At last, something to do for Halloween!

So many options for Halloween here in the Paris of the South -- dinners, parties, dances -- I'm in a quandary. It used to be so simple: there was the Freakers Ball, a Halloween party we counter-culture types threw for ourselves at various spots around the city, after it became too large to fit in anyone's home. Costumes, rock 'n' roll, lots of dancing ... that kind of party.

But that was then. By the late 80s, there were so many of us, and we were so various, and in various conditions of life (e.g. kids! wow!), that no one event could accommodate us all. And it's been that way since. Could there ever be something that would bring us all together again?

I think I've found it! Let's party with these folks:

Pastor Marc Grizzard claims the King James version of the Bible is the only true word of God, and that all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word.

On Halloween night, Grizzard and the 14 members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will set fire to other versions of the scripture, as well as music and books by Christian authors.

“We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic,” Pastor Grizzard said.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people."

All other religious or Christian texts are sacreligious, the pastor insists. The list of books being burned will include works written by "a lot of different authors who we consider heretics, such as Billy Graham, Rick Warren… the list goes on and on,” Pastor Grizzard said.

Also on the pastor's list of heretical authors — Mother Teresa, according to a full list that was previously available at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church's Web site. The Church's Web site — which is no longer available — calls the event 'Burning Perversions of God's Word,' and urges parishioners to "come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan's bibles."

Yeah, that sounds like great fun! And it's just up the road in Canton!

Gary Farber over at Amygdala has all the details, and managed to capture some of the now-missing website, so do check his post out.

See you there! And, er, you might not want to wear that cool Devil costume. Really.

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( A tip o' the hat to Political Animal Steve Benen)

Wordplay this week: Kathryn Stripling Byer

Early last spring the Asheville Art Museum featured a reading by Kathryn Stripling Byer (whom I've known as "Kay" since our days, some forty years ago now, in Greensboro). Kay gave a fine reading, of course (she's not North Carolina's Poet Laureate for nothing), and even persuaded her audience to provide some useful questions. This week's show includes both the reading and the dialogue which followed it.

She may have been born in the flatlands of Georgia, but she's been in the mountains since 1968, and has long since delved far enough into the character of the Appalachian highlands as an ecology, and as a culture, to be almost a native - to know that land, in fact, having come to it from the outside, better, or at least more consciously, than most natives ever will.

When she's not on the road as laureate, she somehow finds time to post to not one, but two, blogs, and also works with the NC Arts Council to provide the laureate's features on its site. The state certainly did well for itself when it chose her for the laureateship; I'd wager she's been the most active advocate for poetry that we've ever had in that position. You go, girl.

She's also - or primarily - the author of The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), Wildwood Flower (1992), Black Shawl (1998), Catching Light (2002), and Coming to Rest (2006). You'll find some of her work here, here, and here. There's a useful article on her work by Sam Pestridge in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

The context for her reading was provided by a small show featuring work by an early Asheville photographer I did not know, one Nace (or Ignatius Watsworth) Brock*, whose life spanned the years 1866 to 1950. He had been active in the city back in the early part of the last century, and had a studio downtown for many years. Kay, whose imagination has collaborated with images created by photographers before, refers to the exhibit several times during her reading.

Musically, the show opens with Asheville's own Braidstream performing the English classic "Greensleeves," from their 2000 release On the Wing. The first break features Al Petteway, another artist translated to these mountains, playing the traditional Scottish tune "The West Wind," from his 1994 release Whispering Stones. Pentangle's 1989 A Maid That's Deep in Love** provided the Child ballad "Cruel Sister" at the second break, and I closed the show with "Winds of the Past," a song by the masterful custodian of those ballads, Betty Smith.

Here's the link to the show. Enjoy.


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* There aren't many images by Brock out in the wilds of the internet, so far. He seems to have specialized in landscapes of the mountains, and in the formal portraiture which was often the bread and butter of his calling. The landscapes that have survived use light well, and convey a certain balance and structure in the world.

Even in that period, as anyone who's read Look Homeward, Angel will know, Asheville had a thriving tourist industry, and it provided a considerable market for landscape studies of its surrounding terrain as "scenery." It also supported a thriving postcard business, which paid photographers for their images, and then sold their work locally and regionally.

The Japanese photographer George Masa (1881 – 1933, born Masahara Iizuka in Japan), whose work filmmaker Paul Bonesteel explored in his 2002 The Mystery of George Masa, would have been active at roughly the same time as Brock. Given the size of Asheville in those days, they likely knew one another; perhaps they compared exposure notes, or the results of their inevitable experiments with the evolving chemistry of making images with silver emulsions.

** A Maid That's Deep in Love was a US release on Shanachie; "Cruel Sister" appeared on the British album named for the song in 1970.

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31 December update: Fixed a couple of typos and/or misspellings. Duh. I must have been writing after too much holiday cheer.

Photographic Project now on Flickr

I've put some of the photos from the 1977-8 Asheville Area Photographic Project up on Flickr. Enjoy. I'll try to scan some more prints over the next few weeks to fill the collection out.

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Update: I'll also be adding to the photo captions; right now they're very bare-bones.

Another return: Lee Ann Brown & Company

One of the transforming facts in my life over the last few years has been the arrival of the poet Lee Ann Brown, her husband Tony Torn, and their young daughter Miranda, on the Asheville scene. Lee Ann grew up in Charlotte, but went to Brown for university and has been active in the New York poetry scene for more than a decade since. She has her own press, Tender Buttons, and has published experimental women poets like Bernadette Mayer, Lisa Jarnot, and Laynie Browne; she's published, with other houses, two significant collections of her own, Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything. Lee Ann's always liked the mountains, so when she and Tony decided to marry, they chose Hot Springs, just down the river in Madison County, as the location for the ceremony. Now they've bought a house in the Little Pine community, and plan to live there, going forward, as much as they can manage, given commitments of career, etc., otherwise. Lee Ann has brought her enthusiasm and energy to local poetry programs, like those at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center (see the link on the right), and has also maintained, thankfully, relationships with friends elsewhere - who sometimes come to visit. Since March, for instance, Lisa Jarnot , Vancouver poet Peter Culley, and Laynie Browne, author of the new Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, have all made their ways across the mountains to Lee Ann's and Tony's - and into Asheville. By the simple act of becoming a local presence, with all her intelligence and energy, Lee Ann has extended the horizons of those here, myself included, who are actively engaged with the work (and play) of poetry.

Lee Ann and Tony have returned to New York for awhile to pursue livelihoods in the city's universities and theaters, so we'll miss them. I'll post more another day, no doubt, about Lee Ann's work, and the work of the poets she's published, but for now I'd just like to say thanks to her for all she's done to open up the land of sky.

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Updated January 11, 2007, to insert a word inadvertently omitted from a phrase.