Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Slabon, Linda S.

NIGHTFALL
Linda S. Slabon
The rains came.
Leaves lay like ash on asphalt.
The smell of home in the wet air, 
Brick and fish.
You are home.
Your belly warms mine to toast.
The smell of bread rises between us 
Yeast and breath.
Breath and bread.
Trees toss their hair in the wind. 
The smell of you and the earth 
Wet and flesh.


English

Nightfall

Sher, Victoria

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Garland, Max

CHICKENS
Max Garland
For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools
shall destroy them. —Proverbs 1:32
As it turns out, it was a farm of only seven-and-a-half acres. Everyone 
thinks his own childhood was bigger. Everyone thinks his childhood 
would make a compelling movie, for example. It’s hard to believe that 
the great scope and depth of childhood experience is not, at least in 
part, a result of vast physical scale. So it was barely seven-and-a-half 
acres, a small country to me, and therefore, a typical childhood. 
Beginning with pigs.
The pigs were huge, muddy lumps of earth that somehow grew 
curious, or ravenous, developed snout and tail, and began jogging 
early one evening toward the barn. They were creatures without 
discrimination, as well as sources of great comedy. Like most comedy, 
the comedy of the pigs was based upon incongruity: the barrel shaped 
body upon the stick legs, the tail curled like an auger, the grotesque 
snout, the coy eyelashes. The piglets were explosive combinations of 
energy and imagination. They would, for instance, stampede head­
long across the pen, then veer suddenly, or even slide to a terrified 
halt for no visible reason, the danger lurking only within their tiny 
rocklike skulls.
The pigs could also be frightening. To think that they were capable 
of devouring anything tossed into their paths: hard corn, over-ripe 
tomatoes, apple cores, pumpkin rinds, dinner scraps, dishwater. It was 
not beyond the realm of possibility that they might even tackle a small, 
careless boy if conditions were right. My grandfather, who owned the 
farm, did nothing to dispel this notion. It seemed simple enough. To 
the pigs, the world was food.
Another element of pig life was their repertoire of sound: grunt, 
squeal, snort, snuffle. Their communications with one another were 
direct and involved simple combinations of these sounds, accented at 
appropriate times with a swift kick from a hind hoof, or a quick
123
nipping motion. There was, of course, an element of disgust in my 
attitude toward the pigs. How could they live the way they did? There 
seemed to be complete and passionate acceptance of filth, as if given 
the choice, the pigs would always prefer a tiny fly-infested barnyard 
for a home. It didn’t occur to me that a lazy pig was a fat pig, and 
therefore, a valuable pig, or that the pigs were living our versions of 
their lives.
It was partly from the pigs I learned the art of turning away. I 
learned how to avoid the thought that connected the huge ear- 
flapping comedians with the links of sausage or strips of bacon that 
appeared regularly on my grandmother’s flowered plates, or the 
country hams hanging from the garage beams. There was simply a 
blank space, a little bridge of amnesia where the connection might 
have been. I didn’t want to know how much of the squeal, grunt, and 
ear-flapping we had stolen, or that the pigs, for all their eccentricities, 
would ultimately be measured in pounds and ounces. The turning 
away was easy. The pigs would simply be loaded on a truck one day, 
and the next thing I knew it was Christmas: gifts, vacation, the 
reappearance of hefty, vaguely familiar relatives, and of course, tables 
covered with plates of dressing, potatoes, pies, and slices of sugar- 
cured ham. The next thing I knew the gifts were scattered across the 
living room floor, my father had fallen asleep in his chair, and I was 
beginning to nod, lulled to sleep by the dinner and the familiar wash 
of sound from the television.
At some point my grandfather stopped keeping pigs. I don’t 
remember why. Maybe it was the economics, maybe just the odor. 
Anyway, as far as I was concerned, the pigs, as remarkable as they 
were, were not the true stars of the farm. They just provided a rather 
raw and sluggish background, like a series of living bass-notes. The 
real objects of my affection were the chickens; mostly White 
Leghorns, usually about eighty of them, with an occasional New 
Hampshire or Rhode Island Red, or more rarely, a speckled Plymouth 
Rock.
Like the pigs, the chickens were capable of comedy at times. For 
example, the exaggerated fear of some sudden innocent motion, the 
tendency to flap away dramatically at the tiniest threat. There was also 
the trick of standing on one leg, body frozen, eye rolling and pivoting 
to take in the henyard.
And oddly enough, the chickens were beautiful to me. From a 
distance they reminded me of small white sails, or pieces of tissue 
paper torn from gifts and blown across the scrabble of grass. If the 
pigs were the bass-line, the chickens provided the melodic complica­
tions for the farm: cackle, crow, squawk, wing-flutter, scratch, a kind
124
of throaty ticking sound, even, at times, something resembling a purr.
We called them a flock, but they seemed more like a tribe to me. 
There were always two or three roosters, arrogant and chiefly, with 
puffed feathers and sharp spurs at the back of the claws. And then the 
hens, which individually appeared rather frightened, comical, and 
somewhat reptilian, but as a group possessed a certain grace and 
intelligence, as if they were eighty complicated and scattered parts of 
a single body. I couldn’t say it at the time, but I felt strangely 
supported by the presence of the chickens. The combinations of 
sound and image were like a net under the summer days.
Enhancing the mystery of the chickens was the chicken house itself. 
A dim, labyrinthine structure, actually a collection of sheds built at 
various times and connected by a system of hallways and doors. 
Rooms led to other rooms according to no discernible pattern. My 
grandfather kept adding to and subtracting from the chicken house as 
the years passed. The building was constructed of old lumber, new 
lumber, corrugated tin, old metal signs with faded advertisements, 
anything that would take a nail and turn the rain.
On the wall of one of the corridors deep in the maze of the chicken 
house, hung a portrait of my great-grandfather. I never asked, never 
seriously thought of asking, why the portrait hung there. It was a huge 
hand-tinted photograph surrounded by an imitation hand-carved 
frame. It was also water-stained, dust covered, and draped with a 
decade of spider webs, but nevertheless there he was, my great­
grandfather laid out in his coffin, his mustache thick and frosted, 
cheeks tinted, hands crossed in an attitude of rest, the network of 
veins faintly visible through the cobwebs. Much later I would discover 
that many families had funeral portraits made. I suppose, then, it 
became a matter of what to do with such an emotionally charged relic. 
It wasn’t the sort of thing even the most devoted mourner would care 
to look at often, but on the other hand it was impossible to throw 
away. As the years passed, my great-grandfather was partially covered 
and obscured by empty feed sacks and pieces of harness and eventu­
ally disappeared altogether, but not before adding his strange weight 
to the atmosphere of the chicken house, and lacing the memory of 
childhood with an important element of ghostliness.
At the other end of experience, the chicken house was part of the 
first myth of origin I ever heard. My grandfather told me that as an 
infant I had been discovered in a nest under one of the sitting hens. 
Naturally, I was picked up, dusted off, and carried into the house to 
be raised as a normal child. Since my grandfather was not known for 
his wit or imagination, I had no reason to doubt this version of my 
beginnings. Like the portrait of my great-grandfather, the infant-in-
125
the-nest story enlarged the experience of the chicken house by a factor 
impossible to measure.
As for the hens, they laid their eggs in nests made of wooden milk 
crates filled with straw. I remember reaching under the sitting hens 
with apprehension and nostalgia, feeling for the warm shapes of the 
eggs. I liked the sense of accumulation: two eggs here, another five 
there. It felt good, like the beginnings of wealth, that rich strain in the 
muscles of my shoulders and back as I carried the egg buckets toward 
the house. It seemed right that the chickens worked for us, laid their 
eggs for us, although sometimes there was a minor flare-up of 
reluctance. A hen would momentarily threaten, making a sound 
remarkably close to a growl as I stole the eggs.
Sometimes, of course, the eggs weren’t gathered at all, but were left 
in the nest to hatch. This happened rarely, and primarily for my 
benefit I think. My grandfather was usually too impatient to wait for 
the hens to hatch their own broods. Also, being a Protestant, I think 
he found it difficult to watch the hens sit idly, day after day, for the 
time it took the hatchlings to appear. Most of the new chicks were 
obtained from Austin’s Feed Store. I would help my grandfather carry 
the long, flat cardboard boxes of baby chicks to the car, listening to the 
fragile peeping and the sounds of sliding, scratching, and gentle 
tumbling as the chicks tried to balance themselves. Every Easter he 
would allow me to pick out a couple of brightly dyed chicks at 
Austin’s: red, purple or green. Every year I fell for the same illusion. 
Each time I believed the chicks would retain their colors, that in a 
matter of months I would possess huge purple or green chickens 
capable of producing eggs of the same colors, giving birth to new 
generations of brightly colored hens. I remember the gradual fading 
of the dye and the increasing difficulty in locating my chicks among 
the others, until finally all the pullets looked the same and there was 
nothing to distinguish the ones with the brilliant early careers.
It was easier to turn away from the deaths of the pigs than the 
deaths of the chickens. The pigs simply disappeared. For a child, that 
left any number of illusions possible. With the hens, the fact of 
assassination couldn’t be avoided. There were two basic methods: the 
simple jerk, employed by my grandfather, snapping the neck of the 
hen; and the more grisly method used by my grandmother (my sweet, 
tear-prone, hymn-singing grandmother). This was the axe-murder 
method, which led to the unforgettable sight of the doomed hen 
dashing about the yard headless, stumbling, rising, finally recaptured 
and held by her feet at arm’s length by my grandmother. It was hard 
to find a place for this vision in my mind. It was hard to incorporate 
the fact that this creature could live and move separated from its tiny
126
brain, bill, and eyes. And even harder, that the hand of rosewater and 
tenderness, the hand that so delicately riffled the pages of the 
Methodist hymnal, or the tissue-thin pages of King James, could grasp 
death so easily and yet so firmly. My grandmother would remove the 
organs in the kitchen sink, then soak the plucked carcass to loosen the 
remaining feathers. It was a spectacle that sent me back to the yard 
toward some game or diversion, something that would rescue me 
from understanding the connection between the death of the hen and 
my own life, between my grandmother’s bloody hand and tenderness.
It was a delicate mental trick—to see and not see at the same time. 
I had no way of knowing how much of my life would depend upon 
this trick, how many of the words I would speak or write over the years 
would be versions of this turning away. On one hand, I believed the 
chickens had emotions like mine, hunger like mine, a certain element 
of devotion, a very evident capacity for fear, a sense of exuberance. 
They could, after all, actually fly a little, though most attempts seemed 
more like leaping and then gliding back down with nothing much 
accomplished. The chickens possessed a nervous curiosity and a sense 
of thoroughness. Nothing edible, not the tiniest grain blown into the 
henyard, could escape their combined attentions. Also, there was the 
sense of community. In the evenings the chickens roosted on a series 
of bean-poles placed horizontally at different levels, a sort of bleacher 
effect. They clucked, rustled feathers, and held on in ascending rows 
of white. Domestic, tired, maybe even dreaming.
On the other hand, there was something impenetrable about them. 
At some point in school I would learn there was a long chain of 
bird-life leading all the way back to the reptiles, but much earlier than 
that, I felt the intuition of that chain. There was something in their 
eyes that no amount of humanizing could fix. A distance, a remote­
ness, a feeling that in spite of their domesticity they were not totally 
amendable. There were other, deeper allegiances. This was the view 
that helped me acquit my grandmother of the axe-murders. I would 
simply demote the chickens back down the evolutionary scale until 
they were reptiles with feathers, an act excusing both slayer and 
witness.
This happened in delicate conjunction with the instant of turning 
away. The creatures I had granted humanity were still in the henyard 
clicking and fluttering like sails. Their lives were comparable to my 
own. At the moment of death, however, they became ridiculous 
creatures, beings with brains so small and superfluous their bodies 
could actually function a short time without them.
During dinner at my grandmother’s house there was generally talk 
of the weather, small family grudges, the mysterious rise or inevitable
127
decline of some aunt’s health, and frequently, the delicious greasy 
plates of golden legs, breasts, and thighs, by that time thoroughly and 
convincingly transformed into food, prayed over, divided, and en­
joyed. But enjoyed in part, I think, because of a missing connection, 
an ability, at least on my part, to absolve myself of a certain 
knowledge. I wonder now at the consequences of that absolution, that 
curtain that descended and allowed the creatures I loved, the ones I 
considered comical, musical, and beautiful, to become delicious. It’s 
another of those things I can’t find a place for. I begin to wonder what 
else might be happening behind that curtain, behind the turning 
away, which occurred even though I watched the killing of the 
chickens. The turning away hand nothing to do with watching or not 
watching. It had to do with disconnecting and denial. I’m not sure I 
was wrong. Maybe a certain amount of aversion is necessary for 
survival, helping deliver us from needless self-hatred or even ghoul­
ishness. I think it’s the question of cost that bothers me. What is the 
price of turning away from such small, unpleasant, yet normal events? 
How deeply ingrained is the habit, and at what point does the 
phenomenon occur in my own recollections, conversions, relation­
ships, and dreams?
Maybe there was a third possibility for the chickens, neither human 
nor reptilian. Maybe there was a realm in which fear, pride, comfort, 
hunger, sleep, dream, accident, and even forgiveness occurred, but in 
ways not open to my understanding. In other words, an emotional, or 
even spiritual life that was real, though not the one I had imagined or 
defined for the chickens. Maybe it was the same for the hogs, I don’t 
know.
About twenty-five years after witnessing my first chicken-killing, I 
was walking through a piazza in Florence and came upon a huge dark 
statue of Perseus, his arm raised and extended, holding the bloody, 
severed head of the Gorgon. I didn’t know much about Greek 
mythology, and still don’t, but strangely, I thought of my grand­
mother, and realized that someday I was going to have to confront the 
turning away, the ordinary slaughters; maybe even dig among the 
roots of the word sacrifice in order to understand the world in which I 
lived as a child, and still carry with me in faint constellations of habit 
and thought.
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129


Chickens

McCourt, Tom

BOOK REVIEW
Tom McCourt
Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 by Susan J. Douglas. Balti­
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 363 pp. Illustrated.
Inventing American Broadcasting is an exhaustive, well-written, and 
admittedly revisionist account of the pre-history of radio broadcast­
ing, beginning with the American unveiling of wireless in 1899 and 
culminating in the “radio boom” of 1921-22. The book traces the 
“social construction” of radio—how individuals and institutions 
shaped the applications of broadcasting, and how these applications 
were legitimated in American culture. The author, Susan J. Douglas, 
is a professor at Hampshire College and media critic for In These 
Times. Her work focuses on the public significance of inventions/ 
technology: How machines develop meaning. To Douglas, technology 
develops through multiple actions and reactions, rather than linearly. 
She carefully explains how radio was ultimately transformed from 
private, or coded, directional medium to a public, omnidirectional 
medium as business, technology, and press wrested the medium from 
individual to institutional control. Douglas views the history of radio 
through a hegemonic lens, in which the media trumpet the “superi­
ority of capitalism” while denigrating alternative views. According to 
Douglas, cultural hegemony of the medium was complete with the 
arrival of commercial broadcasting in the early 1920s: Amateur 
activists were replaced by programmers, passivity was promoted as 
empowerment.
The figure of Guglielmo Marconi dominates the first half of the 
book. Although other inventors independently realized successful 
wireless radio transmission within a short time of each other, Marconi 
was the entrepreneur who bridged science, commerce, and popular 
imagination. Marconi perfectly fit the heroic archetype of the self- 
effacing inventor/entrepreneur, as opposed to “eccentric” scientists 
Reginald Fessenden of boisterous hustlers like Lee DeForest, his two 
main competitors. Marconi’s entrepreneurial acumen was displayed
141
when he allegedly transmitted across the Atlantic in 1901. Although 
no reporters were actually present, they were so in thrall of Marconi 
that they unhesitatingly reported the event. In Douglas’s phrase, 
Marconi “had managed to shout and whisper at the same time” (58). 
Douglas repeatedly contrasts Marconi’s beneficent public image with 
his privately stated desire to create a corporate monopoly. He con­
centrated on selling to major commercial customers, rather than 
hobbyists, and quickly established a monopoly on the sale and service 
of wireless equipment. His successful attempts at privatizing the air 
created one of the basic issues in American broadcasting—battles over 
airspace. Douglas credits Lee DeForest with conceiving radio broad­
casting as an educational and entertainment medium and finds him 
the most fascinating of the wireless pioneers, in that he most clearly 
embodies the contradictions of dreamer and huckster so often found 
in inventor/entrepreneurs. In light of his trials for stock fraud, one 
could scarcely call DeForest an altruist, yet he ceaselessly pushed his 
concept of music broadcasting. He “dreamed of bringing music, 
especially opera, into the houses of those unable to attend in person” 
(193).
The mass media played a major role in the evolution of wireless, 
and Douglas repeatedly frames broadcasting developments in terms 
of press response. According to Douglas, “[press] coverage was hardly 
neutral or objective; it legitimated certain uses of the invention while 
condemning others, and it formed a narrow, romantic technical 
journalism” (xvii). These romantic tendencies were displayed in 
dewy-eyed editorials speculating on the potential of wireless to 
establish a permanent world peace, most frequently in press accounts 
of amateur wireless operators. These operators, or “boys,” were 
praised in the press for their pluck and resourcefulness; technical 
mastery replaced physical robustness as the test of manhood in urban 
society. Douglas is particularly effective when she describes how 
inventors, institutions, the press, and the public all interacted to spin 
a fabric of meanings around the medium. The media contextualized 
technical change in the form of familiar characters, as it does today in 
descriptions of teenage computer wizards. Press coverage of wireless 
provided a balm for Americans ambivalent about technology. The 
“robber barons” had earlier personified the fear of an unrestrained 
technics running amok in society, but the “hero/inventor” resolved the 
contradictions of tradition (individualism, self-denial) and change 
(technics)—taming natural forces and humanized technology (and, 
correspondingly, industrialism).
The second half of Inventing American Broadcasting shifts from 
entrepreneurial to institutional concerns—specifically, the increasing
142
regulation of wireless in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic in 
1912. With the Radio Act of 1912, amateurs were exiled to the 
shortwave end of the spectrum, while military and commercial inter­
ests (most notably, the Marconi Company) were awarded the choice 
frequencies. Broadcasting had become a privilege, not a right. Ac­
cording to Douglas, World War One hastened military and corporate 
control of wireless, in addition to eliminating dissident elements: . . 
the subculture of American men and boys who had previously fought 
with the Navy over who owned the ether now supplied the armed 
forces with thousands of wiling, cooperative recruits. They were no 
longer outside the system, they were part of it” (298). The Navy’s 
desire to deal with American suppliers, rather than the British-based 
Marconi Company led to the creation of the Radio Corporation of 
America (RCA) through the merger of General Electric and the 
American Marconi subsidiary.
According to the author, “technically, economically, legislatively 
and ideologically, the elements of America’s broadcasting system 
were, thus, in place by 1922” (317). Douglas claims that the “radio 
trust” was able to “advance values consonant with consumer capital­
ism” (320), a critical point in the corporate shaping of consumer 
culture. To Douglas, the early history of radio broadcasting symbol­
ized corporate hegemony’s myth of consumer choice and ensuing 
corporate domination of mass communication. The insights she 
presents in Inventing American Broadcasting have implications relevant 
to the nature of today’s communications industry. Douglas’s media 
criticism in the popular press is frequently rabid, but Inventing 
American Broadcasting is devoid of such bluster. Her careful scholar­
ship constructs a persuasive argument of how the mass media, abetted 
by corporate and military interests, effectively discourage pluralism in 
American society.
143


Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1902 by Susan J. Douglas

Courtney, R. K.

Richard III

Kapplinger, Kent

Source—Plant

Smith, Jim

Tiennemen

Westbrook, Keith

Do Young People Say "Lord Ham Mercy"

Petchler, Thea

Back matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Not a member yet

Nightfall

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Chickens

Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1902 by Susan J. Douglas

Richard III

Source—Plant

Tiennemen

Do Young People Say "Lord Ham Mercy"

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Back matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

241

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