Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Refining Fire
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
The city burned with slow fire. The burn line moved about a block an hour, tongues of flame dancing with underwater grace. As soon they heard about it on their police band receivers, members of the Phoenix League began getting the word out by phone tree, blog, and Twitter. In half an hour, everyone who wanted to know was on their way to a railroad yard a couple hundred yards from the line.
I didn’t want to know. Even if the fire worked the way the Phoenixers said it did — and all the studies said it didn’t — I was happy the way I was.
Nobody else felt the same way, though. My teachers always said I was unfocused; my friends said I was too cautious; my dad said I was shy; my mom said I was too proud to ask for help; my girlfriend said I was too sensitive to what other people thought.
The lot of them must have planned it months ago. There was no way to know when the fire would start, or where, or which direction it would spread. So they must have had everything ready: the chloroform, the duct tape, the handcuffs. (It may have just been the wooziness, but I didn’t know Aunt Harriet could drive like that.)
They handcuffed me to a chain link fence in the railway yard, gave me a speech about how this might seem cruel but I’d thank them later, and hugged me. All of them. Even my cousin Burt who’s in the Marines. Then they left me.
The Phoenix-folks walked around, set up folding chairs, chatted — from the stories they swapped, it was clear most of them had done this a few times.
“It doesn’t hurt, exactly,” said a heavyset fellow in a suit. “Third time’s the charm,” he said. “I know I can be even better.”
He and all the others were disappointed when the wind changed and the fire went somewhere else.
An hour went by. Two. I wished my family had left me my iPod.
The Phoenix-leaguers were starting to pack, some in tears, when the van drove up, Aunt Harriet still at the wheel.
They had me out of there in seconds.
“I don’t know what we were thinking,” said dad.
“I love you just the way you are,” said Fiona, and everyone else’s eyes said the same.
I could still feel the fire-heat in their hands.
Read Heron
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
William Mouver wrote of the Jacobean poet Thomas Heron, “As a cause of weeping, wonder, excitement, fascination, and utter envy, there has never been nor likely will ever be any poetry in the English language to rival his. That his arresting understanding of women and the beguiling romance of his words brought him as dull a wife as Judith Bullmer is frankly amazing. His writing is justly accounted the very paragon of manly love.”
Just three days after penning these lines, Mouver was dragged out of his home by an angry mob and kicked to death for seducing a blind twelve-year-old girl literally during her parents’ funeral the previous week. Since he was 43 at the time, this makes Mouver the longest-lived Heron scholar to date.
By way of examples, barrister and Heron obsessive Sean McGargan died in a library fire he set to foil a rival scholar. John Hume-Border, author of the masterful but never-completed Thomas Heron and His Times, was shot fleeing the scene of a “badger game” swindle on his 35th birthday. Documentary filmmaker Yeon Kun Kim died of a drug overdose while shooting what he claimed was an “explosively revelatory” account of Heron’s life, and the footage he acquired was somehow lost while his estate was being settled. No fewer than twenty-nine graduate students are known to have committed suicide and/or died in vehicular accidents (one notable example involving both a speedboat and a helicopter) while working on Heron-related thesis papers. Most recently, noted biographer and poet Andrea Land was found dead for no apparent reason in her home office, clutching a piece of paper on which were scrawled the words “Heron ‘Lament,’ start 4th letter then 5th etc.”
“Lament” could only refer to “The Physician’s Lament,” Heron’s brilliant, bittersweet, and beloved long form poem of 1619, and somewhat to the surprise of everyone, reading the fourth letter of the first line and following it with the fifth letter of the next line (and so on, with a reversal of direction when the end of a line is reached) produced the message “My husband doth account this verse his ouwn, with wits that ne’er thought of love have knowne.”
Professional and amateur scholars alike scoured Heron’s oeuvre for other messages, and found at least six other genuine examples (plus any number of examples that were more wishful thinking than artful writing) scattered throughout the later, most celebrated work attributed to Heron. All of which established that the actual author of Thomas Heron’s poems was inarguably Judith Bullmer Heron, making Thomas a fraud and Judith one of the most celebrated artists of all time, lesbian or otherwise.
Manly love is said to be still recovering.