Mister Razzle Dazzle Turns 150
Happy Birthday to Jack London, Fugitive Father of California Literature and Inventor of the Road Novel
Socialist, white supremacist, tramp, shirtless billboard model
If you haven’t read ‘Martin Eden,’ get thee to a library
Unlike his predecessors in the field of California literature — Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris — Jack London was born in San Francisco. 1876, the year of his birth, was also the anniversary of the centenary of the United States, the nation to which he owed his unalloyed allegiance. His mother, Flora Wellman, a spiritualist and an unwed mother, thought she could communicate with the dead. I’d call her a bohemian or a proto-hippie. As a young man, Jack London traveled widely in Asia and Europe, and across both North and South America. And while he wrote about England, Japan, Mexico, the Yukon, and elsewhere, he lived most of his life around San Francisco Bay: in Oakland, Berkeley, and in Glen Ellen, too, as well as in the city of San Francisco itself.
The famed author’s name at birth was not Jack London, but John Griffith Chaney. When his mother married a wounded Civil War veteran named …
The Front Porch
The farm at the bottom of the road belonged to Millard. By the time I knew him, he lived with his daughters. His wife had died years ago, but he couldn’t bear to part with the house where they made a life and raised a family.
Every day, when the weather was good, and often when it wasn’t, Millard would drive his old beige Chevy back over to the house, park in the driveway, and wait for someone to come talk to him. Everyone in the area knew Millard. In his nineties now, he had purchased the house on the corner as a young man in his twenties. He had kept cows and other animals on the land for nearly seventy years.
Farm work had been beyond Millard for a while. It was a wonder that he was still permitted to drive his old Chevy. Still, he did everything he could to hold onto the land and stay close to his house. He rented out his lower fields to a neighboring farmer for a pittance as grazing …
The Silence of the Lambs in Phoenix
Charlie Kirk’s flock is circled by wolves.
Kick-ass Christian babes inherit the mic, while sullen gamma males lurk at the bar, unsure whether ‘Heil Hitler’ is a joke.
A young man ain’t nothing in the world these days.
While Charlie Kirk was arguably the most influential political activist since the 1960s, the manner in which he has been memorialized is largely without precedent. There are, evidently, five books penned by Kirk. Having read most of them, I can confirm that there is no “Letter from Scottsdale Jail” nor an Autobiography of Charlie K. There’s no Turning Point of the American Mind, no Turning Point Review, no Collected Speeches of CJK. Kirk does not fit neatly among his antecedents, as there’s no singular opus from which his legacy can be understood. His is not a gravestone that will be found using the Dewey Decimal System. The digital world he came from is not one that is inclined to stand ceremony on the altar of the printed word.
Instead, what’s most prominently come to memorialize Charlie Kirk’s life are thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of video …
