Tales from a cave
James L. Fox is a fellow hermit, and we have a deal: He likes to write, and I like to read what he writes.
We present his latest short story, ‘All That Glitters,’ in our fiction section today.
Fox and I do have our differences. At 80, he’s a few years older than me (but not that many). He served in the ‘Tin Can’ Navy of Admiral Bull Halsey’s 7th Fleet, while I pounded various parts of the Earth in the old 1st Army. He admits to being a hermit — he lives in the Mojave Desert of southern California in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains — while I am sort of a recluse but really more of a lollygagger, a dawdler who likes to sit at home on the suburban outskirts of New York City and daydream.
Fox likes to describe his short stories, posted in a Hermit’s Cave section of his website, as ‘tall tales,’ but I see them more as what we used to call ‘good yarns.’ Because his tales could never be as tall as some told by relatives of mine.
I got my first name from a great-uncle who used to tell of winters so cold that he once saw a chain of lightning frozen in a pond. Or mosquitos so big that the only escape was to run inside a house and wait until they shoved their beaks through the window screens, then hammer the beaks over to trap the buggers. (Of course, they once flew away with the house, he said.)
I have another uncle who tells such whoppers that some members of the family actually get angry:
“Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie,” they say.
“I know it,” I say, “but I love the stories.”
I’m sure Fox has a much better reputation for veracity, but I have the same affection for his stories. I’m still thinking about where Jim Graham’s boots went in “Lucky Dawg,” the first of Fox’s short stories that we published April 10. (Note: You won’t find the story under that title now. It is now included in a new fiction entry titled ‘Short Stories by James L. Fox,’ now topped by “All That Glitters.”)
Fox’s website is a rambling place of long and short stories, essays, community services and a few commercial touches, one of them a website he set up for his daughter, Sherry, who takes care of him. The nameplate of his Reading Room shows a smiling bat welcoming you to a cave full of stories with the following introduction from the Mojave Hermit:
Ya get lots a’ time to think about how things oughta be when you’re all by yer lonesome in the desert lookin’ for gold and wonderin’ what if this and what if that were different. I never ever started a yarn with a plot in mind . . . I just created some ornery characters (some of them are real people, but I ain’t tellin’), I just threw them together and let the fur fly. Sometimes, I never knew how it was gonna end ’til it did. Hope ya enjoy my make-believe people.
Spoken like a true hermit.
And now, today’s other new offerings:
• Chapter Seven: North Beach of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones and his friend Elliot, who is about to ship out to Vietnam, go to a jazz club where they first meet Ginny Good, a cute girl with a giggly voice and a tight black dress.
• Chapter Fourteen: A New Light of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which scientists notice a strange blue energy coming from cell samples taken from an alien ship unearthed in New Mexico.
– Sid Leavitt
NOTE:
The image above is an illustration by Scott Mayhew showing Plato’s cave, an allegory used by the classical Greek philosopher in his work The Republic. The cave symbolizes, among other things, that what we perceive may be only shadows of a deeper reality, notably of The Good. The illustration is from a website, Matt Lawrence’s Home Page, now a dead link.
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April 28, 2008 at 8:04 am
Here’s a teensy little story about Plato’s cave from “Oprah’s Dead Son.” G.
—
“Maybe you ought to write a book about this new species you’ve got in mind,” Oprah says, changing the subject. “If it’s halfway decent, I’ll have you on my show. You’ll get rich and famous and win the Nobel Prize for biology or whatever.”
“No, you won’t.” The old guy chuckles.
“Won’t what?”
“Have me on your show.”
“Why not?”
“Your owners won’t let you. There’s only so much you can do or say.”
“What do you think I can’t do or say?”
“Anything that might be even marginally truthful. Your job is to keep people so stupid, they buy the junk your sponsors need to sell. You’re not gonna bite the hand that feeds you, right? Who’s gonna pay you to tell people to consider the lilies of the field? What would that do to the bottom line? People have to stay stupid in order to sell ‘em the endless stream of worthless crap they have to buy in order for your owners to keep getting richer all the time. Remember the guy in Plato’s cave?”
“Vaguely,” Oprah says.
“The guy in Plato’s cave went up into the sunshine, then came back down and told the people watching shadows on the wall what he saw. They said he was crazy, called him a loon. That’s like me trying to talk to you. Try explaining to someone who’s chained in one place, facing straight ahead, someone who can’t even see the fireplace, let alone the fire in the fireplace, but can only see shadows from the fireplace on a wall, try explaining that above and beyond the fire he or she can’t see, there’s a real fire, a fire a billion times brighter than the one in the fireplace. What the guy who went up into the sunshine saw was truth and beauty and love and life, the reality of those things, and all he said when he came back down into the cave was, ‘Know yourself.’ Every holy guy worth his salt climbed up into the same sunshine, saw the same stuff the guy in Plato’s cave saw, went back down and said the same things the guy in Plato’s cave said, and they all knew at the same time and said at the same time that you can say it ’til you’re blue in the face, but the beauty of it is that it’s always been something that can’t be bought or sold or earned or learned. It either happens to you or doesn’t happen to you, you see or don’t see, you know or don’t know. The slaves in the cave are gonna call you crazy, sure, but is that gonna stop you from telling them what you just saw with your own eyes?”
“So that’s what your new book’s gonna be about? Plato’s cave? Cool.”
“I’m not writing a new book. Books are for saps. You have to say really idiotic stuff if you want anyone to read what you write. People only read what their owners pay people like you to tell them to read, so you only tell ‘em to read the drivel that keeps mindless slaves from knowing what mindless slaves they are.”
April 28, 2008 at 9:23 am
Thank you, Gerard, for providing this excerpt that, if you’ll pardon the expression, casts more light on Plato’s cave than we were able to do in our blog entry.
For any new reader who doesn’t know, Gerard Jones is creator of the website Everyone Who’s Anyone, where you can find a full version of Oprah’s Dead Son. The novel still is in a draft stage but, in our opinion, well worth reading. As is most everything Gerard writes.
April 29, 2008 at 10:39 am
Hi, Sid.
I really like the way you introduced me and my work to your website. It presents a great, humorous relationship between us and our websites. By the way, “All That Glitters” was inspired by an article I found on Science 82, an Internet science forum. It is an interesting read.
April 29, 2008 at 10:46 am
Thanks, James. The science article indeed is interesting — a report on a group of people in rural Kentucky whose skin was blue. How physicians and scientists investigated and eventually cured the condition is chronicled in the article, The Blue People of Troublesome Creek, which we have reprinted. I found it fascinating.
April 30, 2008 at 9:26 am
Hey, one of your newspaper buddies is gonna report me to the NY Attorney General. Yippee! G.
Subject: remove me from your spam list
[Gerard:] You’re on your own list and I don’t do spam.
Mr. Jones. I received the e-mail below unsolicited from you this morning. I do not know you nor I have I done business with you. I have requested not to receive any more emails from you.
Unsolicited commercial emails are spam. I will forward the next one I receive from either of these addresses along with my last two emails to the New York Attorney General’s consumer protection division.
[Gerard:] According to your public profile at the Columbia Journalism School website, you’re working on your first book “Fake News, Real Politics.” I have a free website listing agents and publishers which may be of assistance to you. I sent an e-mail to the address you provided on the Columbia site, which in and of itself is a tacit solicitation of e-mail communication.
Further, my e-mail was in no way “commercial.” I’m not selling anything. I gave you a link to a free book, links to chapters of a free audio book, offered to send you a free copy of the fifteen-hour audio book in its entirety and gave you the url of my free website which may aid you in your search for representation and the publication of your first book.
The audio book is a narrative nonfiction account of the history of America from 1943 to 2003 which includes pertinent audio clips from noteworthy individuals who helped shape “real news” during those years, from The Shadow, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, JFK, MLK, Robert Welch, Harry Truman, etc., to Allen Ginsberg, Leadbelly, Walter Cronkite, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, etc. (see the free index I provided you for the others).
What that all means is that the book I gave you for free and the audio book I offered to send you for free is “news.” Your bio says you’re a news guy who, as such, should be interested in news. Whose fault is it that you’re not what you say you are? Feel free to include this reply in your complaint to the NY Attorney General and/or whomsoever else you may want to complain to. Thanks. G.
April 30, 2008 at 10:47 am
Just so our readers know, the complainant is Joe Cutbirth, a former political reporter and campaign press secretary now teaching at Columbia and working on the book Gerard mentioned.
Also, the boldface and [Gerard:] headings were added by me, since Gerard’s comment appeared here all in the same typeface, and I wanted to make clear that a dialogue was taking place.
As for your comment, Gerard, I take no issue with the New York attorney general’s campaign to sniff out and hunt down spammers. But in this case, I think he’s been pointed up the wrong tree.
May 1, 2008 at 7:29 am
Yeah, I don’t know how to make things bold, etc., so you did a good job of clarifying stuff. Here’s the conclusion of our exchange:
Him: “Grow up and move along, will you?
Me: “After you, my dear.”
Spam sucks, sure, but isn’t all advertising spam? G.