On Alex Haley and the Autobiography of Malcolm X: Three Small Points

 A philosophy-centered email blast that I subscribe to, Aeon Weekly, included an essay on August 1 by one Alex White, identified as a historian based in Kampala, Uganda. His essay is a critique of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written by Alex Haley (of Roots fame), in which his main point is that Haley skewed his presentation of Malcolm's thoughts and beliefs by selectively omitting ideas developed mostly in the last few years before Malcolm's death, and by using "plagiarism and invention to fill gaps in the narrative." 

 To support these points, White provides a number of examples noted by a number of critics who have studied the Autobiography in recent years, along with some documents that were unavailable at the time of its writing; and he goes into great detail to show how the selective omission of ideas occurred.

 Let me say first that I am by no means a scholar on Malcolm X or Alex Haley. I haven't read widely on either man; I have, in fact, never read Malcolm X's Autobiography, and the only thing I know of Haley's is his novel, Roots. I read it in a two-volume book club edition when it was new, and like most Americans, I think, I watched the television miniseries that came about a year or two later. I enjoyed it, but I knew it was fiction. My interest in these men is entirely down to the fact that a few of my friends take a greater interest than I in both Haley and Malcolm, and that's the only reason I read Mr White's essay at all. My greater interest is in preserving and supporting editorial standards in general and intellectual honesty in particular.

 Certainly some of the examples of "plagiarism and invention" that White brings up are damning. They seem to be honestly presented and accurately quoted. But I have particular qualms about two of those examples, one of which I consider intellectually dishonest on White's part, and the other somewhat disingenuous on both Haley's and White's part.

  White makes reference to a criticism of Haley by another historian, saying "Haley seems to have re-used material from his previous writing. Malcolm’s comments on the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in Chapter 15, notes the historian Garrett Felber, were lifted directly from Haley’s article on Jackson for Reader’s Digest," published a couple of years earlier. In the following paragraph, he says that Haley "also plagiarised the work of another author...". The implication is that Haley plagiarised himself. This is not possible.

 Plagiarism is the use of another person's thoughts or writings without attribution. Alex Haley can write a sentence twice, in two different places, and not give an attribution to himself without committing an intellectual offense. It may not be transparent, but it is not wrong or even unethical to do so. (Though I have to admit, if it were me I would preface the second use of the thought with something like, "As I said so eloquently and insightfully in my manifestly perfect and unassailable article in such-and-such a publication...". But that's vanity, not intellectual necessity, at work.)

 I think this is a minor point at best, one made no smaller by the possibility that what Haley did was reuse not his own words but the words of Malcolm X, quoted in the earlier article. But the Autobiography was to be presented as written by Malcolm. One of them said it, and so neither of them is plagiarising by saying it again; and I would not even write this critique were it not for the fact that this is the second occasion on which I've seen it suggested that there is something plagiaristic about re-using one's own thoughts. I don't remember the first example, only that it occurred fairly recently and that at the time I thought, "This writer doesn't know what 'plagiarism' is, and neither does their editor." At the time I put it down to the increasing sloppiness of writing in the Internet Age, but now I begin to suspect something more nefarious: an attempt to label as wrong something that is not wrong, an attempt to broaden the scope of a long-standing offense so as to be able to more easily attack people who have not behaved improperly. 

 It also serves to add undeserved weight to White's other examples of Haley's failings as a writer. If Alex White intended his example to serve that purpose here, that would be intellectual dishonesty on White's part at worst, and sloppiness at best.

  Another of White's examples is that Haley lifted sections of text from a letter written about Malcolm's visit to Africa by Alice Windom, a woman who was among his hosts during that time.  After Malcolm visited Accra, Ghana, in 1964, "[s]he then wrote a six-page letter about the visit for friends back home, hoping to counteract any negative coverage of Malcolm’s tour in the US press. ‘It is not for publication,’ Windom wrote in the letter, ‘but use it any other way you wish.’" White states that 56 sentences from that letter appear verbatim in the Autobiography, and that others were altered in minor ways. 

 This is a more serious charge against Haley's honesty, but without at least the assertion that Haley had the entire Windom letter in his possession, you can't rule out the possibility that Windom's friends, to whom she sent the letter, and who were theoretically aware that Windom did not want the letter published, felt differently about the content, and provided Haley with excerpts or partial photocopies along with the injunction that the letter's writer did not wish to be identified. A weak argument, possibly, but given everything else that was going on in the creation of the Autobiography, it remains a possibility. At the very least, before such an accusation is made, the possibility that friends who received Windom's letters may not have had the same purity of motive regarding the publication of the letter, or may have misinterpreted Windom's reluctance to have the letter published. Or, possibly, they interpreted her permission to "use [the letter] any way you wish" very broadly. 

 My final quibble with Alex White's essay is his imputation that Haley intentionally and dishonestly omitted late alterations in Malcolm's philosophical thought. On the surface, this appears to be true. But in reading White's essay, I am struck by the timing and import of those changes; and I, at least, can see the possibility that it was Haley's intention to close up the eventually-published Autobiography as a sort of "Part I" in a remarkable story, with the possibility of a continuation with the new ideas fully hashed out in a further volume. That would seem to me to be, artistically, an excellent path to choose: the stark changes in Malcolm's thought, just at the time the book was being put together, would almost demand such a bifurcation, otherwise the scope of the new ideas could not be thoroughly given over to full expostulation. Could it have been in Haley's mind at all, or in his editor's? I don't know. Given the depth of the change, the newness of the development in Malcolm's ideas, and Haley's own need to get the book done, as White describes, it would certainly have seemed a sound way to move ahead to me. The timing would have made for a neat break between the Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and the Malcolm X who came after his break with that group. 

 In any case, something significant happened that would moot the concept. Malcolm X died by assassination just days after Haley completed the first draft for his review. The publisher "Doubleday announced that they had dropped the book, fearing violent reprisals at their bookstores and offices." Any ideas anyone might have had about the subject likely would have died with him. 

 Alex White's essay contains numerous examples of intellectual failings on the part of Alex Haley, most of which are fairly unassailable, if true (and they seem to my inexpert eye to be true). Most convincing to me are the allegations that arise from analyses of recorded interviews and records released after both co-writers were dead. (Haley died in 1992.) But White's own failings, minor though they may be, must lead to some questioning of the accuracy and faithfulness of his critique of Haley's work on the Autobiography.  

The Not Key West Trip, part 6 (final)

 You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, and all the pictures from this trip here. 

Friday, June 6

 The handful of people who know me will not be surprised to learn that I bailed on my original plan to go to St Augustine. When I left the hotel this morning, the weather was still iffy, and in fact it rained off and on all the way through Mississippi, and the skies were still threatening more of the same when I stopped at the Rose Memorial Cemetery to find the graves of my ancestors, and in fact a surprising number of other relatives that I had no idea were in the area: aunts, uncles, cousins with family names that identify them as part of my maternal extended family. But after a week of contemplating their long-ago deaths, I was running pretty low on grief, and simply made note of the location (Section C), reflected briefly on how few my memories of them are, and headed on to Baton Rouge and Lafayette, where I am now for this, the final night of the Not Key West trip.

 The car has performed well. Not a single warning light came on the entire trip. No funny noises to concern me. No difficulties starting it up or accelerating or anything. It ran smoothly and reliably in a most un-Jaguar like way. It's a blessing. (Actually, the real blessing is that I've found a good, reliable mechanic who doesn't charge specially-elevated hourly rates because it's a fancy-schmancy European luxury car.)

 So. The main purpose of the trip has now been accomplished: I have been to all the counties in Georgia. That brings the number of states where I've been to every county up to 42 out of 50; and this summer I expect to finish one more. The seven that'll be left after that may never be completed. Except for Massachusetts, where there are two island counties that I haven't been to, they're all out west, and the distances I'd have to cover to complete the Every-County objective are almost prohibitive. I actually started planning a trip that would complete Montana and Idaho, and it'd require about two weeks. Throw in Washington and Oregon -- and I might as well do those 3 counties in Central California, around Yosemite, which I've been saving for when my wife retires (which she did about 5 years ago) -- and we're looking at a month on the road. We'd have to take the dog up to Colorado for that time, which is fine, except that then we'd have to take the Subaru, which kind of defeats the touring-car aspect of the journey. It's a dilemma: take the Jag by myself, or take the Subaru with the wife. I just don't know.

 Either way, it'll still leave Massachusetts and Alaska. Plus, it's not like it's something I just have to do before I die. There's nothing at all on that particular bucket list. I'm ready to go now.

Saturday, June 7 

 And a post-script: Throughout this road trip, I've encountered a remarkable amount of construction, on highways and bridges throughout the Southeast. Most, if not all of it, is the result of former President Biden's success in getting an infrastructure bill through Congress with not a single vote from a member of the Republican party. Shame on them. But I also recall all the "Infrastructure Weeks" that President Trump announced during his first term in office, during which he accomplished absolutely nothing. If he had been half as effective a president as Joe Biden, all this damn construction would have been done four years ago, and I wouldn't have had to take so long getting home. 

The Not Key West Trip, part 5

  You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, and all the pictures from this trip here.

Thursday, June 5 

 So here's how my day started. I slept through the night from 10PM to about 5AM for the second night in a row. That hasn't happened in a long time. That's the good news.

 There was no coffee in the hotel office. I checked out around 7 and stopped at a convenience store on the way to the Lockerly Arboretum (which opened at 8AM). They had no coffee. I stopped at the next convenience store, about a half-mile down the road. They had coffee, but nothing to sweeten it with, and only powdered creamer. I tried the next C-store; again, no coffee at all. At the fourth attempt, they had all the equipment, but it wasn't plugged in, as they had no actual coffee to put in it. The fifth stop, they didn't offer coffee at all. At the sixth try, the store (with the word "COFFEE" painted in large letters on the eave of the shop) wasn't due to open for business for at least another week.

 Finally I found coffee at a Jet C-Store. It was outstanding coffee. My day was saved. 

kudzu close-up

I drank it while standing in the apron of their gas station, contemplating the amazing quantity of kudzu, a fast-growing invasive species of vine, on the hillside behind the store, and seeing how it was overtaking all the trees and utility poles on both sides of the street. The spread of that stuff is amazing. It gives everything a soft, furry look but it's death for all the local wildlife that can't eat it, or even travel through it.

 Coffee drunk, I went to the Arboretum. 

The Bog Garden

The Lockerly Arboretum is a very large area landscaped with lawns and as many kinds of trees as can be coaxed to grow in the local conditions. It has a paved one-lane roadway through the entire park, and a number of short trails marked. I wasn't about to try hiking anything during gnat season, which as far as I know is January through December, but certainly includes June. I drove around the grounds, and noticed that there were no blooming plants except the occasional magnolia and something that might be dogwood, all a good distance from the road. When I got back to the parking lot, I consulted a map and saw that there was a small area called the Bog Garden, and another called the Azalea Collection, both a very short distance from the parking area. I walked to those through the cloud of gnats. There was almost nothing blooming in the Bog Garden, and why they call it a bog garden is beyond me. There was nothing but bare earth in the Azalea Collection. So I took a picture of the pretty Rose Hill mansion and left. 

 I found breakfast in the small downtown area at a place called the Local Yolkal. Not just a cute name; this place sets a new standard for breakfast dining. I thought the Eggs Up Cafe in Albany deserved six stars; if that's so, this place rates at least seven. It was utterly outstanding in every way: ambience, service, food quality and quantity, and value. I had Eggs Sardou and (more) coffee, a pleasant exchange with the three employees, and a long conversation with the elderly couple with a service dog named Lady who sat at the next table. These are the kinds of interactions one always hopes for when out in public. Dogs make them possible, I guess.

 I stopped in at a little antique mall a couple of doors down from the cafe, to check out the glass on display in the window. Nothing much of interest, really, but I did find a set of green-and-white mixing bowls from the 1970s just like the ones we have at home, priced at $188. I'm tempted to snort in derision, but after a few episodes of Antiques Roadshow, I'll hold off for now.

The Old Capitol

 My next stop was the Old Capitol Building, on the campus of Georgia Military College. I saw it when I got to town last night and thought it was a church building. It's a very large, architecturally very artless building from 1804, well-maintained but devoid of charm. The entire campus, mostly deserted at present, has a repressed feel to it, like the Stars and Bars should be on the flagpoles. But that's probably just me.

 My last stop in Milledgeville was at Andalusia Farm, the home of the great Southern author Flannery O'Connor. While I consider hers one of the greatest distinctively Southern voices, it's been years since I read her work (all of it, I'm pretty sure). From what I know of her, beyond her work, I would probably not want her as a friend, but her gift for fiction has a resonance tied to the South as a distinctive region. I've tried to read Faulkner, and actually waded through at least a couple of his novels; I read Robert Penn Warren's great novel, All the King's Men and found it uninteresting, like a one-joke comedy. I read Confederacy of Dunces when it was new and didn't find it resonant at all in the Southern Tradition; it's more of a New Orleanian thing. Really, the only Southern novel that I consider as good as O'Connor is Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, which I would put even higher than her work on my list of Great Southern Works.

 I don't have any great interest in seeing the physical remnants of any author's life. Seeing the chair O'Connor sat in and the bed she slept in isn't going to make her work come alive in any way. But what the hell, I'm in Milledgeville, there's not a whole lot of other stuff to see, so I went. They give tours of the house, which I declined; I just went through the little exhibit hall and walked up the hill to see the outside of the main house. A nice house, nothing real fancy. The exhibit hall had a history of the property, some odds and ends like bank documents and old pairs of shoes, and a dozen or so paintings she did near the end of her life, arranged in a truly strange way. The first case had a key giving the number and title of each painting, numbered one through eleven, then thirteen and fourteen. I don't know why 12 was omitted. But why would they mount the paintings on the wall in the order 8, 6, 4, 12, 5, 3, 11, 14, 10, 7, 2, 9, 13, 1, and another 12? It's a mystery. (There's also a small copy of the famous Canova statue, Cupid and Psyche, minus the wings, that O'Connor bought on a trip to Italy just before she died. The museum's card misidentifies it as Cupid and Eros. I noticed the error because, having recently listened to part of Stephen Fry's wonderful book Mythos, I knew immediately that Cupid and Eros are the same person.)

 And with that I could leave Milledgeville in a cloud of self-satisfied smugness, and head on down the road. I did a little dedicated county counting, making a detour from the sensible route in order to get into Wilkinson County; another detour to take in Telfair County; and taking a less-direct route to pass through Dodge County on the way to the Pig Monument. Done, and done, and done. 

The Pig Monument in its setting

 Now, that Pig Monument. As it says on the marker, in 1933 a pig fell down a dry well. Neighbours got together and rescued the pig, because in 1933 a pig was often the difference between starvation and survival. The monument, erected in the 1990s, commemorates the "spirit of friendship and community so characteristic of those times." I note that the farm across the road from the marker flies the Confederate flag, but let's put that aside. A spirit of friendship and community is a worthy aspiration even if the locals can't seem to grasp the barriers they create to it.  

 After the excitement of the Pig Monument, the rest of the drive today was anticlimactic, as you would expect. I went to the Vidalia Onion Museum, where three cheerful docents bent my ear about sweet onions. (While watching a short film about how the onions are grown, I had to wonder that all the farmers who grow these labour-intensive onions probably voted for Trump, who is deporting all their laborers ... except for the guy who referred to his workers as "the inmates.") Then I encountered road closures and detours that flummoxed Google Maps entirely, so ended up taking an overly-long roundabout way to the town of Hazleton, the seat of Jeff Davis County, and on to Broxton, where the Andy Griffith Mural is no longer extant, and to Fitzgerald, where I saw the World's Largest Chicken (actually just the steel frame of it, 19 tons and 62 feet tall, because the money ran out). There's a story there having something to do with the Army Corps of Engineers, but I forget where I read about it so I can't pass it on here. As a result of whatever it was that happened, the town is known for its population of wild chickens. Look it up. 

And then finally, the World's Largest Peanut, in Ashford, a completely uninteresting attraction, but it was on the way.

 I had the top down briefly a couple of times today, once for about 10 minutes and once for about half an hour, but the rain kept starting and stopping so I gave up. I have one Georgia county left after today's drive, and if the weather forecast for tomorrow is like it was today, I'm thinking I will just point my nose towards home instead of going to St Augustine. I don't think I'll regret it either way. 

The Not Key West Trip, part 4

 You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, and all the pictures from this trip here.

Wednesday, June 4

 I had the foresight to bring my sunscreen in to the hotel room last night, so before leaving this morning I got all slathered up and ready for a nice day of exploration in Middle Georgia, which is what this gnat-infested area is called by people who have to live here. I went out to find it had rained during the night, but seemed to be clearing. Loaded up the car, checked out, and went down the road to a breakfast place with the promising name of Fried Green Tomatoes Cafe.

 It turned out to be a cafeteria of the soul-food variety. I got myself an assortment of foods, totalling about ten dollars' worth, and a "small" coffee that I could have gone swimming in had it been allowed to cool. I ate half a link of sausage -- the greasiest, tastiest smoked pork sausage -- and half a biscuit, and three slices of fried green tomatoes, which were not the culinary treat I remembered from my youth, and drank my coffee while setting up Google Maps for the day. (I would have gone for the free refill on the coffee had the shop not had only powdered creamer.) Then I packed up my leftovers in a styrofoam box and was off to the Aviation Museum at Warner Robins Air Base.

B1 bomber

This museum sprawls across acres and acres of ground. It has four huge buildings of exhibits, plus surrounding grounds where a number of airplanes and cruise missiles are parked. I spent about three and a half hours in the museum, and only saw three of the four buildings. I decided to skip the Vietnam exhibit hall because (a) I saw all those airplanes on the news when it was happening, and (b) I was tired, and (c) I was frustrated at how hard it is to get a halfway decent photograph in those dimly-lit buildings with nothing but spotlights for illumination. (I have the same problem at car museums, sometimes, but I almost never spend long enough at a car museum to get that frustrated.)

F-111

 The first building contains the gift shop, an exhibit dealing with the Korean War and another covering the pre-World War II efforts against Germany and Japan, like Lend-Lease and the American Volunteer Squadron that flew supplies to China over "the Hump" from modern-day Myanmar. The rest of the museum I did in reverse order, for no particular reason. A large hangar-style building contains a number of spy planes on one side; on the other is an F-111, which was made in Fort Worth when I lived there and so is of some personal interest to me. I'm always surprised by how big those aircraft are. There's other things over there, too, but nothing that interested me enough to try and photograph it, so now I've already forgotten most of it. Mostly, though, I spent a good hour trying to get decent photographs of the Global Hawk drone, the U2 (I gave up on that) and the SR-71 Blackbird. The photos I got have all been pretty heavily edited, by my standards, just so that I can tell what I'm looking at.

 As an aside: there were a bunch of kids from summer camp in the building, all playing with what looked like styrofoam airplanes such as we used to get when I was a kid; but these had all kinds of flashing red and green lights on them. They looked really cool. These boys and girls looked to me to be about the same age as my great-nephew Bennie, and they were having a really great time with these airplane toys; so when I left the exhibit hall I went directly to the gift shop to see if they sold them. They didn't. If anybody's reading this and sees such a thing for sale somewhere....  I'm thinking Christmas, or birthday.

 The other building I went into was all World War II aircraft. There was a very interesting exhibit on paratroopers during the D-Day landings in Normandy, and a huge jumble of the famous planes of that era: a B-17, a B-29, a P-51 Mustang, and so on. There are so many airplanes crammed into that space that I deleted a bunch of pictures just because I couldn't tell what they were showing. 

 After the Aviation Museum -- lunch was another half-link of that greasy breakfast sausage, eaten in the museum's parking lot -- I made a quick stop at an ATM (there are no Chase Banks in Georgia, so I went to a machine that's in the Credit Union system, which I always forget I can access at no charge) and a supermarket for a 2-liter bottle of soda to refill my little drink bottle, and a couple of apples. The prices for these small purchases really make me miss HEB, at which I could have gotten the same things for half the money. And the apples would have been better, too.

 Then it was on to Macon, which at 150,000 people is the biggest Georgia town I'll see on this trip. First stop was Mercer University, to see the statue of their mascot, the "Bear of Terror." My next stop was going to be a glass studio a short distance away, but it turned out to be closed on Wednesdays, so I didn't go. The stop after that was going to be the Rose Cemetery, where a couple of members of the Doobie Brothers (or maybe it's the Allman Brothers; I forget) are buried, but I decided that I had no real interest in seeing the graves of a couple of musicians whose work I never much cared for, despite one of their songs, Jessica, being the theme song for Top Gear. So I skipped that, too, and went on to my next stop of the day, at High Falls State Park.

 This park is an unusual stop in my County-Counting Wanders, in that it's out of the way and in a county I've already been to. But I saw it listed on RoadTrippers, and just the name of the place made me want to go there. I have a special affinity for waterfalls, as you may have noticed if you've read many of these loquacious blog posts over the years. The comments I read said it was just short walk from the parking lot to see the falls. So I went, about 30 miles out of the way, to see it.

The main part of High Falls

 It's a pretty enough place, but I'm damned if I understand why they call it High Falls. The total drop is about 30, maybe 40 feet, over about half a mile. And it's not a plunge type, like Niagara or Cumberland, it's a cascade, a gradual tumble over rocks for a long distance. It reminded me of nothing so much as the equally disappointing (though equally pretty) Pedernales Falls, except that this one actually has abundant water in it. It's right below a dam, which ensures that there's always water for the falls. And the rocks are a different colour. And it's probably two or three times higher. 

The Falls from the other side

 I walked the first trail I came to alongside the stream. There was an overlook (where the photo above was taken) and the path continued, more or less level, beyond that point, but it only went to a campground; so I went back to the highway, crossed the bridge over the stream, and started down the trail on the other side, which goes downhill right along the water. At this point two things happened. First, my knees made it abundantly clear that my days of hiking really are in the past. I made it to the first of three overlooks on that side of the river. I knew I wasn't going to the third one, because I could tell that you couldn't actually see the Falls from there. I'd planned to go to the first and second, but my knees had other ideas, so I abandoned my plan to go on to the second overlook. Even if I'd had something to hold on to, I wasn't sure I could make it down and back. (I hadn't brought my walking stick because it doesn't fit in the convertible; I thought I had my ski-pole balance sticks, but it turns out they weren't in the trunk. They're probably somewhere in the breakfast room back at the house, but I don't think they would have helped. Not enough, anyway, though they'd've been of more use here than there.) Even the Magic Word, Teotihuacán, would not spur me on.

 As I started back to the highway, the second thing happened. It started to rain.

 It was just a light rain, and I made it back to the car without getting completely soaked, and used the T-shirt I'd bought last night at the axe-throwing bar to wipe down my camera. But by the time I'd done that, and checked out the gift shop -- which only had two fridge magnets, one a generic "Georgia State Parks" and the other a "High Falls State Park" design showing three mushrooms; what's up with that? I didn't see a single mushroom in my time there -- the rain was coming down in buckets. The kind of downpour that makes you grateful for fog lines and "Stop Ahead" signs to warn you of intersections. And it continued that way all the way to my next stop, a huge carving of Sasquatch that sits about a hundred yards off the highway in somebody's pasture. There was no place to park near there, so I just pulled to the side of the road and tried to get a picture through the car window. But when I put the window down, a stream of water poured in from the joint between the roof and windshield. So if you want to see what it looks like, check out the photo on the Roadside America listing.

 I finished up the day with a drive to Milledgeville, where I'm spending tonight. (Dinner, eaten in my room, was the rest of my breakfast leftovers, and one of the apples I bought this morning.) This is the home town of Flannery O'Connor, the first Southern Author whose work I fell in love with, long enough ago that I don't actually remember any of her stories. There are a number of sites in town associated with her, so I plan to see some of them tomorrow morning, and then continue with my County Counting. (I've now visited 19 of the 32 counties I intend to go through on this trip), which includes the Pig Monument that I'm so looking forward to. Here's hoping it's dry enough to get a picture!

  

The Not Key West Trip, part 3

 You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, all the pictures from this trip here.

 Tuesday, June 3

  The sun came up this morning as the same kind of big red ball that set last night. I suspect it's the red-dirt farming dust gives it that colour. The desk clerk thinks it's pollen, but we have pollen at home & the sun is never that kind of dim red ball. Especially when it's as high in the sky as it was when I saw it.

 Anyway. So I spent about half the day today sightseeing in Albany. Started off with a really good breakfast at a place on Old Dawson Road. Drove up and down Dawson Road 3 times, looking for it, before I noticed that it was on Old Dawson Road, which is a short distance to the south. Cafe was called Eggs Up, and I don't know when I've encountered such friendly service. The waitress was from New Mexico & so we talked about a lot of things Texas and New Mexico have in common. We're both amazed at the trees and the rivers around here, they're both present in such profusion. I had shrimp and grits, which of course reminded me of a certain someone who loves that particular dish ... not that I needed reminding. That someone is on my mind pretty regularly as a rule.

the pond at Radium Springs Gardens

 Took my time over coffee, as nothing opened before 9am and I had left the hotel by 7. Then I went to a place called Radium Springs, which used to be a resort area south of town. The old Casino Building was destroyed in successive floods, tornadoes, tropical storms and floods (again) four times in less than 20 years. It stood for about 100 years before the first disaster hit, and then the second, third, and fourth disasters hit before the repairs were complete each time, and in the end they had to tear it down. (One sign said 27 inches of rain fell in one day; another says 24 inches. I suspect that, at a certain point, three inches of rain just doesn't matter anymore.) But the grounds remain as a nice county park (except for those damn gnats; honestly, they make me feel like one of those children on the African Famine Charity commercials, with flies crawling all over their faces), with very nice groundskeeping and a city park on part of the land, gardens on another part, and two other (separate) parks on the grounds across the road and down the south end. Quite extensive. I spent a pleasant 90 minutes or so checking it out.

 Then I headed into town to see the other sights I'd identified. First stop was the Old Railroad Depot. It was closed. It sits athwart a brick-paved street with streetcar rails down the middle. There are maybe 5 or 6 buildings all told, each turned into a specialty historical site of one kind or another: the railroad museum, a general history museum, the regional archives, a museum of surveying, and so on. All were closed, so I just took some pictures of the buildings and went on to Ray Charles Plaza, which is a monument to a native son who made good. It's in a small park on the river front, very tastefully done, although hard to photograph because of the spacing of things, and the sun's position at the hour I was there wasn't conducive to good pictures, either. 

the Blue Hole exhibit

 Just down the street from that is the Flint RiverQuarium, which gives a good explication of the local water source. There are extensive caves under Albany, water-filled and explored by daring scuba divers. So far they've explored about 3/4 of a mile of caves down to a depth of about 1500', where water flows into the Florida Aquifer. The displays of marine life aren't as extensive as at the Texas State Aquarium, of course, but it's definitely worth the eight bucks (senior rate) to see. There was almost nobody else there, which was a big, big plus. 

 From there I drove to the western edge of downtown to see the local Art Museum. It was pretty much as I anticipated: three small galleries showing contemporary exhibitions. I won't say it wasn't interesting, though: the first gallery was a photographic display to do with Native American culture. About half the pics were taken in the early part of the 20th Century, and the rest were done by Wil Wilson, a Navajo photographer I was familiar with. If it weren't for the obsequiously apologetic dissing of the "biases of his time" when expounding on the older pictures, it would have been a well-conceived exhibition. 

 The second gallery contained acrylic paintings on lace paper by some South African woman. It shows extremely wealthy super-model women in extravagant luxury. That by itself was a little too Kardashian for me, but the video of her talking about the burden of having to spend sooo much time getting your hair and nails done.... It was too much. She's a good example of why we should eat the rich.

 The final gallery was a tiny room upstairs where a local artist's work was juried and exhibited: four ... let's call them tapestries .. of odd cloth remnants in random shapes sewn together. It was supposed to represent skin colours and earth colours. I suppose so, but in the end, to me it was just some random bits of cloth sewn together. It was vague enough to accept any explanation you choose to give it, like most modern art.

 After that I had a nice drive west to Fort Gaines, during which I could listen, largely uninterrupted by the Voice of Google Maps, to Rock of Ages, and notice that the narrator's accent would sound frequently like a gentle southern boy moved to Californie, and then suddenly, and briefly, like a Dame of the British Empire for half a sentence. It was interesting, and slight enough not to become irritating. If only he would fully pronounce the last three syllables of each sentence.

 At Fort Gaines, on a bluff overlooking the Chatahoochee River, which is the border between Georgia and Alabama, there is a collection of log buildings called the Frontier Village. These old buildings were rescued from other locations in the county (Early County, if you care) and brought here and renovated, and for some reason decorated with multicoloured Christmas lights, for the edification of people who had never seen how their ancestors lived in the American South before telegraphs and electricity and YouTube. But it was just the buildings; there was no furniture, no rustic tools or implements, and not much in the way of explanation. I've seen enough of this type of historical assemblage to not wonder about things, but if I had small children seeing it for the first time, I'd have been very disappointed.

 Life on the road was a little frustrating after that. I couldn't get a strong signal anywhere in that part of Georgia, and couldn't get RoadTrippers to load; all I had was a few numbers I'd written on the paper state highway map where I'd highlighted my intended route, and I couldn't remember what those particular numbers signified. So I just set off north on the planned route, looking for what the paper map called Highway 161, where I would turn toward the next county in my excursion; and off I went.

 This is when I discovered that the highway numbers on the map aren't reflected on the actual road. There is, apparently, no Highway 161 outside the imagination of the company that draws maps for AAA. After overshooting the turn by about six miles, I set my Google Maps for the next town and learned that, in Reality Georgia, Highway 161 is known as Lucy Lane for a few hundred yards, and then it's called Cotton Hill Road; there being no obvious reason to make that particular switch. Anyway, got where I was going. By this time it was well past lunchtime, so when I stopped at a C-store to try RoadTrippers again (still no signal; only 4G, which it appears is inadequate for that program) I started to buy one of those awful convenience-store sandwiches, the kind with cheap cuts of mystery meat between two slices of white bread decorated with a slice of indeterminate cheese food; but he wanted eight and a half dollars for that miserable imitation sandwich, so I declined, and wondered yet again when it was that Trump was going to bring the prices down on Day One.

 My map didn't indicate anymore planned sightseeing stops before what I remembered I would see in Cordele -- billed as the Confederate Launch Pad, a Titan missile standing by the freeway -- so I just went on, enjoying the good weather and the breeze in my hair and the doings of Junior Bender on audio, until I got to that missile. Cordele is a big enough town, and on a freeway, so it has 5G service and I could finally consult RoadTrippers, to find that the two things I missed after Ft Gaines were instructions to myself. So I didn't actually miss anything. I went to a diner for a refreshment -- by now it was too late to bother with lunch -- and programmed my next couple of travel legs into Google Maps. In my planning, I'd expected to spend the night at Dawson, about 30 miles northwest of Albany, but I made it farther than that, so now I'm in Warner Robins, Georgia, where there's an aviation museum at the old air base that I plan to see first thing tomorrow when it opens at 9AM. 

 Went out for dinner first thing, and found I was at a sports bar; not just any sports bar, but an axe-throwing bar.  Who'd'a ever have thunk you could mix axe-throwing and drinking? There's a row of targets along one wall, and people stand there with their brews or booze and throw axes. Sure, why not. And there's a trivia game going on at the same time, and between questions, they play really loud music and ask questions about it for bonus points. So I got something to eat and drink and was able to watch the USWNT crush Jamaica. Most of it, anyway; by the time it was 3:0 I was done for the day, so I didn't see the last goal, but only read about it on Messenger when S texted to tell me it had happened. 

 Good enough. 

The Not Key West trip, part 2

You should read all this in order, I think. You can access the first part here, and all the pictures from this trip here.

 Monday, June 2

 It was, as expected, another beautiful day: clear skies, not too hot. But I had to start off with half a day's drive on freeway, where you can't hear an audiobook if a truck passes, so the top stayed up until about eleven, while I listened to Rock of Ages, a novel in the Junior Bender series about a burglar who does detective work for other criminals. It's set in Los Angeles and written with a wonderfully wry humour; we've listened to two or three books in the series already and enjoyed them all. We had started listening to this same book on the way back from Colorado last month, but the reader's breathy style -- he fades the last 3 syllables of every sentence -- and the poor quality of the little $10 bluetooth speaker we have to use in that car made it impossible to follow the action over normal road noise. I've now bought a hopefully better bluetooth speaker for the Subaru, so maybe we'll be better able to hear when we travel in it. But I checked the book out again for this trip, hoping the audio setup in the Jag would make it possible to listen to it. It does. It's still a little irritating that he speaks the end of every sentence so quietly that I have to turn the volume way up, and so when Google Maps interrupts with some directional guidance that voice can be heard by drivers on the other side of the highway, but at least I can hear the book.

 I had breakfast at a Wendy's along the highway, having given up on finding anything more local. They have a surprisingly tasty breakfast burrito -- not the least bit authentic, of course, but good, cheap and filling, and not too high in calories. Lunch was at a local fried-chicken place that had excellent green beans as a side; the chicken wasn't as good as what I'd had in Fort Worth a few months ago, but it was OK.

 I got the first handful of counties after lunch: first Union County, where there was nothing to see. In the little town of Colquitt, seat of Miller County, I stopped to see a carved Indian head that I'd found listed on Roadside America. According to the sign there, the sculptor gave one to each state as a celebration of the contribution of Native Americans to our culture. Yeah, okay. Then I passed through Baker and Mitchell Counties without stopping, and into Colquitt County, where I visited the grave of a one-time circus owner. His tombstone is the surprisingly impressive elephant I mentioned in yesterday's post. I also drove through the county seat's historical district, which is impressive in no way that I could see. Lots of early-20th-century nondescript buildings around an equally nondescript courthouse, basically. From there I turned northwest and went through the unremarkable Worth County to Albany, in Dougherty County, where I'm spending the night. 

 Tomorrow I expect to spend most of the day here in Albany, a town of about seventy thousand people. It has half a dozen places of interest to me. Then I'll head west, back to the state line, and then north again for a pass through several other counties. If my plans hold good, I'll end up spending tomorrow night in a little town only about 30 miles northwest of Albany. We shall see.

 There's a Mexican restaurant not far from my hotel, so I went over there intending to have dinner. But the place was so busy that instead I just went to the bar to have a drink, and ended up having a conversation with an agricultural chemical salesman from some small town in Alabama who works this territory. We spent about an hour just talking about everything and nothing; the only thing I really learned from the conversation was that the swarms of insects I've been dealing with every time I stop the car are gnats, not mosquitoes, so that was a relief to hear. For dinner I ended up just getting a sandwich from the Arby's in front of my hotel. It was as good as you might expect. I wasn't particularly hungry anyway. Would have liked to get some more of those green beans but I don't know if there's a Jack's in Albany. Certainly not one within walking distance.

The Not Key West Trip, part 1

Sunday, June 1 

I noticed at some point that, once again, I had long weeks in prime travel season with no trips planned. Key West came to mind -- I won't bother to explain why -- and it had the added advantage that there were a bunch of counties in Georgia that are sort of on the way and that I hadn't been to before. And there were a number of car museums sort of on the way; a couple I'd been to before that I could skip this time, but also several that I haven't seen.

The Undiscovered Country

So that was the genesis of my Spring wander. I got on RoadTrippers and started working out a route that would take me to all the remaining Georgia counties; and then, consulting RoadTrippers and Roadside America and a few other sources, I found things along the way that would in some petty sense justify the travel. I could visit such tourist hot-spots as the elephant-shaped tombstone in Moultrie, Georgia; the Flint River Quarium in Albany; and the Pig Monument in Tennille. Pure gold. 

Well. I find that everything of the least interest is closed on Sundays in this part of the country; not entirely unexpected. More surprising is that it's all closed on Mondays, too. So that meant I'd face, essentially, two solid days of just driving, with no excuse to get out of the car and see a museum or a car collection or anything. And it meant that  I would get to Key West on a Monday. And I didn't really want to be in Key West on a Monday. Long story short, Key West got dropped from the trip. (It was briefly replaced by a trip to Cape Canaveral to see a night launch of a rocket ship, but a couple of days after that was added to the trip, the launch was scrubbed.)

So. The Not Key West trip of 2025. Left today. Tacos at a restaurant on the East Side of San Antonio, drove through Houston and Baton Rouge without even slowing down once for traffic. Amazing! I vow I will never pass that way again on any day but a Sunday.

The weather is good, but I was on the freeway all day long, so the top stayed up. I listened to an entire audio book, a murder mystery set in the Perigord called Bruno, Chief of Police. It wasn't a great mystery, but it was wonderfully evocative of la France profonde, with its descriptions of boucheries and casse-croutes and its casual references to culinary detail. The book really deals with the continuing societal consequences of the Nazi occupation decades before the book's action takes place. I like that kind of stuff, and the reader was easy to understand.

The only stop I had planned for today was in Hammond, Louisiana, where some of my ancestors are buried. Unfortunately, Google Maps took me to the wrong cemetery -- though it insisted it was the right one, despite the name on the gate and the totally different design of the place. A quick search for "similar places" revealed too many other cemeteries to check on my tiny little phone screen, so when I got to my hotel this evening one of the things I did was get on my laptop with its somewhat larger screen, and locate the correct address for the cemetery, about three miles from where Google Maps took me, on the other side of the interstate. I will stop there on the way back in a week's time. Disappointing, but not a major setback, since I'll pass that way again in a few days.

Tomorrow, after a few more hours on I-10, I'll get off the freeway and put the top down. The weather should be good for at least the next 3 or 4 days, so here's hoping for a fun wander.

Things tomorrow, though, won't be the same as they were yesterday. I feel myself slowly declining as the Golden Door draws inexorably closer. This won't be my last trip, but it may be my last wander. (I've said that before, but I was wrong, so don't hold me to it.) I found the planning only somewhat enjoyable, and I'm frankly not looking forward to the rest of the trip with the same excitement and exuberance that I used to feel. 

I don't know where I found it, but it seemed on point.

 

One Day There

I find that if I think of my recent brief excursion to Fort Worth as a reconnaissance trip, I can almost justify it in my mind as a worthwhile use of three days. Fortunately, I suppose, days are things that I seem to have in abundance.

 I've been hearing what seems like a lot about Fort Worth, for it being such a sideshow in the great panoply of sophisticated American life. I've always had the impression that where Dallas was rich, Fort Worth was prudent in its development of culture, and the two cities are locked into a sort of rivalry that pushes both forward (though Dallasites won't admit to the pressure). Thus Fort Worth has long been a surprisingly vital center for the fine arts, a result of the longstanding dedication of a few wealthy people to music, sculpture and painting. And, let's be honest, because Dallas has always been more than a little vulgar in its wealth; that gave Fort Worth the edge in the competition.

 But lately I've been hearing about Fort Worth as -- gasp! -- a center for artisanal and culinary craft as well. This was something new under the sun, and for several years now I've been mulling an expedition up that way to see for myself. I was last there in 2011 to see a very special and truly magnificent exhibition of Caravaggio paintings at the famous Kimbell Museum. That trip, other than the exhibition itself and a brief foray into Grapevine, was a disappointing trip down memory lane, which may have cured me at least partially of feelings of nostalgia whenever Fort Worth crosses my mind. So on this trip, I did my best to avoid the parts of town where I spent or mis-spent the quotidian parts of my youth.

 Weather and Sherry's travel made the middle of March the earliest time I could make this trip. I invited my friend Roland, and he accepted, and his schedule made it necessary to stick to my original poorly-thought-out plan to make it there and back in three days, with only one day to see anything in the city. And a flat tire on the way up meant that a chunk of that one day was spent sitting at a tire dealership, where the only entertainment was a bit of catty people-watching. Our vague plan to split the day between the Kimbell and the Zoo morphed into an afternoon at the Kimbell, with drive-by sightseeing bookending the museum. This, more than anything, kept the entire trip from being anything I would call a success.

 But there were a couple of bright spots. 

 First, the weather heading up was glorious. I took a more westerly route than usual. I almost always go north on 281, through Blanco and Johnson City to Hico, in order to avoid the horrible traffic on Interstate 35. It used to be really bad only as you cross the Colorado River, at Austin, but now the unpleasantness of the drive extends from, roughly speaking, Loop 410 to the east-west split near Hillsboro; and at certain times of day it will linger either until you reach your hotel or until you exit the Metroplex on the farther side of Denton. But because I had to pick Roland up at his house on the northwest side of San Antonio, I saw an excuse to take a western route that would feel too out-of-the-way if done from my own more centrally-located home. So we cut the corner between 1604 and I-10 by taking Kyle Seale Parkway and Sisterdale Road, then climbed up through the Hill Country to Fredericksburg and north on Highway 16.

Not a suspension bridge

 Route-planning is a favourite activity of mine. Finding new and interesting places to sightsee gives purpose to any trip, and the pleasure of anticipation usually exceeds the pleasure of actual experience: the latter often amounts to a few moments of contemplation and photography practice sandwiched between long hours of just driving. (Not that I mind the driving, if the roads are good for it.) And Texas, where almost nothing is new to me, suffers from the curse of familiarity. I have already seen the Dead Man's Hole and the World's Largest Spur (several of them, in fact) and have no desire to repeat those experiences. So the only place worth an actual stop along the chosen route was the Bluff Dale Suspension Bridge (actually a cable-stayed bridge), which looks ready to collapse any day. Since I've seen it now, I won't care much if it goes. The most interesting thing about the bridge is the fact that it was moved to its present location, more than a hundred years ago, when it became superfluous at its old location a mile and a half downstream. 

 There were several other locations on my planned route to begin with, but once I made the calculation that it would put Fort Worth out of reach of a day's drive, I shaved the plan down to the bare essentials: lunch at the Koffee Kup Cafe in Hico (a tradition stretching back decades), the old bridge, and circling around so that I could enter Fort Worth from the northwest, thus avoiding much of the city's (relatively mild) congestion. The popping of a cord in a front tire made me glad I had skipped all that other stuff, as it was still daylight when I had to stop to change the tire, and I only had to drive maybe 35 miles on the spare.

what the ratings mean

 Second, we managed to find what may be the best Thai food in all of Texas, at a small storefront restaurant called Buon Bistro, on Beech Street near Loop 820 North. It just happened to be fairly close to our hotel, and was still open when we got there around 8pm. We were the only people in the place at that hour, which may have played some part in why we had the full attention of the two young women running the shop. The waitress mentioned that the pad wun sen was, in her opinion, one of the best dishes on the menu; and since it's my favourite Thai dish, I chose that, along with an order of spring rolls.

 At Thai restaurants in San Antonio, "spring rolls" are small fried egg rolls. Appetizers wrapped in won ton skins and not fried are called "summer rolls" or "fresh rolls." I usually order those. But this time I ordered spring rolls, 'cuz I felt like that kind of mild sinful splurge. What I got, though, was summer rolls. I was happy with that, especially because the order of three, served with peanut sauce and sweet-and-sour sauce, were outstanding in taste and texture, and the individual servings of sauce meant that I could double-dip to my heart's content. It helped, too, that both sauces were better than most I've had. The peanut sauce managed to be full-flavoured without being at all overpowering; never an attribute of peanut sauce in my prior experience.

 The pad wun sen ... well, I've never had a bad dish of pad wun sen. It must be really easy to do well, but let's not take anything away from the kitchen at Buon. This pad wun sen was so good that I think I have never before had a really good pad wun sen. I ordered it medium spicy, and maybe next time I'll ask for something a little less in the way of spice, but it was sooooooo good that I might just stick with "medium spicy" if I ever make it back to this place.

 There was enough food on both our plates to take the leftovers back to the hotel, and they ended up being dinner the next night, too. Prices were pretty good to begin with, but when you get such good food at such good prices and have enough of it to have it twice, that is really good value.

 We also found a pretty damn good breakfast place, called Breakfast Club 51, which was conveniently located right across the street from the shop where I got a new set of tires. First off, they serve coffee in extra-large mugs, which felt like a no-brainer move to me; and it's a good thing they do, because they only had one girl waiting tables in the entire large-ish dining room, and if she'd had to run around refilling ordinary mugs she'd probably have quit in the middle of her shift and no one could blame her. My breakfast was eggs Florentine, well made and rich and I so wanted to lick the plate but settled for running my finger through the remnants of the sauce one time. Maybe twice.

 And for our one other meal in Fort Worth we went to Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken on Magnolia Avenue, a national chain outlet that was recommended to us by the sales girl at SiNaCa Gallery, where I acquired a piece of art glass for my slowly-expanding collection (nearly 70 pieces, if I count everything; let's say about 50 pieces worthy of the name "art"). That area is now a center for night life and shopping; when I lived in Fort Worth it was a slum. Gus's makes its batter with more than a touch of Louisiana Brand hot sauce, and the result is, as Sheriff Taylor would have said, "goo-ood." Since it was "pi day" and they had it on the menu, I decided first on a slice of sweet potato pie; and since I was being more or less good, dietarily speaking, I only ordered the two-piece dark-meat "snack," which came with just a slice of white bread and no sides. A good move, I think, though a third piece of chicken may not have caused regrets. Excellent food, very good service, good prices, and a welcoming funky atmosphere featuring excellent blues on the PA system. 

 Friday, our one day in town, was clear and warm but very dry and extremely windy (think gale-force), and the wind picked up a lot of dust in West Texas and brought it in for a visit to the Big City; so much dust that by evening it looked like wildfire smoke or a heavy fog. The weather was still good enough to allow us to enjoy being out in Fort Worth, but the dryness of the air gave me slight nosebleeds, and the dust made it a little bit difficult to breathe. It was, on that account, probably for the best that we spent the major part of the day in the Kimbell, seeing their collection.

 I do not at all share the Arts Community's fondness for modern art, and since this blog post is my opinion and no one else's, I will say what I think. If you have different thoughts, you may keep them to yourself, or express them in your own blog post, or you can put your thoughts in the comments and maybe I'll post them. (There's supposed to be a link at the bottom* where you can do that, but half the time I don't see it there. Take your chances if you like.)

 Somewhere around 1820, artists got the idea that all the great stories of our (Western) history -- myths, legends, and the beliefs that inform our culture -- had been done to death. Everything one could say about, for example, the beheading of Holofernes or the fall of Icarus had been said, and every lesson learned. There had been many centuries of realistic sculpture, and a few centuries of realistic painting (starting with the discovery and use of perspective in art, in the Renaissance). Artists were, apparently, tired of painting what they saw, and started painting what they could imagine they saw. Okay, fine. Then they went on to paint lines and blocks and colours and spots, and found that people with money to buy art would buy into glib critical statements of what those coloured lines and blobs meant. Descriptions of art now sound like a waiter's description of a bottle of expensive vintage; substitute emotional terms for fruit flavours and hints of oak, and you've got it in one. 

 Modern art sells, apparently. People who can afford to buy art buy it because it's a way to hold wealth that maybe says complimentary things about them: that they have taste, sophistication, style, grace, &c. It's like Bitcoin for the walls. Modern art is vague enough that you can claim any meaning for it: it is subjective, and because it can mean whatever the viewer wants, it has no intrinsic meaning. Unless, of course, it also happens to be beautiful, but that hardly ever is the case.

Annibale Carracci, The Butcher's Shop

 Maybe some people genuinely like that vagueness. I don't. When I stepped into the gallery containing European paintings after 1820, and saw the blurry landscapes and primitive representations of people and shapeless strokes and lines of paint, I waited for a sense of ... well, anything to come to me, a suggestion of what the painter was trying to say. As usual with this sort of ... art, I got nothing. Sometimes I get something, but it's rare. Perhaps I just wasn't in a receptive mood, after buying tires, to be moved or intrigued by Mondrian's coloured lines on a white background, or the faceless people on a blurry Parisian street. I was much more receptive to the look in some long-dead Englishwoman's eyes in a Joshua Reynolds portrait, and even by the overrated light of Venice in a Canaletto landscape. 

 Well. Anyway. So I spent most of the afternoon seeing all the galleries in both buildings of the Kimbell Museum. Roland mostly sat and waited on various benches. I'm not entirely sure it's because of his difficulty in walking; I suspect he's not genuinely interested in fine art. Not sure why, of all the things I suggested we might do on our one day in Fort Worth, he picked the Kimbell (and the Zoo, but then we had the tire issue to deal with, so it was one or the other, and with the wind blowing so much dust we preferred the indoors). 

 After the Kimbell, we drove a short distance to the location of the Leonard's Museum. When I was a Fort Worther, Leonard's was The Place to go in town: a huge department store complex that took up three and a half city blocks, and had huge parking lots along the Trinity River that connected to the store with a subway! Wow. The store is long gone now, but I wasn't entirely averse to yet another trip down memory lane, especially since I thought it'd be a brief one. Turns out the museum, though, is only open on Saturdays, so Roland was not to be burdened by my reminiscences about something that was probably not as grand a part of my childhood as I want it to be.

* I see that the link for comments has changed; what used to be a pen-symbol is now just the legend, "no comments:". If you click on that, it'll take to you a place where you can question my righteous authority, for all the good it'll do you.