How to know when you're drinking too much coffee

The first way to tell is that, after lunch, you will be overcome by sleepiness immediately following your dessert coffee. If you can take a nap right after drinking coffee, you might be drinking too much.

However, the best way is the second way, which is somehow to go ahead and cut back to the point that you don't drink coffee at all after 3 p.m., and the first night of the first day of that regimen you have a dream, which you realize you have not had in some time, but this is not only a dream, it is a prophecy on the order of the Biblical ones in which you go looking for the room where God teaches singing lessons.

It is inside a large brick building that could be a church or a university hall, and you are told -- by a trustworthy entity whose face is a kaleidoscope that keeps changing to the face of one or another of an old neighbor or friend -- that it is in one of the rooms off the band room, which is at the top of the steps, just like at Northside Jr. High, so you go up a stairway to the top, but the band room isn't up there (anymore?) so you go down a corridor and find a door that opens onto another stairway that looks like it is underneath the basement where you cowered once upon a time when you were dropped off at kindergarten on a holiday by your mother who didn't know the kindergarten was closed that day, except now the stairway looks onto a glassed-in, well-appointed mezzanine lounge well-stocked with butterfly-sling leather chairs, which looks so much like a lifeless MOMA design exhibit that something tells you no one uses these steps, ever, and no one ever has done, so it is just you going up past the glassed-in butterfly chairs, taking steps that have never been taken before in the lifetime of the universe, but there at the top of the steps is a door labeled "BAND," which you open to a room in which a couple of people are distributing red and gold pieces of blank paper that does not look like music, but you have no time to investigate because along the side of the room -- which goes on longways as will, like a country dance -- are alcoves with large, solid, wooden doors that look like they enclose chambers of power and influence, but which repeatedly, when you open them, reveal a small nook in which there is invariably some old man puttering away at an enthusiasm, one of whose is model trains and another of whose is feeling miscellaneous swatches of fabric, but on you go until you stand in front of the door to God and the singing lessons, though not with any great confidence because one of the paper-bearing band people has in the meantime commented with a knowing nod-and-a-wink that God often comes to the door "immodestly attired, if you know what I mean," which is where you wake up.

And that really is the best way to know you've been drinking too much coffee.

When the skeleton in the closet isn't the elephant in the room: The Pentecost Pogrom of Erwin, TN

The approach to Erwin on eastbound I-26 is as attractive a drive as anyone could wish for. The Unaka chain of the Appalachians forms a dramatic and picturesque backdrop. The county seat of Unicoi County, one of the easternmost Tennessee counties that hugs the mountainous border with North Carolina, Erwin has a wealth of outdoor attractions in the vicinity: hiking the Appalachian Trail (Erwin is a favorite location for R&R for trail through-hikers), rafting the Nolichucky River that flows past it, exploring the trails at the relatively new Rocky Fork State Park. A small place with an interesting history, Erwin was for many years the headquarters of the Clinchfield Railroad that connected the coalfields of Virginia to the textile mills of South Carolina; it was the location of a significant Blue Ridge Pottery plant, with some of its workers housed in still-lived-in cottage-style homes designed by "Garden City" architects.

Erwin also has the misfortune of having hosted -- if that is how to say it -- a racial pogrom. 100 years ago this weekend -- May 19, 1918, on Pentecost Sunday -- an incident of some kind (local history says cards) enflamed a lynch mob that killed a black man, corralled the town's entire black population to watch the burning of his corpse, and threatened a similar fate to any blacks who did not leave the next day. Suffice it to say that the warning was heeded. With that, Erwin became a "sundown town" in which blacks were not permitted to live.

I drove over to Erwin this morning to look for evidence of any memory of the event.

"I heard about it growing up," said the librarian at the Erwin library, as she led me back into the local history room, an overstuffed room that looks like it might have been a ticket office back in the days when this was the train station.

Libraries often have files of newspaper clippings and other ephemera related to significant events in local history. The librarian unlocked a file cabinet for me and invited me to browse at my leisure, although she herself had only a vague awareness of the event and no knowledge of any information about it.

There was nothing about the pogrom in the clippings file. There was however a big, fat folder about the elephant, though: Mary, the renegade elephant who killed her circus handler in Kingsport, but, in order to be "executed," had to be brought to Erwin where there was railroad equipment big enough to hang her. That was in 1916, two years before the African-American purge, about which people know nothing. Mary, on the other hand ... Mary is the only thing many, many people know about Erwin.

The library has a very quiet cat who kept me company in the chair next to me while I didn't find what I was looking for.

I then walked over to the town newspaper office and bought the current newspaper (a weekly), which covered a couple of annual culinary celebrations elsewhere in the county: a ramp festival over in Flag Pond and a strawberry festival in Unicoi. There were stories about high school students racing solar-powered vehicles at Bristol Motor Speedway, a visit from a gubernatorial candidate, a fatal industrial accident at a tire plant, and an opinion columnist who allowed as how a front porch might be the key to an agreement between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un.

Nothing about a purge of black residents 100 years ago, though.

The day wasn't a total bust. The library in Johnson City had a book that was relevant: Buried in the Bitter Waters, a book about twelve such "racial cleansing" incidents as Erwin's written by Pulitzer-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin and published in 2007. Some previous reader had flagged the chapter about Erwin by dog-earing its first page. I left it that way. "Something in the Air," says the chapter title. On Pentecost Sunday, what would that be?

I feel sure that the feeling in Erwin is probably something along the lines of "why dredge up the unpleasant past?" But don't we commemorate bad things all the time? We make whole religions out of bad events. Disasters from war receive monumental treatment routinely (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). Even events for which the nation must accept blame -- think of the "Trail of Tears" -- are studied, remembered, and memorialized.

Ironically, Erwin itself has done this with the elephant Mary. Hanging an elephant is bizarre and weird and unpleasant. But Erwin thrives on that part of its history. If you go to the town site, you will see that you can "become an elephant artist." The town is having eight fiberglass elephants brought to downtown, and it is soliciting participants for their decoration. After being exhibited for a time, the painted elephants will be auctioned off, with a portion of the proceeds to go to the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, TN, where "retired captive elephants" live out their dotage.

Now, imagine an entire nation putting that kind of thought and care into deriving some ethical or moral recompense for 350 years of slavery, racial apartheid, and the programmatic deprivation of the civil rights of African-Americans. That's a John Lennon-sized "imagine," I realize, but hey, Erwin, you could be the dreamer that starts the ball rolling.

Like what happened on Pentecost.

Found in translation: helping a town read its Tocqueville

I recently noticed in the Kingsport newspaper's local history column written by Vince Staten a story about Jean Nicaise, a Belgian who spent a year teaching in Kingsport in the late 50's. He recorded some home movie footage during his visit, and it has wound up on Youtube by way of the Belgian Archives and Museum of Literature.

But Nicaise also wrote a memoir in French, which includes some 60 pages describing his Kingsport experience. Vince allowed as how he was having to plug it in bit by bit into Google Translate for an English version, but he provided a link to the original -- also maintained by the same Belgian organization. I took a look at it and thought I might be able to save Vince some time and provide a translation that would be -- it is to be hoped -- more readable and more accurate than anything Translate would crunch out. I volunteered and Vince took me up on it.

He asked how I came to learn French, and the short answer was that it's in the family, what with my father's more settled side steeped in French-speaking Creole New Orleans. Torn from her French Quarter roots and re-settled in Chattanooga, my grandmother maintained her French connection with a weekly "salon" in her home at which only French was spoken. For her services to French language and culture, she was late in life awarded a "palme d'or" (gold medal) by the French government.

I now regret not going to those salons, but at the time I was a heedless teenager. What's more, an episode of antibiotic treatment as a very young child had left me hearing-impaired and oral-language-challenged, and I had a demoralizing chip on my shoulder about the fact that I was a lip-reader with a consonantal speech defect. I didn't realize at the time that the salon would've been an ideal way to practice lip-reading among French speakers. Instead, what did I do? I plugged away in a high school French class, listening to instructional language tapes that were incomprehensible to me -- because, duh, there was no lip-reading -- and completely walling off the idea that it was possible for me to understand spoken French.

But at the same time I loved foreign languages -- because of their music. My parents -- foot soldiers of the international folkie movement, armed with the records and songbooks of Oscar Brand and Theodore Bikel -- sang folksongs in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew, Russian, and even some in English. More formally, I sang German (Bach), Latin (Pergolesi), and macaronic Latin/middle English (Britten) in the Chattanooga Boys Choir. Rarely did I know what any of it meant. It didn't make any difference. It was music.

(Because of my hearing, I have never understood sung song lyrics in my entire life -- even in English -- by themselves, without the help of printed lyrics. Imagine what a revelation it was when the Beatles printed their lyrics on the back of the jacket of the Sergeant Pepper album!)

When it came to the actual meaning of foreign languages, my first introduction was Latin in junior high school. Because Latin is a dead language, you don't learn it for the chitchat factor. That was my kind of language: printed in a book. You worked out the meaning like a puzzle, with a grammar guide and a dictionary. I went on to more of this kind of language learning in French in high school, Greek and French again in college, and finally to German, Spanish, and Italian in my first dream job in a library, where in the downtime waiting for "patrons" to approach me for assistance I was allowed by management to spend as much time with language learning as I wanted.

But it is French that I know best. Bear in mind that my "knowledge" is of a highly artificial kind, as it comes by way of its written rather than its spoken form. Nonetheless, there are so many printed learning tools -- and so many of them speech-oriented -- that it's possible to get some semblance of spoken nuance this way. Here are some examples from my experience:

• I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Paris with French subtitles. I was grateful to the subtitles for helping me understand what the hell the Python boys were saying in my own native language, e.g. "ta mère était un hamster et ton père puait le sureau!" if you get my drift (plug it into Translate if you don't). I have always preferred subtitled foreign movies to English ones because I could follow the conversation better, thanks to the subtitles.
• Also in Paris I stumbled upon one of my favorite books of all time, La méthode à Mimile: L'argot sans peine, by Alphonse Boudard and Luc Etienne. This book deserves a blog entry of its own. Argot is slang, of course, but it also carries with it more than a whiff of forbidden fruit, since it often derives from the insider language of the underworld. It's like the hip jive of jazzers, knowwhatimeanbro? In true language-guide style, the book is a series of dialogues in argot, with, on the facing page, the translation into standard, "correct" French. In general it gave me a glimpse into how oral French changes (simplifies, corrupts, enriches) the written language. It was my bible for a few weeks. I took it with me when I visited a friend of my grandmother's out in the Paris suburbs, a very proper if somewhat rigid gentleman who took one look at the book and was absolutely horrified that I would be defiling her memory by learning such trash. I was taken aback at this. But today, after years of reflection, I realize it was like going to a D.A.R. meeting and doing a book talk on something with the title I Moved on Her like a Bitch: How to Trump like a Motherfucker.
• While in Paris I lived in a pension (boardinghouse) that, quite coincidentally, had once been the residence of the French lexicographer, Emile Littré. (The "coincidentally" became in my mind "providentially" and resulted in a novel whose title was the address of the place.) It also just happened to be right around the corner from L'Alliance Française, where I took a French class. In the French way of things, it is assumed that you will learn to converse on your own, and thus incorrectly, so you must be properly educated in the academic version (the King's English of French, or whatever). This involves a highly structured exercise called the dictée (dictation) in which the instructor reads out a passage and the students have to write it out. This played to my strengths of grammar and spelling, but at the same time it padded my conversational weakness, since the passage was read at least three times deliberately and with clear articulation, such as no conversation ever was in the history of the world. Thus I could be an ace at dictation in the classroom and a dunce at conversation out in the world.

These days I follow Catherine et Liliane on Twitter. These are brief, humorous sketches involving two middle-aged female friends (enacted, quite convincingly, by men) in a cafe or waiting in line for theatre tickets and having their say about "le buzz" of the day. Recently for example they were talking about how women needed to take over the job of leading governments because with men it all boils down to dissing each other about penis size, and this is dangerous in the age of nuclear weapons. Thankfully the Twitter feed automatically includes subtitles, which for me are absolutely essential, as without them Catherine and Liliane could just as easily be discussing the weather or soybean futures.

With all this, then, I do think I have the background to do justice to this memoir, and that is what is uppermost in my mind--doing justice to the author, Jean Nicaise, who in his Kingsport pages wants to get at a larger meaning behind his own experience. This larger meaning is the United States of America. Thus a discussion of the history of Kingsport, the tiny pioneer village on the Holston reborn as a planned industrial city, where the hospital can undergo an orderly expansion on land set aside for the purpose, becomes grist for an extended reverie on the qualities of America vis-a-vis the Old World, and how those qualities, unchallenged by a sense of peerless over-confidence, might lead the country into such missteps as the Iraq invasion of 2003. (Nicaise writes looking back and freely mixes in comments about events that took place in more recent years.)

It's hard not to think of the French nobleman de Tocqueville, whose memoir of travels in late 1830's America has convinced many American readers that he knew us better than we knew (or know) ourselves. Whether this will be the case with Nicaise and Kingsport remains to be seen. I just hope that I can help make him understood to readers of English while at the same time introducing some flavors of the Gallic language that might be, as it were, found in translation. The ear, after all, doesn't discern "sense" from "scents." The nose, on the other hand ...

If you want to get a whiff, here you go. Three installations so far. Many more to come!

Shake n Bakespeare

One of the advantages of living in northeast Tennessee is the proximity of Abingdon, VA, the home of the Commonwealth's professional theatre company, Barter Theatre. Every play I've ever attended there has been well worth seeing.

Last night I went there to see Shakespeare's Richard III.  Not surprisingly, another success. No doubt it helped that I had a front row seat in the smaller theatre, Barter II, and the action was "in the round," so that I was immersed in the action (indeed, at one point in the play the hunchback soon-to-be-king with the wild boar tattoo on his right tricep shook my hand).

But that was really just a small part of it. The production itself was a miracle of economy. The play's cast is large, but Barter pulled it off with a grand total of eight actors, each of whom enacted multiple roles, in some cases five or six, counting minor characters. One, for example, played Margaret of Anjou (widow of Henry VI), one of the nephews in the Tower, Elizabeth of York, a contract assassin, an executioner, a soldier, and I'm sure I'm leaving something out, which I can't feel bad about because the program itself resorted to "etc." when listing the parts played by these actors. They literally wore different hats -- a simple change in headgear was the most common device for effecting the change in character. The only person with a single role was the actor playing Richard.

Another daring (I felt) approach of the production was that, of the eight actors, six were female. Richard and his vanquisher Richmond (Henry (Tudor) VII) were men. All of the other roles in this well-populated dramatis personae were played by women. While this doesn't take as much liberty with the play as those productions that transfer the setting to another place or time (and about which I'm somewhat meh), at the same time it felt somewhat more fundamental, being a partial reversal of the well-known Shakespearean all-male convention. It had me wishing that Barter had gone all the way and presented the play with an all-female cast. How might that have set off some ripples of suggestive thought in this day of toxic masculinity!

So the Barter upheld its part of the deal in its usual fresh and creative way. With this particular play, the only problem I have is with the playwright. Not with the poetry or the plotting or any of that -- the play dazzles from the very first line: "This is the winter of our discontent." But it is altogether such an ahistorical piece of flimsy Tudor propaganda that it is really quite laughable. And you don't have to know much history for this to be the case. All you have to know, really, is that the good guy who comes out on top at the end -- Richmond (Henry Tudor) is the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, the monarch when the play was written. Once you realize that, the whole thing comes across as a bashed-up piece of folderol to curry favor.

Richard is a self-avowed villain from the very beginning, so embittered at being a hunchback that he seeks only to destroy those unlucky enough to be within his orbit. Along the way there is much self-conscious wit and jest, and it is to be supposed that Richard is able to seduce the audience in the same way he seduces Lady Anne Neville, whose spitting contempt of him (not only does his appearance fill her with revulsion, but her father and her husband were killed by his hand) is transformed into a pledge to marry him in the space of less than ten minutes. I was not convinced, and it wasn't the fault of the actor who played Richard. I'm not convinced by professional wrestling either. Or superhero comics with their mirror-image rotten-to-the-core bad guys.

The real problem for me with this play, however, is that I know that Richard's villainy is based on a number of egregious falsehoods. According to the play, Richard is responsible not only for the deaths of Anne Neville's father and husband, but also Anne herself (so he can then marry the sister of the princes), Henry VI, and Richard's brother Clarence. None of this is remotely true. And I doubt that Shakespeare's reliance on previously-published chronicles can entirely shelter him from blame. When you're trying to impress the queen by blackening the memory of the dynastic bete noire, no amount of tar is too much.

The real history is so much more interesting and full of the kind of human drama that Shakespeare supposedly reveled in. One of dramatic high points in the play is Richard's own mother's diatribe against him. To invite this kind of maternal scornful bitterness is a sure sign of Richard's unforgiveable rottenness, and Barter's actress delivered her lines with spine-tingling verisimilitude. But. Bad history. Richard's mother was in fact his champion. She even went to the extent of engineering doubts about her older son Edward IV's legitimacy because he'd pissed her off so bad for marrying beneath him. Let that sink in. She allowed it to be put about that she was an adulteress whose illegitimate child became king. Why did she do this? In order to strengthen the case for Richard's succession after the death of the then-supposed bastard Edward IV. Now that would've been a play worthy of a Shakespeare.

Instead we get an English Titus Andronicus without all the killing happening on stage. A little transcendence, but not much. Chalk it up to a journeyman's trials: Richard III was an early play, written not much later than the toga slasher Titus Andronicus. It is unfortunate for Richard's reputation that he was played false by the greatest playwright in history.

Perhaps, though, it bodes well for our immediate future if there is to be a future Shakespeare inspired by the events of our own age. The future play (enacted entirely by women, of course) will be about a villain who comes to power over a trail of dead bodies. It will be presented as historical, but the history will be as fake as Richard III. The title of the play will be Hillary I. Lucky for us! And I thought she was dead in the water after 2016.