The Bullshit Artist
Plenty of writers are full of shit. Then there is James Wakefield Burke.
The unlikely tale of how J.W. and I collaborated with Johnny Cash on what became a Disney movie about Davy Crockett.
Those Elvis tapes are fake, though.
Of all the authors I have known, James Wakefield Burke (1906-1989) was the most memorable. He was not a great writer, or even a good one. But J.W., as he was known, was a quintessentially American type: the bullshit artist.
I met him in 1985, when I was 23 years old and finishing graduate studies at Yale and researching what became my narrative poem, The Alamo. The only source for some of the books I needed for my research was Eakin Press, a small publishing company in Austin. During a trip to Austin to visit my family one Christmas, the founder and publisher of the press, Ed Eakin, with whom I had corresponded, arranged for me to dine at a Mexican restaurant with him and an author named J.W. Burke. “He’s a bit of a character,” Ed Eakin warned me in advance. Indeed, J.W. turned out to be a bald fellow in his seventies in a fire-engine red suit and white shoes in a style that might be …
My Horse Fox
With one last sneer in my direction, she tweezed the pineapple from the fork with her lips.
‘I don’t remember having a deformed oal, but I must have.’
She might decide to take off at a gallop, at the edge of an uncut hayfield, while I scream.
Before Robert and I moved to the Mesa in southwest New Mexico, I lived in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes and the Cargill salt mines. The mines got the salt from under Seneca Lake. When I was there, sometimes men asked me timidly, “Tama, why do all these middle-aged women suddenly start riding horses? Is there something sexual?”
“No,” I said. “There are only two types of young girls. Those who identify as a girl, and those who identify as a horse. When they grow up, or when their kids have gone, or when they retire and have some extra money, they fulfill their dream of owning and learning to ride a horse.”
“And the others?”
“They get designer handbags. Only one percent of the population ends up with both.”
“What about men?”
“Men don’t have the ‘horse thing.’ Unless they grow up riding when they are young, they don’t have interest as adults. The non-rider men are …
The War for Palestine
Palestine was created by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
What’s happening there today could happen to all of us
It’s in Ohio, stupid
“Saloons, mud, no law, sanitation, guns, and other problems led the town’s concerned citizens to draw up in July 1875 the incorporation papers,” per a 1989 document entitled “Our Town — How it Began,” which I find tucked inside one of the neatly organized manilla folders in a filing cabinet in the local history section of the East Palestine Memorial Library on Market Street. As in nearly the entire continental vastness of 19th-century America, settlers predated the law here in East Palestine (pronounced East Pal-e-steen), Ohio, just as America existed prior to the establishment of law. East Palestine was “laid out on a 640-acre plot of land originally owned by John Taggart, who had bought the land through a federal office in Steubenville,” with the future town then “designated as Section 25 of Township No. 8 in Range No. 1.” Thomas Jefferson signed “the original parchment document” in 1804. “Then in …
