My paint stained pants were made in Bangladesh. They are too short and sexy for worshipers of Allah to wear, but excellent for export. Our balance of payments with countries like Bangladesh leaves much to be desired.

My shoes are from Taiwan, and my watch was made in Switzerland. A most efficient people, the Swiss. Think of the cuckoo clock.

The medications I take are mostly from Germany.

I’ll go to the studio and work on paintings whose ground is French Arches Buff Paper, all cotton rag. The best!

The subject of these paintings? The American landscape of course. Think I’ll put a rainbow in the sky – or not.

*Rodney King

What Boys Paint, installation view, polymer paint on canvas, oil paint and dry pigment on handmade rice paper (from Thailand)

William Dunlap

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The so-called doo-wop singers were emerging. This acapella gathering of young men owed a debt to the rather bland barbershop quartets of the vaudeville era. Yet, they brought something more significant to the form. The same rich harmony but with finger-popping style!

These young men, more often than not of Italian lineage, helped create a music that was a synthesis of lyrics, rhythm and harmony. Plus, the girls loved them which was their raison d’etre, a point made evident in the following decades with the ever-growing sales of guitars and a proliferation of young men who played them.

The doo-wop singers broke their music down into rhythm and harmony and sent it back with a rich dose of something that was desperately needed, Soul.

These two forms of musical expression did not so much clash as morph into one another, with the help of AM radio airplay, travel, and exposure to recordings of so called “race music” from the other side of the tracks. Every band covering rhythm and blues tunes was sure to include the occasional refrain that could be traced back to doo-wop, in one form of the other.

One memorable event occurred in the fall of 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi. After the ballgame parties were something of a tradition. The Heidelberg Hotel in downtown Jackson had the world’s smallest but fastest elevator plus two big event halls – the Olympic Room, and the Victory Room.

For the price of two dollars a head, they would let you into this dark, smoke-filled, unseasonably hot and sweaty party, – or hatchet fight as these events came to be affectionately called by the bands who played them and the patrons who attended. Both were loyal, drunk and seldom disappointed. There was always a cash bar, even though the State of Mississippi was officially dry.

The two college football teams who played one another earlier in the evening in Memorial Stadium were of little import. It was the gathering of the populous at this after the ballgame affair that is still remembered for the inventive and inspired liberty taken with the lyrics of a particular song.

The drummer would be installed on a riser some eight feet above the crowd, which put him at serious risk of contact smoke inhalation, but with a prime view of the crowd and the fights that were sure to break out over whiskey, women, or the two rival schools that had faced off earlier in the day. No matter what, the drummer was to make sure the beat continued, preferably on two and four. The party was not to stop!

It was under these conditions that the band’s horn section, with nothing else to do, began to clap in the background and sing, “Shabba deewop a showba dahway.” Which, within the din, sounded for all the world like, “chop ya dick off and throw it away.” It is lost to history as to who initiated this alliteration, but it fit! So, the band began singing that refrain instead, and so did everyone else in the room. Men, women, bartenders, bandmates, all gleefully singing and shouting, “Chop ya dick off, and throw it away.” A phrase so absurd and over-the-top that it became irresistible.

Now, this deserves a deeper look. What was one to make of this spontaneous, hypnotic, repetitive phrase that so captured the zeitgeist of the moment? Had this existential description of an act of self-emasculation elevated a simple tribal dance song to a throbbing wish? The fulfillment of such would be quite devastating. Why would anyone, even in mid-century Mississippi, profess to sever and then jettison the only possession really worth having, namely the penis? This question would go unanswered.

Afterall, Lorena Bobbitt’s marital act of retaliation loomed large and well off into the future.

Alligator Swale, oil and dry pigment on rag paper, 28.5x39.5” 2026

William Dunlap

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Forsythia is a harbinger of spring and a welcome one. Its yellow flower can be forced during the long winter with the help of dry heat and light. It was named for, but not discovered by, the famed Scottish horticulturist, William Forsythe (1737-1804). This plant fairly took Europe and the British Isles by storm. It is the first flowering plant to be seen come spring in North America, (with the exception of the tiny crocus which is often overlooked beneath ones feet.) Forsythia is hard to kill or control, but we try.

And then there is the work of Gertrude Jekyll, Capability Brown, and others too numerous to name. Thanks to rich soil and a benign climate, the English are natural gardeners. They plant, prune, and pontificate. The BBC once promoted a program about the plants and ecosystem of the hedgerow, along with those who tended it and thrived within. (Hail the nocturnal hedgehog.) Some thought it peculiar and funny and a precursor to Monty Python. Others consider it sacred, and any criticism a heresy.

One cannot drive through the English countryside without seeing the care taken by the population for the smallest growing thing.

This is the very definition of character.

William Dunlap

Front Fields – Walker Hounds, oil paint and dry pigment on rag paper, 24x32”

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Emery had never owned a pick-up truck, or a bass boat, or a double-wide mobile home. He did not use tobacco – neither smokeless, pipe, cigar, or roll your own. He especially eschewed those new-fangled, ready-rolled, cigarettes that came in a crush proof box and were filtered against certain death.

He had played wide receiver on his college football team and was voted all conference his senior year. He had never read Gone with the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird for that matter, but had seen the movies which provided more than enough of the Southern stereotype for generations.

He did not drink beer or bourbon, but preferred a good single malt scotch such as Talisker, neat with water back. So, he may be under the influence of the Scots way of doing things after all. The stories of the Highlands and the fiction of Sir Walter Scott can leave a strong imprint. But if so, it’s chivalry in a bottle and that is by far the best sort.

So, what kind of Southerner was Emery anyway?

As for the ubiquitous Confederate battle flag, he never took it seriously. He came to believe that every time someone waved it, and that was quite often, you best reach for your wallet to make sure you still had one.

There is a little rebel in us all, he thought, and while that part of one’s persona could do with a proper symbol, the red, white, and blue with crossed stars is not it. That battle flag has been efficiently sullied for the foreseeable future. As the novelist and historian Shelby Foote said, “It has been picked up and waived by people who should not be allowed within one-hundred feet of it.” Maybe so, but Emery was not convinced. It might be a generational thing.

His sense of irony was engaged at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center when he saw all the state flags hanging in its grand Hall of States. Mississippi’s flag proudly bore the Confederate battle flag in its upper left-hand corner, as it had since 1890. Of late, it has morphed into a magnolia. Who knows how long that will last?

His irony was replaced with disgust when he saw the Confederate battle flag being carried and waved about by those self-same people Mr. Foote had so accurately described. They were up to no good when they forcibly entered and defiled the Capitol of the United States on January 6, 2021.

So, what kind of Southerner is this who does not rally around the flag, as the song commands? Well, just maybe Emery is a Southerner of the future. One who readily admits that the Civil War really happened, but then so did Slavery. And in all likelihood, we would not have had one without of the other.

As it turns out, if those fire-eating secessionists had decided to stay in the Union and simply elect the same members of Congress over and over again, they could have gotten most of what they wanted through seniority, and saved some hundreds of thousands of lives, but that was not to be.

Compromise is never the Southerner’s way, especially for those who read Sir Walter Scott’s fiction and take it for fact.

William Dunlap

Narcissus Reflects as Audubon’s Osprey Flies Away, oil paint and graphite on rag paper, 42” x 61”

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“I don’t mind dying. Just give me fifteen minutes to draw a crowd,” was the way he often introduced himself. Especially to those he thought might be familiar with his work.

“You be so ugly you make a freight train take a dirt road,” or “Pretty is as pretty does,” he said to a long time paramour who hovered nearby and dutifully wrote down everything he said, noting its context as well.

Her name was Mildred Sheen and she was young, strong, determined, and alert. She was his Boswell, but with privileges. She seemed to know intuitively that it was all an act, a redneck ruse to conceal the fact that Hiram Littlejohn was a brilliant and bonafide intellectual. He was a thinker of big thoughts, a purveyor of Christian principles, a polymath whose essays on Art and Life appeared regularly in the supplement to the Whole Earth Review, the pseudo-intellectual, smarty-pants publication, Du Jour.

He had graduated Harvard at age fourteen and Yale at sixteen, all the while monitoring philosophy classes at MIT and Columbia. He refused to attend any of his graduations and instead signed on as a hand on a ranch in Idaho.

There he mastered the rodeo protocols of riding, roping, and chewing tobacco. He won several cutting horse competitions, and soon learned to whisper, not just to the horses but to the other ranch hands as well. Folks had to lean in to hear his wisdom. Everyone wanted to have their picture taken with him, to stand close, to touch him. Hiram reveled in the attention.

Mildred stayed in a camper near the edge of the property and followed him on foot, or on a bicycle so as to continue her devoted chronicling of everything Hiram said, and most of what he did. She had learned that crucial thing women must master in order to survive in the company of men, how to appear invisible. Her time would come. She had but to wait. Hiram was sure to implode, as all egoists do.

She had so far compiled some nine, unedited volumes of Hiram’s thoughts, movements, and utterances. It was a feat unmatched in the history of journaling. Mildred owned Hiram and she knew it. If he had a future, a life after death, it would be through her definition of him. He would only be remembered by her writing. Now, what to do with it? The American myth of the lone assassin was the direction in which he was headed. It seemed inevitable

Then he asked her to marry him, and she did. Mildred took the vows, “…in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part,” seriously, and continued to chronicle his every move and sentence.

Hiram took many medications. Some of them prescribed, others just to get high. He also self-medicated and used an assortment of illegal substances that did not mix well. He became something of a human petri dish. He also had a .30-06 rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. His skin darkened. He lost eyesight and weight and began to physically shrink. He died suddenly at forty-four, never having fired the rifle. All the children were safe to attend school.

Mildred edited the now fourteen volumes down to one and found a high end publisher. Her Wit, Wisdom, and Genius of Hiram sold millions. He came to life on the page. She had him. All of him, and soon began the sequel.

She had not spent a penny of the very generous advance the publisher provided and continued to live in the camper. It is what Hiram would have wanted.

William Dunlap

The Bounty and Burden of History, polymer paint on canvas, 68”x94”

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Maypops are that peculiar vine that grows near the stands of plums and whose flower produced an edible fruit. Its leaves and stems are poisonous. The charm of the maypop is matched, if not exceeded, by the bulbous, tennis-ball sized growth that, when stepped on with just the right force, produced a loud Pop! What joy!

This was part of the thrill of a rural childhood in the Hill Country of North Mississippi. It’s all true and was all we had. That, along with June bugs flying circles around us tethered by a thread we’d tied to one leg, and fruit jars filled with lightning bugs who come out at twilight.

Those things are all gone now. Progress in the form of right-of-way grooming and DDT are the culprits.

Collecting the plums always came with the warning, “You children look out for snakes!” The women shouted from the car which was parked nearby with the windows rolled down and doors opened while they fanned themselves and drank iced water from a fruit jar.

The children picked the ripe plums that would soon be blanched and put up in jars to make plum jelly. The green ones would make you sick, sick, sick. Just ask General R. E. Lee who partook of yet to ripen plums on his way to Gettysburg, and we all know how that turned out.

If the eight or so Plantagenet (1154-1485 AD) Kings of England or their subjects ever ate plums, it is lost to recorded history. They had names like Geoffrey, Henry, Richard, John, and Edward. Some were good, some not so. They were however, most war-like with conflicts that could last as long as one-hundred years, and were occasionally even about flowers. In particular, Roses! Though never about fruit.

After the Battle of Boswoth Field, when Richard III lost his head, the Plantagenets were replaced by the Tudors and their most literate apologist, William Shakespeare.

And all the while, wild plums and maypops were thriving in the New World, waiting to be discovered.

William Dunlap

Front Fields-Walker Hounds, oil paint and dry pigment on rag paper, 24x32”

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“I played in the first football game I ever saw,” he confided.

In one poem he perfectly conveyed the frustrations and acquiescence of a middle-aged man lying on the sand, his imagination captivated by a nubile young woman walking out of the water.

“She towed sex in her wake,” he wrote.

He was impatient with the changes coming to our mid-twentieth century world, and often said so. He was something of an amateur sociologist, as all poets are. On one drive into town he pointed to a group of three, side-by-side domiciles and read their history accurately. An old man and his wife, both long dead now, had built the two-story dogtrot. Its sides had never known a drop of paint. Now unoccupied, it was used to store hay and outdated farm implements. Next door sat a ranch-style brick house built by their son. He worked for a salary and benefits in a factory in town. Beside the brick house sat a double-wide mobile home, bought for their daughter, a high school cheerleader who had managed to get herself pregnant her senior year. She and her husband were happy enough.

The poet characterized these Southerners with disposable income from wages and credit, as “bass boat rich.” For the first time in generations they took vacations and bought second homes.

Among them were the beach people – those who slept with the windows open in their two-week ocean-view rental in order to catch the salt air and hear the waves break on the shore. There is always a breeze in their lives.

The next demographically measured group were the mountain people. They are the ones who seek the higher elevations, walk the trails and the paths to glimpse the gorge views so often obscured by the fog or the clouds they have climbed above. Always in search of the peaks. Their A-frame time-shared chalet faces the ski slopes, empty this time of year except for the wild flowers which grow in profusion.

Those who changed the least were the farm people. It is generally mid-summer after their crops are laid by – and hot, hot, hot. Too hot to do much of anything but sit on the porch, drink iced-tea, and fan themselves. They are known to gather, and sing, and play musical instruments handed down from one generation to the next – guitar, fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, and mouth harp.

These farm folk think about their gardens and the coming canning season, and tell each other time-worn tales that are embellished and often downright fictions. But tall tales are compelling, and one must keep in mind that tradition is more important than truth. There is always someone there on the porch willing to cut hair.

These folk fear the ocean and don’t trust the mountains or the summer people who come here and clog their roads. They remain the same, year after year. However, their children will go off to college and become either beach or mountain people, or both. And occasionally when home, they will pick up the old instruments and play, because they can.

They will talk and tell stories to anyone who will listen.

They will abide.

Agri Building & Bird Dog, oil paint and dry pigment on rag paper, 22” x 30”

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Since he could afford it, he bought paper by the roll. Forty-eight inches by ten yards of Rives BFK usually, sometimes Arches buff. Both were products of France and one-hundred per cent cotton rag – a most forgiving surface on which to work.

He first became acquainted with this high quality paper when making prints. Both lithography and intaglio are traditional processes where the image often looks better on the inked surface than on the paper. The printing process employs an oil-based ink pressed onto a damp Rives BFK sheet. The transfer is crucial. Sometimes a bit of magic occurs.

A print can be sculptural and graphic simultaneously, a mesmerizing transformation of which he became enormously enamored. He soon began to use Silver paper to affect a similarity with the inked plate. He often painted back into the prints to make them more presentable for critique or just for the hell of it. Turns out there is a long tradition of hand-coloring prints.

With its illusion to deep space and volume, to say nothing of the color possibilities, our young aspiring artist thought painting to be the most elevated and elusive of the visual arts. Sculpture came easy, and while competent enough he soon realized he was doing little more than making expensive doorstops. His prints were well-received and opened many doors for him, but painting was something he aspired to. He had never taken a course in painting except for early exposure to watercolor, which is a most unforgiving medium. Watercolor did however encompass drawing, painting, a knowledge of the materials, and flew in the face of his teachers who were steeped in Abstract Expressionist ethos. They actually thought a nineteen-year-old could express himself in some overt and timeless way. He recalled seeing a Jackson Pollack retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum that, at long last made complete sense. The scale of the paintings was unexpected and duly noted. He never got over it. Scale was one of Modernisms greatest re-gifts to the art world. It made all the difference. “If you can’t make it good, make it big,” as one art world wag stated.

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As for the prints, delicate oil washes could be utilized like watercolor to enliven the images. This soon led to works on paper and a mixed media process employing Prisma colors, dry pigment, oil paint, and graphite. Also employed was a new product on the market – oil pastels.

Although the standard methods and materials books often warned that oil paint on paper was to be avoided at all cost and would decompose before the check cleared. This was proved to be wrong. Our young artist turned researcher found 15th century oil studies on paper that held up very well indeed. And more recently, the Hudson River school painters often employed oil paint on paper for preliminary studies. These predictors of eminent disaster were generically written by people who saw no problem with rabbit skin glue as a sizing on canvas before applying gesso, a traditional ground on which oil paintings would crack and craze after only a few years.

Thus was born a healthy suspicion of art critics and scholars, especially those who had never made a painting. This skepticism would prove useful as he progressed in his chosen profession.

He recalled a transformative evening at his art school. Liquitex was relatively new to the art world and the company hired a group of down and out itinerate painters to promote the brand. They would travel around and demonstrate the properties of this new water-based medium. Polymer or acrylic replaced linseed oil as a molecular binder for the pigment. Big Science comes to Art!

This new medium could mimic oil paint, watercolor, even plaster of Paris, and would not crack and craze like oil paint. Whether it would last and remain colorfast for five-hundred years was yet to be determined.

The Liquitex demonstrator promised to drink the water used to clean his brushes and thereby proving the lack of toxicity in this product. Indeed, he did drink the water, but as it turned out this was not the only thing he’d had to drink – but that’s another story.

What became clear was that this medium was perfect for the sensibilities of our young artist, who was impatient with oil paint which sometimes took weeks to dry. Polymer paint dried instantly, and multiple glazes could be applied quickly and directly. A few drops of polymer medium into watercolor and voilà, you had a rich glaze to apply that was not unlike egg tempera. The possibility seemed limitless!

These two processes, thin oil washes on rag paper and polymer paint on any canvas would serve him well. What ensued was a series of paintings that quoted from old masters. Rembrandt’s some seventy odd self-portraits were a starting point, and our young initiate taught himself to paint by emulating and always losing to these old masters whose paintings were made in their time using a relatively newfangled medium, oil paint.

The process of making a painting was broken down in a rather large, tongue-in-cheek titled canvas, Learn to Paint like Rembrandt in Three Easy Steps. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was not easy and there were considerably more than three steps, but it was a start.

Our young initiate learned early on that it was not enough to make a painting. The artist must also make an audience for that painting. He had observed that some artists made their work precious by disappearing, leaving the fray and playing hard to get. Others showed their work everywhere and seemed to be ubiquitous. Flooding the zone, so to speak.

He identified with this latter approach and began to show his work everywhere – flea markets, libraries, service stations, and people’s homes. In the early days it was not unusual for a frame to cost more than the art itself. This irony was not lost on our young artist, and he realized that so much art training taught the student artist nothing more than how to teach. No one seemed to acknowledge the fact that a working artist was a small business person.

The whole university-based art establishment seemed to be operating on Hyram Williams’ edict the “there was nothing wrong with selling a painting but there was something slightly wrong with making a painting to sell.” Andy Warhol would change all of that.

Pass the opium pipe!

Ghost Dog and Birds of a Feather, polymer paint and dry pigment on canvas, 34”x68”

William Dunlap

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He had lost books along the way, usually by loaning them or simply misplacing them, but he had never consciously thrown a book away. It seemed an act of heresy.

To be in the book was his ambition – his goal as an artist. But would he write them? Never, that is, until he did.

His choice of a profession seemed obvious. He would become a librarian, and he studied something called a Library Science at the University of Nebraska.

In the late 19^th century, public libraries were all the rage. Upon his death, philanthropist and politician Samuel J. Tilden left several-million dollars toward the building of a free public library for New York City. It now has some ninety-two locations and over 53 million items available for loan. This, the second largest library in the nation, serves more than eighteen million people and represents an idea whose time had come.

It was to a regional library that he applied, and was granted an interview. The Middleburg Virginia Library and Sporting Museum is a branch of the Louden County system, contains countless volumes, and a forgiving exhibition space. Some forty miles west of Washington, D.C., this is horse country. The library reflects that fact. On the day of his interview, an exhibit of Sir Alfred Munnings’ equestrian paintings was coming down.

The vast network of community libraries, many of them founded and financed by Andrew Carnegie, offered diversion and opportunity. The Library of Congress came about when Congress bought Thomas Jefferson’s extensive collection of books after the British burned the original library in Washington, D.C. The current Library of Congress grows by the day and is the country’s largest by far.

Today’s contemporary library has morphed into something entirely different. The computer has seen to that, as has the homeless epidemic. Needless to say, the concept of the library as a repository of knowledge and a refuge from the outside world has kept pace with the times and is not likely to disappear, or so we hope.

The burning of the library in Alexandria, Egypt is regarded as one of histories greatest tragedies. One from which we are yet to recover.

Books, books, books, filled with words, words, words. Who could ask for more?

William Dunlap

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Cloud Burst, polymer paint, dry pigment and watercolor on canvas, 30x40” 2026

Not since I stood on the lip of the Ngorongoro Crater in Eastern Africa, witnessing the first rays of a morning sun accompanied by the calls from wild animals and songs of exotic birds rejoicing that they had made it through the night, have I heard such a symphony of morning sounds to match those in April in North Mississippi.

We heard Chimney Sweeps, Robins, Warblers, Mockingbirds, Bluejays, Cardinals, Carolina Wrens, Chickadees, Brown-headed Cowbirds, Tufted Titmice, Eastern Towhees, Wood Thrushes … and more. All making morning noise – in real life and literature. These are the sounds heard by Huck and Jim that promised another day on the raft, another day on the river.

So I ask, do the birds even know they are in Mississippi?

This place of subtle beauty is easily stereotyped. Many of those with strong feelings or opinions about the place have never been there – but the birds have and they sing on.

This place owns a dark and violent past. Its primeval forest ripped from the ground by an enslaved people without so much as a thank you, kiss my ass, or a fare-thee-well. With the land conquered, what followed was the forced removal of Choctaw and Chickasaw to Oklahoma, a territory where the corn was to grow as high as an elephant’s eye.

And still, the birds sang.

After four years the war was lost, yet the violence and repression continued. And still the birds, like the legendary Shine, sang on.

Some migrated, others were here for the duration.

Do the birds know they are in Mississippi?

It’s doubtful, and they could not care less.

They live to sing.

William Dunlap

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In modern parlance, it has come to mean a nagging combination of repetitive sounds that live in your brain and will not go away.

Everyone, from Mark Twain on down, has experienced this irritating phenomenon. I must assume that, in this age of inescapable, recorded background music that somehow finds its way into every corner of our culture, – think elevators, supermarkets, shopping malls, restaurants, and so on, – the instance of earworm incursion has multiplied exponentially.

There seems to be no end to it – nor a cure for it!

I am currently enjoying a torturous semi-musical riff that has bored into my memory bank, and will not go away! It is part of a classic tune from the Eagles, a 1970’s-era band that is still alive (at least some of its members are) and kicking – so to speak.

It is not unusual to see these aging rockers come out of rehab and reunite with their respective bands. Their graying ponytails are often backlit and somehow still attached to ever receding hairlines as they play to stadiums full of folk who look about like them.

So, it would seem that the earworm is destined to have a visual equivalent. It has yet to be identified and/or categorized by modern science, but it is coming – just wait and see!

William Dunlap

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Louis Evermore was a lover of language and how it could inspire.

He had always heard that sleep was a thief so he burned the candle at both ends. He made hay while the sun shined, and generally embraced every cliché that seemed to apply, and they all did.

From Poor Richard’s Almanac to The Wit and Wisdom of Milton Berle, Louis embraced what made the Protestant work ethic the key to his American dream. The possibilities seemed endless.

A stitch in time saves nine.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

The early bird gets the worm.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The pussy you don’t get is the pussy you won’t get. Because, you can never step into the same river twice.

It all seemed to be working, even as his blood pressure was considerably elevated and he was ripe for a stroke.

On this, all his doctors were in agreement.

Coitus

“I’m too fat to fuck,” she said, taking some pride in the alliteration while glaring at herself in the full length mirror she kept in her small, cramped, yet welcoming bedroom.

Truth was, she wasn’t too fat at all, as any number of her friends and casual acquaintances could testify. Just zoftig, or “big boned” as they said in this part of the world.

She was actually quite pleasant to look at, whether naked or not. She had high breasts, tiny ankles and wrists, an athletic stride, and smooth alabaster skin. It was as if she were an Aristide Maillol sculpture come to life – lustful, animated, confident, and experienced.

And so they did, fuck that is with Louis on top. God knows he wanted to live so he didn’t dare let her straddle. It was mutually satisfying and lasted quite a long time. They both had to stop mid-copulation for water, cocaine, and wine. But resumed in order to finish simultaneously.

Then they just lay there, sweaty and satisfied. Neither smoked, so the cliché of a cigarette after intercourse did not apply.

They stumbled to the shower and lathered one another up, a purely functional act. Not an ounce of arousal left between them, she dried off and handed Louis the towel. They got back into the bed still damp, and slept.

Come daylight, it would start all over again.

Rigid Member

The poor-old, whipped-down penis has been under pressure of late – along with those who happen to be attached to one.

Time was, the penis reigned supreme. Now, it is suspect. It is part and parcel of the much-maligned toxic testosterone syndrome, a drive that can break down brick walls and spread cancer and contagions in the most pervasive manner – or as they say, “A hard dick has no conscience.” Yet, when one makes an intellectually profound correlation, congratulations may be offered along with the phrase, “Now you’re thinking with your big head.” The little head being the all-knowing mind of the hidden brain which every penis contains and controls masculine behavior 99% of the time.

The ubiquitous penis has earned many a nickname over the years, which include but are not limited to: Dick, Johnson, (reference to US presidents?), Mr. Willy, blue steel hard-on, Little Elvis, one-eyed trouser snake, or meat as in, “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.”

The list goes on, but why bother. It seems no accident that weapons, from the very beginning be they clubs, lance, guns, or guided missiles resemble the penis. So do neolithic obelisks, Trajan’s Column, and the Washington Monument. It proves nothing.

Then there are sex change operations so popular today. They often end with the surgical removal of the penis. What a waste! Where, after all, does one hang one’s towel after a cool refreshing shower?

This appendage has many functions. Erasure of guilt is not one of them.

This, Louis Evermore was saddened to learn.

William Dunlap

Fog Lift, polymer paint and dry pigment on synthetic canvas, 2025

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It’s a spring thing, and I often wonder if Hernando De Soto and his accompanying conquistadors encountered walls of honeysuckle as they cut their way through the American South in their futile search for El Dorado.

Once, driving from northern Virginia to southern Florida, we stopped in Georgetown, South Carolina. It was dusk when we exited Interstate 95 looking for a famous restaurant we had been told not to miss. My wife, daughter, and I drove past a cemetery all aglow with solar powered votive lights that cast an eerie illumination at graveside level.

We stopped to further inspect. I recognized a familiar scent, and saw bees buzzing around a wall of vines abloom with a ubiquitous yellow flower. It was the rich nectar of honeysuckle that delivered such a fragrance, so familiar and evocative. I was able to snatch a few of the flowers without getting stung, and shared them with my four-year-old daughter. I showed her how to suck the sweetness from the flower before the bees could get to it. She has always remembered that moment, and thanked me for it.

Now, every time I catch a whiff of honeysuckle I know it is spring, and that wherever it grows children are sucking the sweetness from nature. Also, that I should have run faster, and that there are lights in the cemetery in Georgetown.

I love the scent of honeysuckle in the morning. It smells like the, … SOUTH.

William Dunlap

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Flamingos in the Flatland, polymer paint on canvas, 24”x72”

As for Death and Dying as an academic subject, we collectively knew nothing. Creativity being a principal way to cheat the grave, as a painter I was drafted to participate.

We drew up a reading list, Margaret Kubler Ross being our goddess. Then there was Swimmer in a Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle. It was dark and brooding. Another paperback was about two young boys caring for their failing grandfather. I forget its name, but it was very useful. Many in the class seemed to identify with it. We invited a variety of visiting lecturers with varying results. Everyone had an opinion, and there was no consensus.

It was winter in the mountains, which was a death-like season. The only radio station in the small town, an AM affair, featured the Obituary Column of the Air. The program broadcast daily against the background of organ music while an undertaker-voiced character with a rich baritone delivered details about the lives of the deceased. Everybody got the point.

Many papers were written, but my major contribution was to set up a video camera in a closet of the old building we occupied and have everyone file in and make a short videotape offering their thoughts on dying.

We were all young, and strong, with our entire lives before us. By now, I expect some of that class has, in fact, died. They would be old enough, as am I. None of the tapes have survived and that is unfortunate, but I do recall one young man in particular. He looked straight into the camera and said something to the effect that, “Everyone who has ever lived has died, or is about to. So, what’s the big deal?”

What’s the big deal, indeed. So much about what we think of as art relies on the answer to that question.

William Dunlap

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Dimitri Alvin Freeman drove a late model Plymouth Fury convertible. It featured a push button transmission, sky high tail fins and a two tone color scheme of Naples yellow and brown.

More often than not, a big bottle-blonde sat in the middle of the front bench seat, her left arm around his neck, her hand out the window. No one knew her name, there were in fact several of them, all interchangeable and equally mesmerizing.

He sat low in the driver seat and looked out through the steering wheel at the landscape he was anxious to leave. Seat belts were mandatory, but they paid no attention to the rules.

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He hung his wet swimsuit on the car’s radio antenna. This indicated he had been to the sandpit, a dangerous place to swim. Sometimes the swimsuit would be replaced by a pair of women’s underwear, indicating he had been swimming somewhere else.

He had never heard of Lord Byron much less read him, but he did exude a kind of charm and raw intelligence. Teachers and students both were attracted to him. He was high-risk and high-maintenance. He towed danger in his wake.

It was prophesied in the Teacher’s Lounge that Dimitri would either end up in prison, or in the White House. Then one day, he was gone.

Some said he was off to Los Angeles, others to New York City. As it turned out, he went to Dallas and enrolled in undertaking school. There he would learn to embalm, apply makeup, and tie a Windsor knot.

He would spend the balance of his working life in small, family-owned, funeral homes throughout the South. He got to wear a suit and tie every day, and work in air-conditioned comfort.

It was a good life, more than he could have hope for.

William Dunlap

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Every summer since our father died, my brother and I came to the sprawling, unpainted, three-story house, and occupied a room in the attic. This room’s only window looked out over the square to the Courthouse, and the buildings and businesses which surrounded it.

The Courthouse lawn was always busy with men. They were either whittling, engaging in conversation with various drummers, or riding back-and-forth on horses. They came and went and shared papers of one kind or the other, as though they could actually read.

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Then, about mid-July when the Black-eyed Susans began to bloom a lady, thought to be young by some, would come to stay at the boarding house for two weeks. She was being treated for a nervous disorder by Dr. Alton who would join her for dinner, which is what the noon meal was called. He was charged twenty-five cents per seating, and came to observe the lady and her behavior. She made small talk with Dr. Alton who laughed congenially at everything she said.

Early the next morning, she would leave the boarding house shortly after breakfast, and cross the square to Dr. Alton’s second floor office to receive his ardent ministrations. She was thus treated until noon, returning to the boarding house to rest and recuperate. My brother and I watched from our attic window, which looked down on Dr. Alton’s office.

The lady, Mrs. Monmouth Peabody, seemed cool and collected as she undressed for the procedure and concomitant examination, which seemed very thorough indeed. She and Dr. Alton would drink copious amounts of his patent medicine, an elixir he blended, bottled, and sold to various patients. He had become quite wealthy thanks to this practice.

Dr. Alton’s highly-professional medical procedure was a daily practice and only paused for church on Sunday. This went on for the entire two weeks. Just as the Black-eyed Susans began to wilt, Mrs. Peabody decamped from the first floor room on the left that she had occupied, walked down the hill to the train depot, and out of our lives for the balance of the year.

I concluded medicine a fine profession, thought I might want to pursue it, and made it a point to speak to Dr. Alton and solicit his advice when I next saw him.

Dr. Alton stopped coming to dinner at the boarding house, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. She sorely missed his twenty-five cent contribution.

Money was tight, but there was never a dull moment around the courthouse. From snatches of conversation at table and around the courthouse steps, I learned that there was soon to be a public hanging.

It seems that a Mr. Whitaker had caught his wife with a Mr. Robinson conducting medical examinations on one another – without a license – in his rat proof corn crib. Whitaker had, of course, shot and killed them both, which was his right, but the killing of Mr. Robinson’s 17-year-old son, who was standing lookout or waiting his turn, was one killing too many. Mr. Whitaker was subsequently tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang the following week.

My mother sent word that my brother and I were not to witness such a spectacle and should come home immediately. We did so hate to miss the event, as our grandfather was the County Sheriff and would be in charge of the hanging. Besides, our grandmother’s house was a kind of Nirvana, full of life and characters who were always ready with a story or anecdote, no matter the protestations.

The day before the hanging an elderly black man turned up out front of the boarding house in a wagon drawn by a scrawny old mule to take us back to Roseville and our mother and stepfather, who fussed and fought constantly.

I picked the last of the Black-eyed Susans, put them in a vase with water, and left them along with a note on the dining room table for our grandmother and her boarders.

William Dunlap

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Risk avoidance being a personal concept, he wore suspenders and a belt. He put chocks under the wheels of his automobile whether parked on an incline or not. Gravity would not get the best of him.

But then, he fell deeply in love with a new employee at the waste management firm where he worked in Human Resources. She was right out of business school, in her mid 20s, and maybe a bit overweight. Her name was Barbara Edelman, his was Roland Malloy. But being plump only meant there was more to love, and given the taboo nature of their relationship, it only made their occasional encounters more exciting, dangerous, and exhilarating.

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She wore a Playtex corset with clips that held up her hose. This device was developed in Maidenform’s laboratory by male engineers in Madison, Wisconsin. Given that pantyhose had been introduced and marketed for some time now, her rigid girdle with hose clasps was obsolete. However, the thought of Barbara’s undergarment unfastened and falling to the floor drove Roland apoplectic. To think it had only recently been attached to her thigh so near her honey pot, a term Roland had read in his vast collection of paperback romance novels. He used the phrase often in conversation, not knowing exactly what it meant.

He reached down and picked up a clasp, still warm from its recent place on her body. It was with the same smooth gesture he used to pick up a spent cartridge, still hot from the magazine of the M-16 military issued automatic weapon used to kill the parking lot attendant at the medical facility where Roland had gone for bloodwork. It seems he had elevated levels of lead. His doctor wanted to get to the bottom of this, and confirm in fact exactly how much lead he had in his system and from whence it came.

The parking lot attendant in question was undocumented, spoke no English, and was of South American extraction. Honduran to be exact. Obviously, he had it coming and besides he ran. He ran to get away from the masked camo-clad, un-badged, recent employee of Homeland Security, a force intent on saving our country from this minimum wage earning migrant scum working in our yards, our fields, our houses, and on our construction sites.

So there it was, the Brave New World in which Roland lived. A world of unrequited love and deadly force. Both in abundance.

William Dunlap

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He had been a fixer and close advisor to politicians and businessmen since World War II. I recall one night him telling a small group of us about being a “Kid Lawyer” for the government when, in September 1942, a Nazi U-boat discharged a handful of would-be saboteurs onto a Long Island beach near Amagansett. They’d been ordered by their superiors to disrupt the American war machine by blowing up bridges and aluminum plants. It was however, their plan to defect in order to become American citizens, aid the Allies, and prosper in this promised land.

Instead, they were tried, found guilty, and several of them executed. “We were all about the same age,” the wise man lamented.

Much later he was asked to help bring order to the administration of a particular leader of the free world whose presidency was observed to be in free fall. Cabinet meetings were disorganized affairs with everyone chatting with one another. That is, until our wise man was appointed General Council. At his first cabinet meeting he rose to his feet and stood ramrod straight at attention when our boy president entered the room. Everyone else followed suit and soon our great ship of state was righted once again.

“It’s the small things,” our wise man opined.

He became immensely wealthy heading a law firm that bore his name, yet he never really bowed out of politics even as other wise men died or began to show signs of dementia.

His generation was replaced in the public forum by television pundits, religious zealots, and money men who bought influence openly and bragged about it. Given that corporations were now people, that seemed to make sense. It was, however, observed it would be far easier to believe corporations were actually people if the state of Texas executed one.

When our wise man died, well into his 80’s, he was universally mourned. We were not likely to see his ilk again, they said.

Our loss.

William Dunlap

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He said, “I really like to fly and East Africa is as good a place as any, also the money is exceptional.”

He continued. “I always check the politics as well as the weather. I don’t want to land in the middle of a tribal dispute, of which there are many.”

The colonial era has left a grid of invented countries in Africa, the borders of which do not recognize language, cultural differences or religion, to say nothing of ancient migration patterns. And then there are the animals.

We were not flying very high, maybe thirty-five hundred feet. We looked down at a very dry, brown to reddish plain, dotted with small villages and herds of animals. Some domestic, others wild, everything was in sharp focus.

And then there were the Dust Devils, scores of them. We were told they were common this time of year. Dust Devils are small, compact tornadoes produced when the ground air heats and thermals are formed. They can rise 200 feet or stay small to minuscule. No matter, Dust Devils are disruptive and dangerous, especially to aircraft. It was our pilot’s job to miss them and he did.

Banking hard to the right he flew around a formidable funnel full of dirt, limbs, parts of trees and huts. This was a maneuver he had performed before. It never interrupted his narrative.

Our pilot stated that he flew for this charter company during the summer and returned to the states in the winter to ski. Not a bad life.

He said he had a wife and family in Crested Butte, Colorado and one in Nairobi. This arrangement tended to produce no problems. Our pilot negotiated this potentially dangerous duality like he did the field of Dust Devils, banking hard to the right or to the left as need be. Not a bad life, for a man anyway.

We made several passes by the tower of the Nairobi airport, a casually run affair located in an active game park. Finally, when the wildebeest, zebras, giraffes, and water buffalo ambled off the runway we were cleared to land.

That afternoon we visited the Ngong Hill home of the writer Isak Denison and had dinner that night at a restaurant called Carnivore, where they served just what you might imagine – fresh meat from buffalo, wildebeest, giraffe, elephant, lion, and zebra.

The streets of Nairobi were busy. The Jacarandas were in full bloom. I assume our pilot went home to his wife and children.

As African days go, this was a good one.

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William Dunlap

Elwood was single, attractive, and seemingly everywhere all at once. His presence in the congregation of the Holy Way Church of Christ, to which he had moved his letter, was welcome as well. His father was an ordained minister who pastored a Church of Christ across the state line in Tennessee.

The band members responded positively to Elwood’s section rehearsals and individual lessons. Their playing, marching, and discipline improved considerably. The majorette corps was twirling away frantically. Their best, Marjorie Meriweather, took to the fire baton like a seasoned pyromaniac. Marjorie’s mother, the recently widowed Annette Meriweather with time on her hands, was determined to defuse the rumor that Elwood was gay.

The Meriweather boys were surly and at times deranged. Hoyt and Enders were most protective of their sister-in-law, Annette. Her late husband, Wilmet, was their brother who had been killed in a high-speed chase with the state police. It seems he had a tail light out in his late model Oldsmobile, and a trunk full of barbiturates. How the drugs got there was pure speculation.

Well, no matter, Marjorie had found a purpose in life with the fire baton. In her grasp it was both death defying and graceful. Her ample breasts heaved with every launch of the flaming projectile into the lower orbit of the darkened football stadium at halftime. People came from miles around to witness the phenomenon. Football be damned.

All of this and more would become common knowledge after the Meriweather boys shot up the church looking for Elwood who was suspected of extinguishing his manly fire baton in both Marjorie and her mother Annette.

Well, at least he wasn’t gay – that had been established.

Hoyt burst into the sanctuary with his 12 gauge Remington shotgun. The first thing he blasted were the flowers which sent petals, leaves, stamins, pistils, glass shards, and water droplets everywhere. Enders popped up from the baptistry similarly armed and scanned the congregation for Elwood. The parishioners hit the floor. Some dove under pews, others out the open windows. It seems Elwood was in a rear vestibule having his way with a deacon’s wife which ruined her marriage yet saved his life, at least temporarily.

The Merriweather boys had obviously not thought this through. They were shooting up the very church where their funerals would be held. A church shooting was not as common then as it is now, and some folks in this right to carry culture were downright offended.

One of the congregates who got out early was the highly celebrated and decorated Milton Worthington, recently retired from the Sheriff’s Department. He walked to his car and from under the front seat he retrieved his Emeritus Sheriff’s badge along with his 357 Magnum Service Revolver. He then proceeded back into the church where he confronted Hoyt and Enders and shot them dead.

Epilogue:

So, it is fair to say everyone lived happily ever after.

Marjorie Merriweather got a scholarship to Everbright Community College where she would twirl her way on to the Dean’s List.

Her mother, Annette, found Milton Worthington, (whose wife had died the year before) appealing and pursued him. They were married in the sanctuary where Hoyt and Enders had been funeralized.

The flowers for both events were done by Elwood McCoy, who decamped from his position at Mechanicsville High School to Lodi, Tennessee, where he tended his garden and assumed the position of assistant pastor at his father’s church.

And the band played on.

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William Dunlap