‘Smash Your Idols’ in Taint Taint Taint
New Journal Publishes My Essay on Great Art and Bad People
Taint Taint Taint, a new journal published by the novelist Jeffery Renard Allen, launched today. It has a wide-ranging and truly global cast of writers. I am honored that Jeff has included my essay “Smash Your Idols” among the many amazing pieces of writing he has collected.
Smash Your Idols
It was 1980. Legend becomes myth. Left dead on a sidewalk, assassin’s bullet spilling blood. Like his mother, a lonely corpse misremembered, known but never really known, “you had me, but I never had you.”[i]
I remember hearing the news while I was still at Penn State, winter break approaching. They collected outside his home in the days that followed, outside the Dakota. Genius remembered. Candles lit to his memory, our memory really. The stories we tell. He “beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.”[i] Admissions, perhaps. A son abandoned, a family in “bits and pieces,” and the bird sings and sings and sings. Sink into the sound, the high baritone, the phrasing. The words.
Make an offering. Smash your idols. They have no power at all.
To read the full essay, go to Taint Taint Taint and click on Non-Fiction.
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