by David Burn | Jul 11, 2005 | Literature, Lowcountry
I’m reading a truly outstanding book of essays by Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate and Lowcountry native, Roger Pinckney XI. There’s so much to touch on in this man’s wonderful collection, but for now I’ll just focus on one small, but important aspect. Pinckney introduces a cast of characters who belong to the Burn clan*.
Pinckney makes mention of Arthur “Papy” Burn, the keeper of the Bloody Point Lighthouse on Daufuskie Island during the mid 20th century.
According to Lighthouse Friends, Arthur “Papy” Burn lived at the lighthouse until his health forced him to move to the mainland. Papy was quite involved in island life serving as a substitute teacher, a Sunday School teacher, a magistrate, and taxidermist. Papy was known for the beautiful flowerbeds that surrounded the lighthouse each spring, but he is probably remembered most for his winemaking. They say Papy never drank, but in 1953, for some reason he started making wine in the old lamp house, which he christened the Silver Dew Winery. Papy would make wine out of anything he could get his hands on, including blackberries, bananas, elderberries, scuppernongs, and oranges. Papy passed away on Sullivan’s Island in 1968, having outlived three of his four wives. Papy’s body was returned to the island for burial, and more than one person has since felt or seen his presence at his beloved lighthouse.
Papy’s daughter-in-law, Billie Burn and her son Bobby Burn live on Daufuskie today. Billie has written a book on the island’s history, folklore and Gullah traditions, Stirrin’ The Pots on Daufuskie. Artist, Bob Burn, is the proprietor of Silver Dew Pottery on Daufuskie. According to a new piece for Orion by Pinckney (not in the book), Burn is also a strong, wiry, storyteller with a deep knowledge of “Indian stuff.”
Then there’s Francis A. Burn, Bob’s uncle, residing at Burn’s Landing on Daufuskie. With all these potential kinfolk in the area, I’m feeling just a little bit more at home.
*Note, very few people in the U.S. spell their name B-U-R-N. Of course, I happen to be one of them.
by David Burn | Jul 10, 2005 | The Environment
Last January, Grist Magazine ran “The Death of Environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. In the foreword, Peter Teague, Environment Program Director for Nathan Cummings Foundation ties global warming to the increasing number of hurricanes the Gulf Coast is now experiencing. And since the Gulf Coast is experiencing another one right now, this seems an opportune time to take a look at an excerpt from the piece.
We believe that the environmental movement’s foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn’t as “environmental.” Most of the movement’s leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing.
Environmentalism is today more about protecting a supposed “thing” — “the environment” — than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who nearly a century ago observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Thinking of the environment as a “thing” has had enormous implications for how environmentalists conduct their politics. The three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making hasn’t changed in 40 years: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as “environmental.” Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g., cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators through a variety of tactics, such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, advertising, and public relations.
When we asked environmental leaders how we could accelerate our efforts against global warming, most pointed to this or that tactic — more analysis, more grassroots organizing, more PR.
Few things epitomize the environmental community’s tactical orientation to politics more than its search for better words and imagery to “reframe” global warming. Lately the advice has included: a) don’t call it “climate change” because Americans like change; b) don’t call it “global warming” because the word “warming” sounds nice; c) refer to global warming as a “heat trapping blanket” so people can understand it; d) focus attention on technological solutions — like fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars.
by David Burn | Jul 9, 2005 | Lowcountry
I was surprised to see a local news story today on our neighbors down the street.
Bonnie Rogers’ home on the sixth fairway of Old Carolina Golf Course has been pelted nearly a thousand of times. She has 715 golf balls collected from her yard to prove it. The Rogers have lost three windows and now have twenty odd pockmarks in their vinyl siding. According to the report, not one golfer has stepped forward to offer apologies, to say nothing of compensation. Golf club general manager, Scott Adams, said it is the golfer’s responsibility when they damage property, but he admits few are prepared to do the right thing. Rogers says they’d sell their two sixth fairway homes, but rightly asks, “Who would buy them?”
by David Burn | Jul 9, 2005 | Art, Lowcountry
Pluff Mudd is a term indigenous to the South Carolina Lowcountry. It refers to the odiferous ooze that carpets marsh bottoms and riverbeds in the tidal zones of the May and Colleton rivers. Pluff Mudd smells of rotten eggs, and is the reason why salt marshes have that typical smell at low tide—the result of anaerobic bacteria that proliferate in the muck. Pluff Mudd is rich in nutrients, and supports a rich ecosystem for the oysters, shrimp and other aquatic creatures.
Wilderness Way by Peggy Duncan
Pluff Mudd is also a Calhoun Street gallery in historic Bluffton, owned and operated by painter, Peggy Duncan.
by David Burn | Jul 9, 2005 | Music
I bought Kathleen Edwards sophomore effort, Back To Me, off iTunes this week. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m liking an awful lot of country these days. But hey, the country I like is some damn good country.
The New York Times praised Edwards as a writer whose songs can “pare situations down to a few dozen words while they push country-rock towards its primal impulses of thump and twang,” and on Back To Me, she once again demonstrates that she can rock hard but also move a listener with heart stopping insights.
“It’s always been important to me that my records work as an album – that it isn’t just a collection of songs, but something that creates a real, vivid, three-dimensional portrait. And I don’t want to rely on the same dynamic and style on every song. I want to use every crayon in the box, and I feel like I accomplished that with Back To Me,” says Edwards.
by David Burn | Jul 6, 2005 | Architecture
The Guardian is running a story on Aussie architect, Sean Godsell. Godsell created a stir down under when he submitted his Park Bench House—a temporary answer to the problem of homelessness—to the Institute of Architects awards under the best new house category.
He then turned his attention to helping those caught in natural or political disaster areas, with the invention of Futureshack, shown below.
A firm believer that great ideas are born out of adversity, Godsell set himself the task of designing for a theoretical disaster, arriving at Futureshack as something that could be used as a medical centre, transformed into housing and then shipped on to the next natural calamity as needed. He sees this ability to cope with the unexpected as a useful Australian trait, derived from the resourcefulness of the original colonists and convicts, which has given birth to the term “bush mechanic” – the ability to make do and mend should your car clap out in the outback.
by David Burn | Jul 6, 2005 | Lowcountry
When one moves to a new place, there are many new place names that don’t mean much until one has time to digest them. On Hilton Head Island, Coligny Plaza is sometimes thought of as the town center. After a little digging, I learned that Gaspard de Coligny was Admiral of France in the mid 16th century, and the man responsible for sending Jean Ribault to the New World. Coligny and Ribault were both Huguenots, or French Protestants. Thus, the acquisition of new lands had a decidedly religious, as well as nationalist, thrust.
Ribault reached Port Royal–which he named–in 1562. He and his men set up shop in what is today Parris Island, naming* the small settlement Charlesfort for their young King. Ribault then turned back to France for more supplies, but upon arrival found his nation engaged a religious civil war. Ribault fled to England, where he was jailed as a spy in the Tower of London. He escaped jail, returned to France and was sent back to Charlesfort to help fortify the colony, which had since moved south to the St. John’s River under the leadership of René Goulaine de Laudonnière.
When Ribault made it across the Atlantic, he was caught in a hurricane and shipwrecked south of St. Augustine, where he and his surviving men were rounded up and killed by the Spaniards, who’d clearly “had it” with the competition. A few, including Laudonnière, escaped.
All the while, one French Huguenot settler, Guillaume Rouffi, stayed behind at Port Royal, marrying the daughter of Indian King Audusta. Smart kid.
In 1566, Pedro Menendez de Avilles traveled north to Port Royal and built the town of Santa Elena on the exact same spot as Charlesfort, with the intention of making it the new capital of La Florida. Ten years later the Orista Indians–who had been on good terms with the French–attacked the nascent town of over three hundred, sending the Spaniards racing for their boats. They watched ten years of labor receed behind them as they sailed for the safety of St. Augustine.
*Ribault called Hilton Head Island, Ile de la Riviere Grande. The Spaniards called it, Isla de los Osos, or Island of the Bears.
by David Burn | Jul 3, 2005 | Go Big Red
“You should enter a baseball field the way you enter a church.” -Bill Lee
I was lucky to grow up in a time of oddball pitchers. Mark Fidrych a.k.a. “The Bird,” Bill Lee and Dock Ellis were three of the central summertime characters of my youth.
Dock, who threw a no hitter on LSD in 1970, spoke to the Dallas press recently and now the story of his no-hitter is circulating again. Good. Maybe, in light of such a performance, some people might question the drug’s reported harmfulness. I know that’s a lot to ask, and it’s ever more to ask that one read Acid Dreams, a rigorously researched book on the widespread counter intelligence efforts made against LSD by the FBI in the 1960s.
The answers are out there. Discover them at your own risk. But let Dock’s no-hitter serve as evidence that on a good day, one can find clarity, concentration and endurance in LSD.
by David Burn | Jul 2, 2005 | Music
Greg Poulos, a singer/songwriter and archivst of Grateful Dead tickets, backstage passes and laminates, currently showcases 3232 digitally rendered artifacts on his PSILO site.
by David Burn | Jul 1, 2005 | Literature, Lowcountry
Ten months ago I wrote What I Really Want To Do, wherein I listed five book ideas to shop around. I have another I’d like to float by you.
The story is set in histortically signifcant Beaufort County, South Carolina, where Chance Pinckney’s people are from. Chance himself grew up in West Philly. He’s black, educated and something of a firebrand. He’s also a speechwriter in search of an independent candidate for Congress.
He eventually finds his man and they make their way to Washington. In a story such as this, where a radical element has center stage, it’s tempting to kill off the hero. But that’s too easy an out. No, Chance and his candidate get shot at (this is post-modern realism) but they escape harm. I hope that doesn’t ruin it for you.
