Burnin’

Nine months ago I wrote this, “Bald eagles, egrets, herons, alligators, manatee, dolphins and panthers make Florida their home. For sure, increasing human population is a dangerous threat to pristine nature. Which makes it all the sweeter to visit places in the state that are hard to reach and therefore relatively untouched. The Ten Thousand Islands are such a place, as is Keewaydin, a barrier island between Naples and Marco Island. Keewaydin is accessible only by boat. There are homes, but very few. You can walk the beach and see no one. That’s a true joy in modern times.”

Tonight I heard from a concerned citizen in Naples who informed me Keewaydin is in danger of being opened to resort-type development. Some Collier County mucky mucks want a new place for another private club, is the short of it. To their credit, the developers say they want to do it right. But that’s not the point. The point is once you give an inch the game is lost, for some other jackasses will be lined up to take a mile.

Naples News: Basil Street Partners LLC, a company making a redevelopment mark on downtown Naples, wants to build a 2,925-square-foot beach club on land the company owns on the barrier island within the boundaries of the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

The club would serve as a private amenity for as many as 750 club members and their guests. Members would be condominium and boat slip owners at Naples Bay Resort, a collection of Basil Street Partners projects at the former Boat Haven site, at the intersection of U.S. 41 and Sandpiper Street and at Grand Central Station. The general public also might have a chance to buy memberships.

Basil Street Partners, which is managed by developer Jack Antaramian, needs approval by Collier County commissioners to build the beach club.

Please voice your opposition by August 19, 2005, to:

Linda Bedtelyon, Community Planning Coordinator
Community Development and Environmental Services Administration
2800 North Horseshoe Drive, Naples, FL 34104
Phone: (239) 213-2948
Fax: (239) 403-2395
email: lindabedtelyon@colliergov.net

Metafilter picked up on a SF Weekly article on writer and artist, Weldon Kees.

During the 1940s and ’50s, Kees was a moderately famous artist, known mostly for his poetry, who quit the New York literary scene in 1951 and moved to the Bay Area, where he played piano in San Francisco jazz bars, wrote newsreel scripts, and produced a North Beach poetry and music revue before disappearing in an apparent Golden Gate Bridge suicide 50 years ago this past July 18.

One of Kees biggest fans is none other than Dana Goia—music critic emeritus of San Francisco magazine, former General Foods marketing vice president, opera librettist, laureled poet, translator of Latin, Italian, German, and Romanian literature, university instructor, widely published literary essayist, and current president of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia has published essays on Kees, edited books on and by Kees, written poems fashioned after Kees’ style, and discussed Kees at symposiums, in classrooms, and with journalists.

1926
by Weldon Kees

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.

Of course, I was interested to note to that Kees is another in a long line of famous writers from my home state, Nebraska. Kees is a native of Beatrice, atttended Doane College and graduated from Univ. of Nebraska at Lincoln.

University of Nebraska Press has been instrumental in collecting and distributing Kees’ work and keeping his flame alive for future generations.

photo by Evil Vince

Our friend, Chris May, a.k.a. DJ Evil Vince, is out on tour with Ben Harper this summer and his photos are being showcased on the Ben Harper site, under On The Road (on the nav bar). When you get to the tour page, click the letter [P] in brackets for the photos to pop up.

It’s nice to see Evil’s work get this type of high level exposure.

“California is a garden of eden. It’s a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot,
If you ain’t got that do re mi.” -Woody Guthrie

Despite Narayan Nayar’s best efforts, he now regularly uses the word “dude” in conversation and even in writing. Academics tend to shy away from such colloquialisms, but living in Santa Cruz, CA can break down a person’s natural defenses, even a well educated person’s.

The local lexicon is far from Nayar’s only issue with the place.

There’s many things to like about (northern) California, but in no way do I consider it the pinnacle of civilization that its real estate prices would suggest. The fact that real estate prices in the Bay Area rose 22% last year evinces the kind of self-delusion a place which serves a tofu-everything can induce. It won’t be too long until the only people who can afford to live in the Bay Area are the CEOs of Apple, Oracle, Google, Adobe, Industrial Light & Magic, and Yahoo, all of whom will feast daily on a diet of ego and wheatgrass, and use the houses of regular schmucks like myself as mere parking sheds for their fleet of Segways.

I wonder if the dude’s watched Joel Coen’s The Big Lebowski, a movie which appeals to coolest of all dudes (male and female).

I have had no Thai food for six months, and that’s not a recipe one wants to follow. Thankfully, all that changed last night, as we met an old friend at Kao, a French-infused Thai restaurant on Savannah’s east side.

Adam and I both opted for salmon in green curry sauce. Darby had cashew chicken and Adam’s friends shared mussles and a bottle of champagne. The service was outstanding, the decor inviting and the food perfect.

In 1956 the James F. Byrnes Bridge, a two-lane toll swing bridge, was constructed at a cost of $1.5 million. This opened Hilton Head Island to automobile traffic from the mainland for the first time. The toll, which was $2.50, was discontinued in 1959. In 1978 the bridge was widened to four lanes. According to the county, the bridge is actually interconnecting twin spans. The one nearest Hilton Head, crossing Skull Creek, is the J. Wilton Graves Bridge. The other, crossing MacKays Creek, is the Karl S. Bowers Bridge.

To the casual observer, it may seem that the bridge is what brought the flood of people to an island that had been dormant and underpopulated since the War of Yankee Agression. But one local sees it differently. Retired journalist, Fran Heyward Marscher, who was profiled on Tuesday in Bluffton Today, is a Bluffton native, as was her daddy and his daddy. When she grew up here there was no grocery store, so her family went to Savannah every Saturday for supplies. There was no A.C. either. Her house had fans.

This isn’t some long lost era were speaking of. A 1959 high school graduate, Marscher mentions she was but one of six in her class. Summing up the reason for so much change in such a short span of time, she says:

Air conditioning is what caused all these people to move here.

While I love the drama and simplicity of that cold hard fact, in fairness, Marscher also says:

I could never have stayed here if the community had not changed. There would have been no newspaper for me to work on. The people who have come here include many smart, creative, interesting people, so there have been many benefits to the growth. It’s a tradeoff.

Roger Pinckney XI (yes, the eleventh), who I mentioned here the other day, deserves a closer look. Since, moving to the area in February I’ve been learning who the local writers and other artists are. Pat Conroy is undisputed top dog among Lowcountry writers. His long list of books and the commercial success of those books is hard to argue with, although I’m sure some do argue with it.

Then there’s Roger Pinckney. He’s an interesting character. He rightfully places himself in the action in his stories. We see Rog hunting deer up in a tree and boar from a mule’s backside. We see him enjoying hellfire and damnation sermons on Sunday. We see him struggle with the women in his life. Pinckney also struggles mightily with the powers that be in Beaufort County, SC and the changes (not all for the better) happening everywhere around him. Some call it progress. That’s what his short essay, E.O.D., the final statement in The Right Side of the River, is about. Being at the end of his own personal dock in the face of unforgiving progress.

Hilton Head, South Carolina, the island where golf is king. I am waiting on a boat, waiting on the end of the dock. E.O.D. Tags on my groceries, the parts for the ailing Toyota, the box of Kentucky sour mash, all bear the initials.

I’m headed for Daufuskie, where the dockhands will paw over a jumble of golf bags and suitcases and sort what is going to the beachfront inn from the grocieries and parts and whiskey for people who live on the back of the island like I do. I will collect mine at the end of the dock. E.O.D.

But I am too late for one boat and too early for another, so I pour a dram of Rebel Yell and think many things, as I do when sipping good whiskey.

Lawrence, Kansas city commissioners met recently to consider approving a recommendation by the city’s Historic Resources Commission to place the former home of renowned but controversial author William S. Burroughs on the Lawrence Register of Historic Places.

Burroughs lived in the city from 1981 until his death in 1997.

Thanks to Living with Legends: The Chelsea Hotel Blog for the pointer.

Associated Press: A 7,600-pound nuclear bomb dumped off the Georgia coast in 1958 remains lost - and is best left unfound, the Air Force concluded after its first hunt for the missing nuke in decades.

“We haven’t found where the bomb is,” Billy Mullins, an Air Force nuclear weapons adviser who led the search, told a news conference in Savannah. “We still think it’s irretrievably lost. We don’t know where to look for it.”

The Air Force says the bomb is incapable of an atomic explosion because it lacks the plutonium capsule needed to trigger a fission reaction. The device does contain an undisclosed amount of uranium and about 400 pounds of conventional explosives.

“The best course of action in this matter is to not continue to search for it and to leave the property in place,” said the report by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.

A damaged B-47 bomber jettisoned the Mark-15 nuke into Wassaw Sound, where the Wilmington River meets the Atlantic Ocean about 15 miles from Savannah, in February 1958 after colliding with a fighter jet during a training flight.

City officials on Tybee Island, a beach community of 3,400 residents, urged the government four years ago to recover the lost weapon. But after hearing the Air Force report Friday, island City Manager Bob Thomson agreed that it’s best left alone.

“I’m not saying it’s a good thing that we have a warhead out there,” Thomson said. “But I believe the greatest danger is it being disturbed from its watery grave.”

I’m reading a truly outstanding book of essays by Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate and Lowcountry native, Roger Pinckney XI. There’s so much to touch on in this man’s wonderful collection, but for now I’ll just focus on one small, but important aspect. Pinckney introduces a cast of characters who belong to the Burn clan*.

Pinckney makes mention of Arthur “Papy” Burn, the keeper of the Bloody Point Lighthouse on Daufuskie Island during the mid 20th century.

According to Lighthouse Friends, Arthur “Papy” Burn lived at the lighthouse until his health forced him to move to the mainland. Papy was quite involved in island life serving as a substitute teacher, a Sunday School teacher, a magistrate, and taxidermist. Papy was known for the beautiful flowerbeds that surrounded the lighthouse each spring, but he is probably remembered most for his winemaking. They say Papy never drank, but in 1953, for some reason he started making wine in the old lamp house, which he christened the Silver Dew Winery. Papy would make wine out of anything he could get his hands on, including blackberries, bananas, elderberries, scuppernongs, and oranges. Papy passed away on Sullivan’s Island in 1968, having outlived three of his four wives. Papy’s body was returned to the island for burial, and more than one person has since felt or seen his presence at his beloved lighthouse.

Papy’s daughter-in-law, Billie Burn and her son Bobby Burn live on Daufuskie today. Billie has written a book on the island’s history, folklore and Gullah traditions, Stirrin’ The Pots on Daufuskie. Artist, Bob Burn, is the proprietor of Silver Dew Pottery on Daufuskie. According to a new piece for Orion by Pinckney (not in the book), Burn is also a strong, wiry, storyteller with a deep knowledge of “Indian stuff.”

Then there’s Francis A. Burn, Bob’s uncle, residing at Burn’s Landing on Daufuskie. With all these potential kinfolk in the area, I’m feeling just a little bit more at home.

*Note, very few people in the U.S. spell their name B-U-R-N. Of course, I happen to be one of them.