The Search for Maugus

I grew up on Mau­gus Avenue. When peo­ple (from a few blocks, towns, or states over) vis­ited, they asked my par­ents the same ques­tion: “What’s a Mau­gus?” I’ve spent most of my life won­der­ing, “Who was Mau­gus?” The time’s almost here I get to start really tear­ing into that question.

Dredge Poetics (Full Text)

Well, it’s been deliv­ered. The mighty Bren­dan Con­stan­tine also deliv­ered a deli­cious lit­tle lec­ture, and it was an honor to open this new com­mu­nity series with him. Here’s the full text. If you like or if you don’t, please say so!

Another important dream

I’ve been think­ing about the Mul­ti­verse a lot again, prepar­ing my poet­ics lec­ture, and just now, I dreamed I was in the house I’ve been dream­ing of for years.

Curious Dream

I haven’t been dream­ing much of Welles­ley lately; been absorbed in other things. The last few weeks – largely why I’ve been absent here – I’ve been slav­ing on An Under­ground Guide to Alburquerque’s new web­site. But mean­while, the pull from the Dredgery has been slack. Last night, I dreamt the two were the same thing.

Criminal Elistism

How many times has this hap­pened? You want to deepen your under­stand­ing of some­thing. You get a book. You start read­ing. The writ­ing is so dense, or need­lessly com­plex, you can’t get through it, much less enjoy it. This is crim­i­nal elit­ism. Shit’s gotta stop.

Redemption

Just now, read­ing Sex at Dawn in the Captain’s Chair in the liv­ing room, I had one of those Impor­tant Moments. A few years back a friend asked if and how my writ­ing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he sug­gested “beauty.” That answer always sounded like a copout. The words can dress the sub­ject ten­derly, but the sub­ject remains dark, bit­ter, dis­turb­ing. Untrans­formed. But all this talk of humans fight­ing and caging our sex­u­al­ity by insti­tu­tion­al­ized “pair bonding”  –  on top of mak­ing me randy as a sono­fabitch  –  is reveal­ing some­thing. I’ve been wor­ried this whole time* that I’m paint­ing an unre­deemable pic­ture of North­east­ern Amer­i­cans. That we’re worse than history-​​​​deniers: we devalue and…

Flintstonization

I’ve been read­ing Sex at Dawn: The Pre­his­toric Ori­gins of Mod­ern Sex­u­al­ity. Along the path to claim­ing that humans are really bad at monogamy, authors Ryan and Jethá make a very impor­tant point about fram­ing and per­spec­tive: we can’t pro­duc­tively cast old worlds in the mold of the present. It’s like tem­po­ral hege­mony. In the same way we can’t pro­duc­tively look to other cul­tures exclu­sively through the moral frame of our own, we can’t the­o­rize about ear­lier ones with cur­rent behav­ior pat­terns as a guide. If we want to under­stand them (and thus our­selves), we can’t treat them as mediocre reflec­tions. Fel­low his­tory blog­ger Jim Belshaw calls it Pre­sen­tism; Ryan and Jethá refer to it at…

Central Questions

It doesn’t take a his­tory PhD to fig­ure Meta­com declared war on the Eng­lish in 1675 to fight the now English-​​​​favoring bal­ance of regional power. Power was land, reli­gion, guns and fol­low­ers. Let’s take that for given. There was, of course, another huge, com­plex fac­tor in the mix: Indigenous-​​​​English rela­tions. And as much as that had to do with the foun­da­tions of Amer­i­can racism, it was also wrapped up in ques­tions of debt. Accord­ing to Philbrick, the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­cans  –  the chil­dren of the Ply­mouth colonists, and the Puri­tans in Mass­a­chu­setts Bay, nei­ther of whom had to suf­fer the first win­ters in the area, with only the assis­tance of the Pokanoket mak­ing the dif­fer­ence between life and…

Another Exploratory Question

Deeper dis­patches from Mayflower: Of the behav­iors the Pil­grims (and their Boston-​​​​area spin­offs, the Puri­tans) became known for, I’m start­ing to won­der which was more dan­ger­ous: their ratio­nal­i­sa­tions (the Pequot War of 1634  –  1638 was a nec­es­sary blood­bath to ensure Indian Coun­try didn’t unite against them), or their obliv­i­ous­ness (launch­ing a raid and killing Mass­a­chu­sett war­riors in the early 1620s would have no effect on Indige­nous trade and rela­tions.) Also just as inter­est­ing, at least to me, is the rev­e­la­tion that from the remains of the Pequot, the Nar­ra­gansett, the Pokanoket, the Mass­a­chu­sett and other tribes, the Wampanoag were formed. Grow­ing up, I heard only the last of those names bandied about. Read­ing Fac­ing East from…

Hello again, Alexandra

This morn­ing I dreamed of the House, first time since Madi­son last month. Some­one else drove past it, up the hill, and I knew I shouldn’t be there. We went inside any­way. You wel­comed me in. I asked if you remem­bered meet­ing me, two years ago. Or when we met uncon­scious, six months later. You said, Vaguely. Then I asked a favor. That you remem­ber this con­ver­sa­tion, so that I could ask the con­scious you, when I see her next, if we’re con­nected. If we meet there, at that House, in our dreams, or if even my dreams think I’m crazy. If you responded, I don’t remem­ber, which I guess is fit­ting. Maybe you’re not the…