating snake root. So, you know, you see all this on his face. You see a kind of a very etched life that you don’t see nowadays very much.
BR: You talk about Lincoln’s rather incongruous marriage to Mary Todd—at least height-wise… I wonder what happened to her after he was assassinated. Do you know anything about that?
SP: Her son, Robert had her committed to an insane asylum—a private asylum which happened to be called Bellevue Place in Batavia, Illinois. Now, she was able to escape after only three months, I mean to be discharged. And then she ended up living in France—a place called Pau—P.A.U. So she was eccentric. She was terrified of poverty, while simultaneously spending lavishly. The reason Robert committed her to the insane asylum apparently is that she came to visit him in Chicago. She was certain that he was deathly ill base on some intuition she had, which was untrue. She said, on the train to Chicago she was poisoned and that a wandering Jew stole her pocket-book and then gave it back to her
SFX: Interference
SP: So you know she was an odd character apparently, but she lived pretty long, died in 1882 in Springfield, Illinois…
VOICE: We are the ones, who have the will to win. Who not only deserve…
TN: What’s that?
BR: Interference?
TN: Yeah but what kind of interference? This isn’t radio. We’re in a studio and the monitors are muted. Doesn’t make sense.
SP: Well I thought it was FDR.
TN: What’s he doing here?
BR: Who knows? Anyway… we’re running out of time and megabytes. Sparrow, there’s a section of your book, which unfortunately we couldn’t include in this excerpt. You list the first names of the US presidents. Could you say something about that and then take us out with that list?
SP: Well the presidents are these iconic characters, and of course on another level they’re human beings. And I don’t think anyone has ever compiled before me a definitive list, which I wrote as a poem incidentally, of the first names of all the presidents in chronological order. And it’s interesting to hear them, and suddenly you realize these are people. People that sat down at tables and ate soup like everyone else. So here they go. I’ll read it now. George, John, Thomas, James, James, John, Andrew, Martin, William, John, James, Zachary, Millard, Franklin, James, Abraham, Andrew, Ulysses, Rutherford, James, Chester, Grover, Benjamin, Grover, William, Theodore, William, Woodrow, Warren, Calvin, Herbert, Franklin, Harry, Dwight, John, Lyndon, Richard, Gerald, James, Ronald, George, Bill, George, Barack, Donald, Joe.
TN: Hi Sparrow. Welcome back to The Strange Recital. I’m hoping you remember who we are.
SP: Yeah, I’m hoping I can remember who I am.
BR: These are strange times and memory can play tricks...
TN: Yes... Well... your book is written in the form of a diary by a chiropractor in Stone Ridge and seamlessly moves between his musings on Abraham Lincoln and his life with his wife, Winnie and three-year-old son, Grange. There’s a poetry to it. It was hard to pick an excerpt—there are gems everywhere, or diamonds that grow upon fungus, as I like to say.
SP: So what made you decide to choose the parts you chose?
BR: Well on the cover of the book is a close-up picture of Lincoln’s face, and across the top is written “Abraham” and beneath it “Sparrow”. And both those words have seven letters, so our excerpt would begin on page 77. It was a no brainer. But Sparrow, tell me a little about your writing process… you’re known for your very short poems, so how do you transition from those into a full novella with a fictional storyline?
SP: Well when I give a public reading I always read short poems. I get bored reading prose, and I want to know whether the poems are good or terrible, which you can tell when you read a tiny poem but if you read a long prose piece people seem to just fall asleep.
TN: Now you quote from an account about Lincoln arriving in Springfield, and sharing a bed with the owner of the local general store. So was he gay? Not that it really matters. I’ve heard differing opinions—from him definitely being gay, to that sharing a bed had a different cultural significance in those times and we shouldn’t project our modern viewpoints on to days gone by. But he did stay with Joshua Speed for four years, and I seem to recall that later on he used to share a bed with his Secretary of State. So what do you think?
SP: Well it happens that I met Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln, and Kushner is gay and he spent years thinking about Lincoln for this screenplay and I asked him if he thought Lincoln was gay and he said: “quite possibly.” So, I notice that I’m not that interested myself in whether or not Lincoln actually had sex with men. I could see possibly you could sleep in a bed for four and a half years with another guy in the nineteenth century and never occur to you that there’s any sexual possibilities there. Maybe they had sex every night. I guess I’m not that interested in Lincoln as a real person but I am interested in the fact that this guy named C.A. Tripp wrote a book in 2005 called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (posthumously published, not written, in 2005), which I believe is the first full length book to suggest that Lincoln was gay, and it made everybody in the Abraham Lincoln establishment of historians and Lincoln-lovers nervous. So I think that is interesting.
BR: Yeah, yeah. I’ve always been interested in the blurry boundary between an author’s “self” and the voice in which he or she writes, and what happens when one clearly chooses a narrative voice that is not oneself. So, why a chiropractor as a narrator?
SP: Well the narrator—Robert Klasson his name is, was originally a high school teacher in the first draft and I showed the manuscript to my friend, Larry Bush and he said: “Teachers always tell stories about being teachers.” And I couldn’t think of any stories about being a teacher to put in the book, so I just turned him into a chiropractor because chiropractors never talk about their work.
TN: What led you to present the book as a journal?
SP: Well you know, I was looking in my writings today and I noticed in a manuscript I wrote: “The journal is the art form of aristocrats and teenagers.” Which… I don’t know that has any relevance here. I mean, I think the journal is the easiest form to write. I mean it’s kind of the closest to writing a poem. It’s in the eternal present. My wife accuses me of living in the moment, and I also write in the moment. There’s some famous writer said: “ I could never write a novel because I could never write the sentence: Then Andry walked in the room.” And when you write a journal you don’t have to write: “Then Andry walked in the room.”
BR: We should mention that for the sake of an audio experience, we removed your date and time notations that give authenticity to the journal format on the page. So we made it timeless!
SP: Yeah… I mean I have this highly idiosyncratic method of notation, whereby the number twenty-four followed by the letter “E” indicates May 24th, because E is the fifth letter of the alphabet and May is the fifth month of the year, so when you’re reading the book you’re just constantly confronted by these mystifying notations—that you can’t figure out what they mean.
TN: Well going back to Abe… you write that: “The lineaments of Abe’s jaw and chin emerged from the forest; they don’t belong in a photo.” This is a very poetic statement. Can you say more?
SP: Well if you look at the very first photographs, peoples’ faces really look different. It’s like people sort of co-evolved, or devolved along with photography. For one thing, people didn’t smile all the time in the nineteenth century. And you know Lincoln had an extremely difficult life. He grew up poor, deep in the woods with this kind of merciless father. His mother died from drinking milk that was poisoned by the cow eating snake root. So, you know, you see all this on his face. You see a kind of a very etched life that you don’t see nowadays very much.
BR: You talk about Lincoln’s rather incongruous marriage to Mary Todd—at least height-wise… I wonder what happened to her after he was assassinated. Do you know anything about that?
SP: Her son, Robert had her committed to an insane asylum—a private asylum which happened to be called Bellevue Place in Batavia, Illinois. Now, she was able to escape after only three months, I mean to be discharged. And then she ended up living in France—a place called Pau—P.A.U. So she was eccentric. She was terrified of poverty, while simultaneously spending lavishly. The reason Robert committed her to the insane asylum apparently is that she came to visit him in Chicago. She was certain that he was deathly ill base on some intuition she had, which was untrue. She said, on the train to Chicago she was poisoned and that a wandering Jew stole her pocket-book and then gave it back to her
SFX: Interference
SP: So you know she was an odd character apparently, but she lived pretty long, died in 1882 in Springfield, Illinois…
VOICE: We are the ones, who have the will to win. Who not only deserve…
TN: What’s that?
BR: Interference?
TN: Yeah but what kind of interference? This isn’t radio. We’re in a studio and the monitors are muted. Doesn’t make sense.
SP: Well I thought it was FDR.
TN: What’s he doing here?
BR: Who knows? Anyway… we’re running out of time and megabytes. Sparrow, there’s a section of your book, which unfortunately we couldn’t include in this excerpt. You list the first names of the US presidents. Could you say something about that and then take us out with that list?
SP: Well the presidents are these iconic characters, and of course on another level they’re human beings. And I don’t think anyone has ever compiled before me a definitive list, which I wrote as a poem incidentally, of the first names of all the presidents in chronological order. And it’s interesting to hear them, and suddenly you realize these are people. People that sat down at tables and ate soup like everyone else. So here they go. I’ll read it now. George, John, Thomas, James, James, John, Andrew, Martin, William, John, James, Zachary, Millard, Franklin, James, Abraham, Andrew, Ulysses, Rutherford, James, Chester, Grover, Benjamin, Grover, William, Theodore, William, Woodrow, Warren, Calvin, Herbert, Franklin, Harry, Dwight, John, Lyndon, Richard, Gerald, James, Ronald, George, Bill, George, Barack, Donald, Joe.
Music on this episode:
Vi Nur Vivas Dufoje, Esperanto rendition of You Only Live Twice by John Barry
