"The past sure is tense"

Haven't listened to Capt. Beefheart in a decade or two, but then I stumbled on a 2 CD anthology, THE DUST BLOWS FORWARD, put it on and was blown backward into the present. The recent upheaval of the bookstore move also unearthed this old issue of Rolling Stone reproduced here.

Beefheart is a great American poet, and his delivery is often perfect.

Meanwhile, I'm responding here to a question by Kirby Olson from the Silliman blog comment line, just so I don't clog up that blog any more than necessary.

To wit:

Kirby Olson said...
Bill borneman, could you give more details from your memory on the ensuing conversation that took place? Who was there, and what was the general buzz?Ron's talk is so dense that delivered orally it must have been almost impossible to follow. I read it twice, slowing way the heck down and lingering over sentences, and still I don't think I understand it.What did people get from that night?

Kirby: I didn't get much out of either talk that night, but reading Ron's response today, I think he was right on. Yes, this stuff is dense. It takes a while to become acquainted with the form of discourse taking place, but today it seems pretty lucid to me. Silliman went a bit over the top with his urination metaphor, but then his point was that Baudrillard was completely awash in his metaphorical discourse while presenting it as philosophical writing. I think most people left the auditorium shaking their heads, wondering what they had witnessed.

Then Kirby says:

At any rate I wonder what people said in Montana in 1989. I take it most people were socialists? I've only been in Missoula once -- on a road tripp -- had a baked potato and a rainbow trout at a very good restaurant for 4.95 in about 1985.Hard to imagine many socialists in that place, but perhaps the university milieu was different. I thought that Montana was kind of Heideggerian at least in its philosophy department.

Bill: No, there were very few socialists in the audience. The guy who set up the whole presentation was in Missoula only very briefly and was something of an anomaly. The whole idea of bringing in Silliman as a respondent was unusual in itself and fairly subversive. And Eugene Chadbourne as the "entertainment?" It was all kind of crazy.

The two major philosophers to teach at Missoula are Henry Bugbee and Albert Borgmann. The latter is indeed a Heideggerian; the former a mystico-existentialist about whom I wrote an essay in the anthology WRITING MONTANA.

*

Finally, I'm wondering this. How can someone be both a surrealist and a Lutheran? I myself was raised as a Lutheran in a small farming community in northern Illinois. I lost my faith way early, when I was 12 or 14. Subsequently, I discovered Surrealism, along with any number of --isms, but it seems implausible to shelter one cranium under the two disparate umbrellas of Surrealism and Lutheranism. Initially, I thought you might be joking, but it seems you are completely sincere. How can this be?