#james mcwilliams

[thesingingknives]

The life and work of Frank Stanford, once presented and appreciated in its fullness, calls for a new and more inclusive narrative for the art and expression of the American South, one that extends to many souths and beyond and one that demands that we rethink the fall of the Old South as the defining benchmark of a regional literature.

This claim hinges on what ultimately defines Stanford’s work: his unwavering attention to marginalized voices. “I take to / people that are all fucked up,” says Stanford’s alter ego Francis Gildart (466–67). Later, he notes, “The help is always better than the ones in the bow ties” (6472). And near the end, “I call to the downtrodden” (12328). This impulse is as true for Francis Gildart as it was for Francis Gildart Stanford and for Frank’s heroes Walt Whitman and Pier Paolo Pasolini. To his friend and editor Michael Cuddihy, Stanford explained, “I like to be around the monks, the poor—black and white—and alone with myself.” As with the blues, which was Frank’s music, his poetic ear was finely tuned to the experiences of multiracial and multiethnic misfits and outcasts. Those who lived under the weighty thumb of the powerful interested him the most. “The American rural South of his poems,” writes Leon Stokesbury, “is full of defeat and the aimless wanderings and grotesques that accompany defeat.” C. D. Wright notes that “injustice . . . was an intense preoccupation.” Stanford agreed with his spiritual counterpart Walt Whitman, who insisted we “stand up for the stupid and crazy.” Indeed, themes of dispossession, diminishment, marginalization, and, most notably, racial prejudice pervade not only The Battlefield but also much of the rest of Stanford’s work. “Good men,” remarks Francis toward the end of The Battlefield, “have not been given their due” (11878). The Battlefield is in part an epic expression of revenge and retribution—and cultural reassessment—in honor of the overlooked poor, weak, overworked, abused, and forgotten.

—James McWilliams, from The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford

[responsiblelemon]

"Failing to acknowledge the ethical implications of killing, commodifying, and eating sentient beings erodes, with quiet banality, our sense of collective self-worth and... our capacity for justice. Eating animals might make us happy as individuals. It might unite humans as communities breaking bread together. But - no matter how deeply we repress the inevitable violence required for the act - it could be compromising our capacity to tune in to life with the truest authenticity and honesty."

-James McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

[millionsmillions]

O’Connor was a Catholic whose literary ambitions hewed to an active faith. For her, nothing could come from nothing.

Escaping the Waste Land: On Flannery O’Connor and T.S. Eliot

[thesingingknives]

“EVERYONE FORGETS THAT ICARUS ALSO flew.” The words of poet Jack Gilbert—whom Frank never knew but should have—remind us that a death does not define a life. At least it shouldn’t, especially a life as actively lived as Frank Stanford’s. Stanford shot himself three times in or near his heart at the age of twenty-nine. Like so much about his life the final act seems almost impossible. His was a dramatic exit, and those who know Stanford cannot avoid speculating about why it happened. But those are motives only one man will ever know. For all his obsession with death, this book is not an attempt to analyze, or even understand, Frank Stanford’s suicide. As one of Frank’s friends put it, “Of his death we should have little to say.” With this I agree.

Stanford’s nearly thirty years were full of life. He was an orphan who never met his biological parents; a summertime resident of Mississippi levee camps staffed by Black laborers; the educational product of Benedictine monks and an autodidactic reading habit; a teenager who lived a comfortable bourgeois life in a lakefront house; a prodigious and promiscuous lover; a student of cultures local and global and high and low; a child prodigy; a land surveyor; a muse with a near-photographic memory; a devotee of jazz, blues, film, and classical music; a barfly; a karate and judo expert; a publisher; the founder of a small press; an exacting gardener; a savvy editor. And when it was time to tell the big lie, he was astonishing. So yeah, Icarus flew.

Stanford was a chameleon. As a kid he fashioned himself into a southern aristocrat with Mississippi heritage and roots dating back to England (to Earl of Sandwich peerage, no less). Later, he became a periodically reclusive and often brooding artist from Northwest Arkansas, a charismatic and well-read Ozarkian hillbilly who wrote poetry that proved irresistible to the nation’s leading journals (the elite “little magazines” especially); toward the end, he buttoned down, cut back on his drinking, and acted as a professional editor of his own small publishing company, Lost Roads Publishers, where he ushered young and underrecognized talent toward future success in a spirit of wisdom and guidance. Finally, ending the journey with what his friend the poet Thomas Lux called an “irreversible cliche,” he became a writer whose reputation has been overly defined by a striking, self-inflicted, and fatal act.

—James McWilliams, from The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford

[mundowords]

Being alone doesn’t count as being alone if the boredom underscoring the experience is outsourced to an app—that is, if the stress of the experience is erased. The essential fact about being alone and bored is that the moment becomes yours when you engage it through the idiosyncrasies of your own consciousness. When you own it. Uncomfortable as it is, being alone must therefore be a radically self-absorbed endeavor because only in the quiet space between tedium and distraction can we make lasting choices about who we are, what we believe, who we want to become, what we want to support, and—most relevant for our purposes—what we want to resist.

James McWilliams, Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie

[mundowords]

A genuine self can’t be in two places, much less five or six, at one time—at least not in any meaningful way.

James McWilliams, Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie

[vegan-bear-blog]

A secular and religious consensus exists that living an ethical life means accepting that my own interests are no more important than another’s simply because they are mine. Basic decency, not to mention social cohesion, requires us to concede that like interests deserve equal consideration. If we have an interest in anything, it is in avoiding unnecessary pain. Thus, even though a farm animal’s experience of suffering might be different from a human’s experience of suffering, that suffering requires that we consider the animal’s interest in not being raised and eaten much as we would consider our own interest in not being raised and eaten. Once we do that, we would have to demonstrate, in order to justifiably eat a farm animal, that some weighty competing moral consideration was at stake. The succulence of pancetta, unfortunately, won’t cut it.

James McWilliams in ”Loving Animals to Death“

[atarimcgregor]

Amy Fitzgerald, a criminology professor at the University of Windsor in Canada, has found a strong correlation between the presence of a large slaughterhouse and high crime rates in U.S. communities. One might object that a slaughterhouse town’s disproportionate population of poor, working-class males might be the real cause, but Fitzgerald controlled for that possibility by comparing her data to counties with comparable populations employed in factory-like operations. In her study released in 2007, the abattoir stood out as the factor most likely to spike crime statistics. Slaughterhouse workers, in essence, were “desensitized,” and their behavior outside of work reflected it.

“PTSD in the Slaughterhouse”, James McWilliams