Horace's Od(e)ious Gossip Column - Bob Shacochis is a Scallywag

Dead Beat was getting concerned. Horace was missing from the tool shed. The door was flung open but no wild expositories.

"Greece, Rome?" Hudson suggests.

But lo and behold I hear him wandering up the lane late at night muttering to himself, "Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death..."

"You Horace?"

" Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. One must exercise proper deliberation, plan carefully before making a move, and be alert in guarding against relapse following a renaissance..."

"Yeah, it's you."

Turns out he has been attending the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Bob Shacochis no less running a panel on: Literary Gossip: Do's and Don'ts. Salon C 2nd Floor.

"If you don't have anything nice to say, sit by me," Dorothy Parker supposedly said. Gossip can hurt, and yet who can resist it? Certainly not writers. Is gossip always backbiting and character assassination, or is it really just talk about people, talk that is interesting and honest? Why aren't men said to gossip? Certainly they do. Panelists provide infamous examples of literary gossip and discuss how to transform scandal into engaging fiction. Is living well- and writing well-the best revenge?

"So what did you learn Horace?"

"Yon Shacochis is a scallywag."

"Yup. What else?"

"Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing."

"You're bluffing, Horace. You didn't learn that from B.S."

"Geraldo Rivera is Kurt Vonnegut's ex-son in law."

"Now you're talking my language. What's the scoop on Bobby himself? How many brewskis?"

Horace's Od(e)ious Gossip Column

Horace once again rushes out from the tool shed: “Neither your wife, nor your son, desires your recovery; all your neighbors, acquaintances, nay the very boys and girls hate you. Do you wonder that no one tenders you the affection which you do not merit, since you prefer your money to everything else? If you think to retain, and preserve as friends, the relations which nature gives you, without taking any pains; wretch that you are, you lose your labor equally, as if any one should train an ass…”

“What do you say, Horace?”

“I verily say, that Hudson is the father of Anna Nicole Smiths’s infant daughter. So be obedient to the rein, and run in the Campus. Finally, let there be some end to your search; and, as your riches increase, be in less dread of poverty; and begin to cease from your toil, that being acquired which you coveted: nor do as did one Umidius (it is no tedious story), who was so rich that he measured his money, so sordid that he never clothed him self any better than a slave; and, even to his last moments, was in dread lest want of bread should oppress him: but his freed-woman, the bravest of all the daughters of Tyndarus, cut him in two with a hatchet.”

“Hudson?”

“”It’s looking that way.”

Tasting the Sweet Smell of Success - Hudson and Homer Hit the Oscars

So Hudson comes in with this Hangdog expression.

“Where’ve you been?” I ask. He didn’t come in when called last night.

“On the town with Horace.”

“Hudson and Horace!” Dead Beat cannot think of a worse combination.

“Where?”

“Oscar parties. Marty Scorsese, Vanity Fair, you know.”

“No, I don’t know Hudson. Dead Beat has never been to the Oscars, Dead Beat has never even been to an Oscar party, Dead Beat has never really been to a party in fact, Dead Beat….”

“Leave it out Dad! You got nominated for an Irish Blog Award, didn’t you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s like I was saying to Marty at the party….”

“Marty at the party, Hudson?”

“Yeah, Scorsie. I was telling Scorsie….”

“Martin Scorsese?”

“To you, Dead Beat, to you…. Anyway there Horace and I are, gridlocked, Gwyneth, Tom, Nicole, Leonardo, Cate, Kate, you know how it is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“So streets in a two-block circumference of Morton's were closed off by police, there are three fire engines in attendance since stars tend to flout the no-smoking laws….”

“You didn’t Hudson?”

“One cigar, Dad, maybe two, three at the most. Anyway Madonna is hitching up her skirt and placing a wine glass between her thighs, Dame Helen Mirren is missing, probably sitting in the toilet, staring at her Oscar and talking to it….”
“Get to the point, Hudson.”

“There is no point, Dad. These are the Oscars we are talking about. I was down at the grand Beverly Hills Hotel when a stream of expensively-wrapped packages arrived culminating in a planet-sized floral bouquet, vast enough for its aroma to linger after it had been dispatched upstairs. "What is that amazing smell?," Horace asked the receptionist. "It's the smell of success, the sweet smell of success." I have made it, Dad, Hudson has tasted the sweet smell of success.”

Horace's Gossip Column: Maud Gonne Checks Out of Rehab

Horace again, Dead Beat's Gossip Columnist, storming out of the tool shed, paper in hand.

"I offer this. Be careful what you say and to whom, about whom. Run from a curious man he'll love telling others. Secrets that you trust to open ears won't be well kept. And once a word escpaes, it flies. You can't recall it..."

"What you got this time, Horace?"

"More to tell on Maud Gonne."

"Horace, Horace, Horace, I told you already it better be juicy. None of this ancient folklore. W. B. Yeats pining for her and all that."

"She shaved her head. She just checked out of rehab."

Dead Beat rushes over, throws his arms around him in delight. "You might just keep the job, Horace. You might just." Dead Beat steps back swiftly, holds his nose. " One thing though: You got to take a bath."

Maud Gonne Loses Her Underwear - Horace's First Gossip Column

So Horace comes bounding out of Dead Beat's tool shed.

"I have it. I have it," he screams waving a sheet of paper above his head.

"What do you have" D.B. asks him, "apart from a major case of dementia?"

"My first literary gossip column sang of news, as will my very last. I did well and have a practice sword to prove it."

"Let's have a look," I say snatching it from his hand.

"At the start of 1898, 15yo James A Joyce (JAJ) was just coming down from a year of intense Catholic religious fervor, and turning just as passionately against the Church. He was probably working on a (lost) notebook of poems, titled Moods, and feeling very fin de siècle: "The spectacle of the world... filled him with such sudden despair as could be assuaged only by melancholy versifying":

I have consorted with vulgarity

And am indelibly marked with its fell kiss,

Meanly I lived upon casual charity

Eagerly drinking of the dregs of bliss.

Meanwhile 32 yo William Butler Yeats spent most of the winter of 1897-98 in London (where he'd taken an apartment in 1896, in order finally to lose his virginity) hosting a regular Monday night salon for his literary friends, taking hashish pills and pursuing magickal researches with the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Meanwhile Lady Agusta Gregory (who surely had secret designs on WBY though she was 13 years his senior) met with Maud Gonne who WBY was sweet on and jealously said, "instead of beauty I saw a death's head".

Off Maud goes to Paris and Yeats returned to London where he took mescaline-- supplied by Havelock Ellis-- trying to achieve astral communication with Maud in Paris.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats had made no secret that Maud was his muse-- someone described the spectacle they presented on the street: "It is Maud Gonne and the Poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-colored Great Dane-- Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda."

But on 08 Dec 1898, after acknowledging their 'spiritual marriage' (and kissing him for the first time!) Maud traumatized WBY by finally telling him about her eight-year relationship with Millevoye, and of their two children (an infant son had died in 1891). On 18 Dec WBY would nonetheless propose to her, again, but she refused again: "I have a horror and terror of physical love."

Maud then returned to Paris, and WBY slunk off to Sligo, taking the hashish pills he relied on, to finish his new book of poems, The Wind Among the Reeds."

"Thats it, Horace? Your first Literary Gossip Column?"

"To some my satire seems too cutting, so extreme it violates the law..."

"It violates something that's for sure," I tell him. "Listen Horace, this is meant to be gossip, you know up to the minute slander. Jeez, Horace, Yeats is dead!"

"What exactly do you want Dead Beat?"

"Horace, Horace, Horace, at least Maud Gonne swinging her legs out of a taxi without her underwear on."

Horace Requests To Become Dead Beat's New Gossip Columnist

So Horace runs out of the tool shed screaming bloody murder:

"This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they never are inclined to sing when they are asked, [but] unasked, they never desist. Tigellius, that Sardinian, had this [fault]. Had Caesar, who could have forced him to compliance, besought him on account of his father’s friendship and his own, he would have had no success; if he himself was disposed, he would chant lo Bacche over and over, from the beginning of an entertainment to the very conclusion of it; one while at the deepest pitch of his voice, at another time with that which answers to the highest string of the tetrachord. There was nothing uniform in that fellow; frequently would he run along, as one flying from an enemy; more frequently [he walked] as if he bore [in procession] the sacrifice of Juno: he had often two hundred slaves, often but ten: one while talking of kings and potentates, every thing that was magnificent; at another–"Let me have a three-legged table, and a cellar of clean salt, and a gown which, though coarse, may be sufficient to keep out the cold.” Had you given ten hundred thousand sesterces to this moderate man who was content with such small matters, in five days’ time there would be nothing in his bags. He sat up at nights, [even] to day-light; he snored out all the day. Never was there anything so inconsistent with itself. Now some person may say to me, “What are you? Have you no faults?” Yes, others; but others, and perhaps of a less culpable nature...."

"What are you trying to say Horace?' I ask him.

"Dead Beat, can I be your gossip columnist?"

"Horace, old friend, old very old friend, Dead Beat does not stoop so low to gossip mongering."

Horace stomps up and down, positively fumes:

"When Maenius railed at Novius in his absence: “Hark ye,” says a certain person, “are you ignorant of yourself? or do you think to impose yourself upon us a person we do not know?” “As for me, I forgive myself,” quoth Maenius. This is a foolish and impious self-love, and worthy to be stigmatized. .."

"Okay, okay, you win, Horace. You can be Dead Beat's new official Gossip Columnist."

"Dead Beat, but that you are so good, that no man can be better; but he is your friend; but an immense genius is concealed under this unpolished person of his..."

"Shut up already!"

D.B. and Dead Beat Thrash It Out

It's one thing to have Horace berating you for "reforming" your writings, but it's altogether another thing when you start berating yourself. Conversation went a little like this.

"So Dead Beat, has Horace got a point? Too much time spent rewriting and not enough time "writing something of promise"?"

"Sit on it D.B. what would you know?"

"Well maybe you can overwrite something, know what I'm saying?"

"Not really."

"You know spend too much time going back over it - worrying it to death."

"You wish. The problem with you D.B. is that you don't rewrite enough. Making do with something that is just not quite there yet. Figuring out what the story really is and then how best to tell it - That's what rewriting is all about."

"I rewrite!"

"Too much time in the shed with Horace talking *****"

"Dead Beat, you're cruel."

"The truth hurts D. B. That's the long and the short of it."

Horace - As Happy As A Pig In Sh**e

Horace is happy as a pig in sh**e in Dead Beat's tool shed. He bursts out occasionally spouting off some nonsense or other then disappears back in. I throw him a handful of Hudson's leftovers. He nearly bites my hand off.

This morning he flings open the back door and shouts in:

"Happy is Fannius, with immortals classed,
His bust and bookcase canonized at last,
While, as for me, none reads the things I write.
Loath as I am in public to recite,
Knowing that satire finds small favour, since
Most men want whipping, and who want it, wince."

"How do you like your eggs?" I shout after him as he scurries away.

Dead Beat Falls Prey to the Satires of Horace.

Kesey took off - and what with the relatives safely back in Ireland Dead Beat thought it was back to normal. He had finished a draft of a novel before Christmas and was waiting on some feedback, and so he got on with rewriting a children's novel he has been working on (or more like working on and off on). Anyway Dead Beat thought he would return to his rewrite and all thoughts of Kesy and his Merry Pranksters disappeared like a sinking psychedelic bus in a western swamp.

But no it was not to be - there I am ensconced in rewriting once again when who wanders in uninvited but Horace. Yes that Horace! Gave up all the gladiatorial work so that he could tramp around the country and ended up finally on my doorstep.

"Shoo!" I shooed.

But Horace is no pushover, pig-headed really. Will not be shooed. Starts berating me infact:


"Dead Beat, You write so seldom, as not to call for parchment four times in
the year, busied in reforming your writings, yet are you angry
with yourself, that indulging in wine and sleep you produce
nothing worthy to be the subject of conversation. What will be
the consequence? But you took refuge here, it seems, at the very
celebration of the Saturnalia, out of sobriety. Dictate therefore
something worthy of your promises; begin."

Then he skulks off - takes up residence in my tool shed.

Too busied in reforming my writings!!
Dictate therefore something worthy of my promises!!

Be gone fool!