The hall has been rented, the orchestra engaged and the booby traps have been set, hidden and forgotten.
Next month Saragun Springs becomes another publishing site, but it will not be just another publishing site due to the remarkably productive cases of mental imbalances that direct the run of the place. It is run by myself and Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar (often DWB and/or “The Drifter.”)
One key difference is the Springs remains a real dimesion in the creative universe. There is a Pygmy Goat named Daisy Kloverleaf who is as real as a person gets on this side of the veil. There are over two hundred various residents of the realm, and each one of us thjnks it is a high and fine idea to share space with writers and artists looking for new places to show their works, which all begins next month on Monday, 5 January.
The set up is rather free form and other than the Weekly Drifter every Sunday whatever happens will do just that. Mainly, items that will be selected will run daily and since that isn’t too hard to present, we are all for it.
There are cynics who feel that such an announcement has all the depth of introducing an individual snowflake during a blizzard. True, but there are also occasions when the universe can be improved by the silence of cynics. “Shut the fuck up” can be expressed in infinite ways, which are dictated by the patience of the advisor.
Today we once again present the Submission Guidelines as written by Dale. We aim to keep the site simple, but that should not be associated in any way with a lack of effort or caring on our part.
This current month will contain odds and ends with reruns of works presented throughout the year. It will all get new enough, anon.
Life is a draw up the play in the dirt sort of thing. It keeps the fear up and the energy flows. Such is the path we shall trod. Things will get gloss on them as time goes by, but I hope we never get slick.
F. Scott Fitzgerald called Joan Crawford the quintessential flapper (which, for Fitzgerald, meant the quintessential literary woman) because she combined two qualities into one.
She had a desperate-hearted love of life, or a love of life that was tinged with desperation, and she had it more intensely than anyone else.
He also disparaged her acting abilities. He said it was nearly impossible to write for her. (He was a screenwriter who usually didn’t even receive writing credits.) It was nearly impossible to write for her because of the tendency she had to overact, he claimed.
But there’s a very fine line between overacting, on the stage or screen, and over-re-acting, which happens in life.
To me, when I watch it now, much of Joan’s overacting on screen seems like nothing more than the OVERREACTING that certain people are all-too-capable of when they find themselves in emotionally charged situations.
Joan overacts on screen because she overreacted in life half the time.
She did both because she was an artist. And artists are people whose moods sometimes, or even most of the time, get the better of them.
Because it comes with the territory.
Art is about emotion, moods, atmospheres, feelings (as well as thoughts and ideas but here we’re focusing on mood).
Joan Crawford had a genius-level intellect on many levels.
And one thing she understood far better than most people was the ways people’s moods get the better of them.
And she understood this even as her own moods would get the better of her.
All of this comes out very clearly when you watch her, with close attention, on the screen.
It’s best to do it in a partially darkened room when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night with good creative energy but not creating anything, just absorbing more for later.
Try to find your own sweet spot regarding medications that can keep you buzzing while not taking you over the edge.
Breathe the midnight deeply, relax, and be very alive.
It’s best to focus on some of the movies she made during the 1950s.
For me, this decade is Joan’s high point.
Before that, she hadn’t fully matured. After that, she started to become a bit of a parody of herself. (There are exceptions in her work in either direction in time.)
It doesn’t have to be a great movie (in technical terms). All it needs to do is have the great Joan Crawford in it.
Watch the way her face moves.
The beautiful way her face moves and never stops moving.
And what it shows. (And she knows it.)
Joan Crawford understands (all too well) when people are playing her (or trying to).
She’s always willing to give other people a chance to be their best selves (but watches very closely when they veer off the track – because she’s been hurt before).
She knows that the world is made up of people who need one another but also can’t live together (or not peacefully).
She can read the reactions to what she says as deeply as if she were reading a book (which she also did much of during her life).
She knows that more sadness is up around the next bend.
But she also communicates the Dickinsonian fact that hope springs eternally.
She knows that humans are beautiful and ugly by turns, and that being ugly inside is much more important (in the wrong way) than being beautiful on the outside.
And she knows that outer beauty is what Jesus called “the light of the body.”
This exists for those can see it. It is an inner radiation that travels outward even when the subject (its source) is unaware that it’s doing so.
It’s the reason Joan was just as beautiful at 70 as she was at 20, even though she chain-smoked and chain-drank for most of her years.
When the dust settles, one man, at least, will still be standing.
He might only stand five feet seven inches in his socks (Eminem is, and Kerouac was, five-eight, a precursor and an heir), but Alexander Pope, one of the dozen or so greatest English poets of all time, was four feet six inches tall. (Pope died in 1744 at the age of 56.)
And Bob Dylan has more than a little of Pope’s verbal resources, great heart, wild intelligence, deep soul, artistic energy. If “Eloisa to Abelard,” by Pope, doesn’t break your heart and make you want to go on living, nothing will.
The Drifter has compiled seven reasons why, with their flipsides, Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize. The reasons are brief and they are meant for quick reading in a busy world; but they are also meant to be pondered upon and thought about more later for any and all who are interested. (And meant to be USED.)
ONE: He both does, and does not, care what he looks like, and he looks like it.
TWO: He has done a lot of drugs but hasn’t done so many drugs that he isn’t still going strong at 84. The life of the artist, any artist, is a balancing act.
THREE: He puts out material at a relentless pace as if this were the most important thing in the world, and then does little to promote it.
FOUR: His “style” of life and work are ancient and modern.
FIVE: His work can exist “on the page” or in the air.
SIX: He does, and does not, care/s about “quality.”
SEVEN: He goes out into the world – while wearing disguises.
(Afterthought: Those last two should be hung out with like zen koans…)
(Note: There plenty to be thankful for this week, including a full week of new work from Co-Editor Dale Williams Barrigar. He is truly an encouraging and talent person, and I’m certain that readers will agree–Leila)
…And one thinks of the elder Charles Dickens (in his 50s) embracing his new, or renewed, favorite hobby: exploring London’s opium dens.
We don’t know if the esteemed author ever developed a habit, but we can be sure he partook, and not lightly, of the primary wares in the opium dens.
Such behavior resulted in several immortal characters who are contained in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
This book is a murder mystery which became a true murder mystery for all future history, since Dickens never finished the book, never provided a clue to who the murderer was (he never left notes nor told anyone about it, either), and since he died of a stroke right in the middle of the book’s composition, at the age of 58.
Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer is one immortal character from this novel.
She’s a haggard-looking woman who runs an opium den and who the world thinks is also disabled and in need.
But she’s neither disabled nor in need in reality. And I say “haggard-looking” only because her haggard appearance is a costume she deliberately dons.
She spends her time looking like she’s pretty out of it while secretly gathering info on all the customers of her establishment, just in case she ever needs any of it. A spy, in other words.
Over the years, many literary scholars have pointed out that Dickens’ last tale, Drood, almost reads like a rewriting of one of Dickens’ all-time favorite books, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by Thomas de Quincy.
The Confessions is a short book (or long essay) that first appeared in The London Magazine when Thomas was around 36 and Charles was around 9 years old, in 1821.
(The population of London and environs was just over two million in the early to mid nineteenth century. Most English writers lived in London, and most knew or had at least met one another. At the time, London was, by far, the largest city in the world.)
Within a year or so of its magazine appearance, the Confessions appeared in book form. It made de Quincy an immediate “celebrity” (of the dubious variety) and remained his best-known work for the rest of his life, even though he completed many other works just as worthy as this one. Later, he blew up the text to four times its original size and republished it once again, this time in a much slacker, weaker, more verbose version probably influenced by none other than laudanum.
De Quincy’s book would later go on to have an explosive impact on American writers of the twentieth century as well, including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson. The influence extended through them, of course, onto entire counter-cultural movements continuing through to our own time (2025).
De Quincy was a lifelong laudanum user and addict (he discovered it as a teenager). He cycled back and forth between just using and being hopelessly addicted. He was 4 feet ten inches tall, and thin. He lived to be 74 (which would be like at least 84 now) and often walked 25 miles a day, including on heavy use days. He had eight children; Dickens had ten; such numbers were normal back then.
Thomas took his inspiration from his pal and mentor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another lifelong user who cycled between addiction, use, and abuse.
De Quincy called it “eloquent opium!” and said it gave him the feeling of having “hands washed free of blood.”
But he also depicted the horrific, terrifying, nightmarish aspects of the drug in his writing.
He wrote about it as if using opium were like dropping into a pit.
In the same way, Dickens very much had a dual view of the world. His characters in Drood are still hilarious and horrible by turns, just like De Q’s depiction of drugs.
Thomas de Quincy was also an author who (in many ways) started what we now call the “true crime” genre of nonfiction writing, when he began to explore London murder/s in his works, like people getting their throats cut in their own beds over their own taverns on the edge of town and the crimes never being solved.
In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens gathered together the triple obsessions of De Quincy with crime, drugs, murder and put them all on display in a way he never had before. One way he did this was with the prose style.
Before Thomas de Quincy, prose was prosaic. There were exceptions, like John Donne and Samuel Johnson. But prose was considered to be far below poetry and its nature was merely functional.
In his Confessions of 1821, De Quincy talked about wanting a new thing in the world: what he called “impassioned prose.”
And then he proceeded to make it happen, as did Herman Melville 30 years later in America. De Quincy took opium and Melville drank wine.
Dickens had a massive stroke after a hard, full, fulfilling day of working on Drood, and never regained consciousness.
Saragun Springs 