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Stud-Duckery
Mar. 28th, 2025 09:32 amAnother dream about Rick Raffanti & the House of Usher! (Should I start skimming obituaries?) Only this time, the House of Usher was a very grand place, filled with crystal chandeliers, stained glass, & gleaming mahogany. Rick stood on a balcony high above me, calling, "DiLuch!" (My nickname in the volleyball days.)
We embraced.
He told me he had recently remarried. Connubial bliss was the term he used.
Do you own this house now? I asked. It's the house I grew up in—Well. Kinda, sorta.
But, no. He didn't.
###
Meanwhile, yesterday, I toddled off to the gym & repurpled my hair—two activities designed to cheer me up because Black Chicken was making me very sad: She would not eat the corn tortilla bits I lavished upon her, & she would not leave the henhouse. She is clearly depressed—but I can't do anything about that because she is not my chicken!
It seems like a waste of time to expend emotion on a situation you can't do anything about. Yet I couldn't help grieving for her. The plight of animals often moves me more than the plight of humans. I mean, fuck humans. I suppose that makes me cloyingly sentimental.
###
When I got back from the gym, I played around with SquareSpace. Watched tutorials—which always moved too slowly, so I'd give up & dash downhill through the software itself, trying to find the elusive backend.
After a while, I developed a begrudging respect for SquareSpace. Saw how I might actually come to like the software if I got better at configuring it.
SquareSpace is design-oriented rather than content-oriented, and that means they have many fail-safes in place to prevent you from undermining the layout. I can see the utility in this: Professional websites must have a certain look. But it also makes it exceedingly difficult to tweak the content.
Anyway, I came up with a design & basic verbiage for the Adrienne homepage, & sent a screenshot to fresh-faced little Brian, the campaign manager.
Fresh-faced little Brian shot an enthusiastic email back: He loves the direction I'm going in!
I actually think that's true.
I'm pretty confident I can finish the website this weekend.
Which will be a relief since I didn't actually volunteer to do Adrienne's website. In the runaround, I was somehow volunteered.
###
I'm on my second reread of Tracy Daugherty's Larry McMurtry bio. It continues to delight.
One of the most interesting things about McMurtry was that while he was an obsessive literati, he was not necessarily obsessive about writing. In his youth, he thought he was obsessive about writing and produced one perfect novel: The Last Picture Show.
Later on in his life, he carved out the novel most people think of as his masterpiece—Lonesome Dove—from a mess of half-finished manuscripts & screenplays that had accumulated on a series of desks over a span of 20 years or so.
But his true passion was not for writing books; it was for collecting books. McMurtry was a kinda modern-day priest of the Library of Alexandria! And the most interesting parts of his biography are his rare book scouting adventures.
###
About Lonesome Dove itself, McMurtry was ambivalent. He likened it to Gone With the Wind—a very apt analogy, I think.
Now, I happen to think Gone With the Wind is a great American novel!
But I didn't attend a graduate program in English literature at a major university, and McMurtry did. I am a post-modernist: I see absolutely no difference between so-called high culture and so-called low culture. Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—they're absolutely equivalent to me.
Larry McMurtry was not a post-modernist.
###
Lots of other fascinating things in this book—as, for example: McMurtry had a long relationship with Ken Kesey that started when they were in the Stegner Fellowship together.
About Kesey, McMurtry wrote, "He made it plain that he meant to be the stud-duck... There were about a dozen of us assembled when Ken made his entrance, and he was hardly the only competitive person in the room. Like stoats in the henhouse, we were poised to rend and tear... we were all young males. Ken plopped himself down at the right hand of Mr. Cowley and got set to read what turned out to be the first chapters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This was stud-duckery indeed."
Now, I happen to think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a steaming pile of shit.
Sometimes a Great Notion is better—but, you know. A Look Homeward Angel imitator.
Back in the Jurassic when I was young, Kesey was a mega-cultural icon. Literary excellence was one of many laurels heaped upon his brow.
I do understand how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest got nominated to its place in the American literary canon: The literary pantheon back then was male-dominated, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the Male Castration Fantasy made print.
But I simply loathe it.
Anyway, Kesey's mental decline is episodically chronicled throughout the McMurtry biography, & I, for one, enjoyed reading about it.
We embraced.
He told me he had recently remarried. Connubial bliss was the term he used.
Do you own this house now? I asked. It's the house I grew up in—Well. Kinda, sorta.
But, no. He didn't.
###
Meanwhile, yesterday, I toddled off to the gym & repurpled my hair—two activities designed to cheer me up because Black Chicken was making me very sad: She would not eat the corn tortilla bits I lavished upon her, & she would not leave the henhouse. She is clearly depressed—but I can't do anything about that because she is not my chicken!
It seems like a waste of time to expend emotion on a situation you can't do anything about. Yet I couldn't help grieving for her. The plight of animals often moves me more than the plight of humans. I mean, fuck humans. I suppose that makes me cloyingly sentimental.
###
When I got back from the gym, I played around with SquareSpace. Watched tutorials—which always moved too slowly, so I'd give up & dash downhill through the software itself, trying to find the elusive backend.
After a while, I developed a begrudging respect for SquareSpace. Saw how I might actually come to like the software if I got better at configuring it.
SquareSpace is design-oriented rather than content-oriented, and that means they have many fail-safes in place to prevent you from undermining the layout. I can see the utility in this: Professional websites must have a certain look. But it also makes it exceedingly difficult to tweak the content.
Anyway, I came up with a design & basic verbiage for the Adrienne homepage, & sent a screenshot to fresh-faced little Brian, the campaign manager.
Fresh-faced little Brian shot an enthusiastic email back: He loves the direction I'm going in!
I actually think that's true.
I'm pretty confident I can finish the website this weekend.
Which will be a relief since I didn't actually volunteer to do Adrienne's website. In the runaround, I was somehow volunteered.
###
I'm on my second reread of Tracy Daugherty's Larry McMurtry bio. It continues to delight.
One of the most interesting things about McMurtry was that while he was an obsessive literati, he was not necessarily obsessive about writing. In his youth, he thought he was obsessive about writing and produced one perfect novel: The Last Picture Show.
Later on in his life, he carved out the novel most people think of as his masterpiece—Lonesome Dove—from a mess of half-finished manuscripts & screenplays that had accumulated on a series of desks over a span of 20 years or so.
But his true passion was not for writing books; it was for collecting books. McMurtry was a kinda modern-day priest of the Library of Alexandria! And the most interesting parts of his biography are his rare book scouting adventures.
###
About Lonesome Dove itself, McMurtry was ambivalent. He likened it to Gone With the Wind—a very apt analogy, I think.
Now, I happen to think Gone With the Wind is a great American novel!
But I didn't attend a graduate program in English literature at a major university, and McMurtry did. I am a post-modernist: I see absolutely no difference between so-called high culture and so-called low culture. Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—they're absolutely equivalent to me.
Larry McMurtry was not a post-modernist.
###
Lots of other fascinating things in this book—as, for example: McMurtry had a long relationship with Ken Kesey that started when they were in the Stegner Fellowship together.
About Kesey, McMurtry wrote, "He made it plain that he meant to be the stud-duck... There were about a dozen of us assembled when Ken made his entrance, and he was hardly the only competitive person in the room. Like stoats in the henhouse, we were poised to rend and tear... we were all young males. Ken plopped himself down at the right hand of Mr. Cowley and got set to read what turned out to be the first chapters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This was stud-duckery indeed."
Now, I happen to think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a steaming pile of shit.
Sometimes a Great Notion is better—but, you know. A Look Homeward Angel imitator.
Back in the Jurassic when I was young, Kesey was a mega-cultural icon. Literary excellence was one of many laurels heaped upon his brow.
I do understand how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest got nominated to its place in the American literary canon: The literary pantheon back then was male-dominated, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the Male Castration Fantasy made print.
But I simply loathe it.
Anyway, Kesey's mental decline is episodically chronicled throughout the McMurtry biography, & I, for one, enjoyed reading about it.
