TSDK No. 56. I Have Adopted Ding Dong
Plus: Dying Inside, the Californication of Texas, fermented meat and more.
Greetings
An action-packed issue of TSDK with some BIG NEWS this time around, so let’s get down to it.
I Have Adopted Ding Dong
Don’t Californicate My Texas
The Best Album (Back) Covers of All Time IV: Quartet for the End of Time
Dying Inside: Robert Silverberg
From The Secret History of the World
Fermented Meat Party
Ding Dong (Slight Return)
First, the BIG NEWS: I have adopted Ding Dong, Texas.
Ding Dong, for those who do not know (which is probably everybody reading this) is a settlement located about sixty miles north of Austin. It was founded at some point in the 20th century, allegedly in the 1930s, but the only source I can find for that is Wikipedia so the usual caveats apply. The story goes that one day Zulis and Burt Bell, who ran the local store, hired an artist to make a sign for them. After painting two bells he then added the words “Ding” and “Dong”, and that’s how the town gots its name. What it was called before that is anybody’s guess; I suspect it didn’t have one.
Besides that, very little is known about Ding Dong, even though it has now existed for close to a century. It’s not even clear how many people live there as the census data doesn’t seem to have been updated since the year 2000. Back then, 22 souls called it home. I admit, I haven’t actually been to Ding Dong myself, even though I just adopted it. That said, I am pretty sure I must have driven past it a couple of times, because it’s on the way to Killeen, and I’ve been there a couple of times. Probably I didn’t notice because people keep stealing the sign.
I suppose I should visit Ding Dong, and introduce myself to the locals. Maybe I’ll even get one of them to sign the certificate that I received from the Texas State Historical Association in exchange for my $25 adoption fee. Heck, maybe I’ll get all of them to sign it! I’m sure they will be very pleased that I adopted their town in honor of this newsletter. Who knows, perhaps a few might even subscribe…
Don’t Californicate My Texas
I first spotted the phrase “Don’t Californicate my Texas” on a T-shirt in an antiques and knick knacks store in Johnson City, a tiny little town outside Austin that was once home to Lyndon B. Johnson. Since then I have seen it numerous other times on bumper stickers, mugs and so on. But what if Texas has already been Californicated? That was the question I asked in this piece for UnHerd, a case study in how one formerly sleepy rural town has changed over the past two decades….
When I first moved to Texas in 2006, I spent several months living with my in-laws in Georgetown, a quiet town of about 46,000 people located 30 miles north of Austin. There was a giant house in their neighbourhood that looked different from all the others; apparently the owner had sold a much smaller property in California and built this dream home with the proceeds. Large-scale migration from California to Texas had not yet begun so nobody thought this was a harbinger of social and political change. The concern, rather, was that too many of these “McMansions” would increase property taxes.
But internal migration to Texas did kick in, and then some. Newly released census data shows that between 2020 and 2023, nine of the 10 fastest growing cities in the US with a population of 20,000 or more were in Texas, and Georgetown was on the list having grown by 40.1% during that period. Today, census data puts the population at 93,612. Other towns grew at an even faster clip: Celina — outside Dallas — by 143.2% and Fulshear — outside Houston — by 142.7%. Now the possibility of social and political change seems very real — a popular T-shirt/bumper sticker reads “Don’t Californicate my Texas”. The country singer Creed Fisher (whose oeuvre includes such classics as “Girls with Big Titties”), released a song about the same anxiety: that exiles from the sunshine state will vote for the very same policies that caused the conditions they fled from, changing Texas forever.
Certainly, there are California transplants who intend to do just that. But the overall picture is more complicated than it appears. First, some Californians who move to Texas are conservatives. Second, migration into Texas is from all over the US. And third, Texas has already changed forever.
Georgetown is an excellent case study. When I first visited, it was the seat of archly conservative Williamson County, the Yin to the Yang of Travis County, which was home to all the hippies and nudists and slackers of Austin. The town was everything you’d expect in Texas: a picturesque courthouse, lots of churches, sheriffs with guns on their hips, harsh penalties for marijuana possession and a Walmart as big as an aircraft hangar. I remember eating at a barbecue joint where the staff wore T-shirts that said “Keep Georgetown Normal” — a direct riposte to the famous slogan Keep Austin Weird. Later, the restaurant was converted into a church.
Georgetown was also a bit snobby. It was home to the first university in Texas, a private arts college with a meticulously maintained campus. There were old families with deep roots, such as the Wolfs, whose surname is now attached to a shopping centre and a subdivision built on what was once their land. Then there were the Stumps, who practised law and had an office on the town square: Stump, Stump and Stump. One Stump was very involved in St John’s United Methodist Church, which was founded by Swedish immigrants in 1882. They had a Swedish-language service early on Christmas morning for descendants of the original members. But most impressive of all was that Williamson County was “dry”, meaning restaurants in Georgetown weren’t allowed to serve alcohol.
It all feels like a lost world now. Things began to change with the opening of Sun City, an “active adult community” for people aged 55 and over that brought an influx of retirees. Sun City was my first exposure to that bizarre American style of authoritarianism, whereby free people submit to strict rules about what colour their doors should be, what kind of plants they can grow in their gardens, and so on.
The inhabitants of Sun City wanted places to go in the evening, so it wasn’t long before the whole dry county thing was abolished and upscale restaurants selling alcohol appeared. My wife and I visited one of them for our anniversary. I remember watching a diner with a personal oxygen tank sipping on some wine. The vibe was snooty and stifling, although rumour had it that Sun City was not quite as buttoned up as it seemed to be. I once met a nurse who told me that the “active adult community” was active in more ways than one and had an unusually high rate of STDs. “They have swinger parties,” she said. To be honest, this is so similar to a myth that swirls around a notorious Florida retirement community that I think it’s an urban legend. But it’s a good story.
More McMansions appeared in my in-laws’ neighbourhood, and new subdivisions were added to the town. During the first decade after my arrival the population grew by 20,000. In 2016, when Clinton ran against Trump, I realised that change went far deeper than the liberalisation of alcohol laws. Much to my surprise, the lawn signs in my in-laws’ neighbourhood seemed evenly divided between Trump and Clinton. There was even a “This House Believes…” sign down by the nature trail. But it was during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that I really understood how much Georgetown had changed, when there was a major standoff over the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse. One week I’d visit and there would be a crowd of protestors petitioning for its removal; the next, a motley crew dressed in Confederate uniforms would be there defending it. In the cemetery, little Confederate flags appeared by the graves of soldiers who had fought against the Union.
Ultimately, the monument stood — although efforts to remove it continue. Despite that, the protestors seemed much more at home on the square than the recalcitrant Confederacy cosplayers. Whereas once I used to see a burly man casually strolling about with an assault rifle over his shoulder, I now saw a “woman-owned bookshop” that celebrated inclusion and LGBTQ voices. A fancy confectionary shop opened, as did a winery that also sold artisanal olive oil. It became commonplace to see people weaving in and out of the shops, drinking wine in the open. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this irritated me so much until my son asked if the powers that be in Georgetown would be quite so relaxed if a group of Mexican day labourers started knocking back Corona beers in front of the courthouse, or if a trucker turned up and started swigging whiskey from a bottle in a brown paper bag.
Read the rest here.
The Best Album (Back) Covers of All Time IV: Quartet for the End of Time
In 1939, the French composer and Catholic mystic Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was drafted into the French army as a medical orderly. His war was brief, however, as he was taken captive by the Nazis at Verdun in May 1940. From there he was transported to the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Gorlitz, Germany where he composed Quartet for the End of Time. It was in the camp, too, that the quartet received its premiere on January 15th 1941. Four musician-POWs performed the eight movements for piano, violin, cello and clarinet that alternate between angular, grating passages and sustained moments of ethereal calm. Messiaen took the title from the Book of Revelation, dedicating the piece to “the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hand towards Heaven saying ‘There shall be no more time.”
Quartet for the End of Time went on to become one of the most celebrated pieces of 20th century chamber music. In 1975, decades after its debut performance in the Stalag VIIA camp, the Tashi ensemble was formed specifically to make a recording of Messiaen’s composition for the RCA Red Seal label. Tashi’s members were all young, highly accomplished classical musicians. Pianist Peter Serkin was the son of Rudolph Serkin, a legendary interpreter of Beethoven, while the other three were equally at home in the world of avant-garde and experimental jazz: Ida Kavafian (violin) played with Chick Corea, Fred Sherry (cello) played with Chick Corea and John Zorn, while Richard Stoltzman (clarinet) played with Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter and Keith Jarret.
But as much as Tashi’s interpretation of Quartet for the End of Time is deservedly still held in high esteem nearly fifty years after it was recorded, it is not their musicianship that I have come to praise today. Rather, it is the back cover which features all four members of Tashi grinning at the camera, looking less like classical musicians and more like the members of a bizarre microtonal folk band who once opened for Country Joe and the Fish. In particular, I would like to draw your attention to clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, seated on the left in velvet robes with a giant butterfly on the sleeve, as if his greatest desire is to replace Rick Wakeman on the keyboards in prog rock titans Yes. When I look at this back cover, I too want to be part of a classical quartet in 1976, casually tossing off virtuosic performances of avant-garde contemporary music written by traumatized war survivors in-between my duties chopping wood and changing diapers on a hippy commune in northern California.
Alas, this artwork was not to endure. Many years later, Tashi’s version of Quartet for the End of Time was re-released on CD. I own that too. The sound is much clearer, but the back cover is infinitely drearier.
Previous installments of The Best Album (Back) Covers of All Time:
Electronic Meditation by Tangerine Dream
From the Inside by Alice Cooper.
Dying Inside: Robert Silverberg
In TSDK #50 and #53 I wrote brief tributes to Christopher Priest and Robert Irwin, two authors I admire who had recently died. Given the rather melancholy nature of such an undertaking I thought I should write in praise of an author who, at 89 years of age, is still among the living: Robert Silverberg.
Silverberg began his career as a hack writer of space operas for pulp magazines in the 1950s. In a two year period he published eleven novels and 220 short stories, and was so burned out that he retired in 1959. However he soon un-retired and in the 1960s branched out into erotic novels, mysteries and non-fiction including Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations. However while most pulp authors cranked away and remained poor, Silverberg invested his earnings and was independently wealthy by the age of 30. (The video below offers a glimpse of his house and library). And it was also around this time that he changed direction and started to write works of high literary merit.
Although I had read some of Silverberg’s pulp stories in my teens I was unfamiliar with his other work until last year, when I finally read the copy of Dying Inside (1972) that I had bought 30 or so years ago. This, it turns out, is widely regarded as his finest novel.
Ostensibly Dying Inside is a story about telepathy, but Silverberg’s treatment of the topic is unique. His protagonist, 41-year-old David Selig, has been blessed with this power but he hasn’t made particularly good use of it. He eavesdrops on people, enters into his girlfriend’s mind as she is experiencing orgasm, and also applies the power to making a living with the minimum effort possible. Telepathy at once gives him access to the inner lives of those around him, but it is simultaneously profoundly isolating as he keeps his abilities secret.
Then one day, his powers start to wane. Silverberg explores in great detail the diminishing of Selig’s world, his anguish, his loss of vitality. On the one hand it is a detailed exploration of what it would be like to have telepathic powers and lose them; on the other it is one of the most harrowing midlife crisis novels you are likely to read, even though Silverberg was not yet 40 when he wrote it.
Last year, besides Dying Inside, I also read Thorns (1967) which was one of Silverberg’s first experiments in his more literary mode. In this novel, a space explorer whose body has been rendered freakish by aliens and a surrogate mother who had all one hundred of her children taken away from her are sent on a tour of the cosmos as part of a reality TV show. The squabbling and bickering of the mismatched couple is broadcast to a vast audience that enjoys their pain. Silverberg was nothing if not prescient. This summer I read The Book of Skulls (1972) in which four frat boys set off on a quest across America to find a monastery where you can attain immortality, although two of them just die if the other two are to live forever….
Both Thorns and The Book of Skulls are intelligent, thought provoking novels, but Dying Inside is exceptional and I highly recommend it. I also have an old copy of Nightwings on my shelves as well as Silverberg’s retelling of Gilgamesh; I expect I will eventually get around to reading all or most of the books from his literary period. It is easy to demarcate, because Silverberg grew irritated at the lack of appreciation for his work and retired again in 1975. When he resumed his literally career in 1980, he was still adept at crafting well-written entertainment, but like David Selig, something special was gone.
From The Secret History of the World
Chemical toilets at the end of time.
Fermented Meat Party
This article on what you aren’t told about traditional diets is simply one of the best things I have ever read on Substack. By the pseudonymous “Stone Age Herbalist” it will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about our ancestors’ taste for fermented or even putrefied meat... and then some. Here is a brief excerpt:
….many northern latitude cultures go against the general rules of butchery and hygiene by leaving the stomach contents and the bowels intact within the animal, before depositing the whole creature to ferment underground. Evidently the bacterial contamination of the meat is intentional, and reports of the aftermath make for quite grim reading:
In the fall of the year they casually cache their caribou without removing the stomach. The semi-digested vegetable contents ferment and taint all the flesh, but the Copper Eskimo relishes both the smell and the flavour, though his more sophisticated brother in the west pronounces them disgusting. I have seen a man take a bone from rotten caribou-meat cached more than a year before, crack it and eat the marrow with evident relish, although it swarmed with maggots. As a rule such meat is fed to the dogs, but not infrequently the natives cook it for themselves, especially when fresh meat is not available.
- “The Life of the Copper Eskimos.” In Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1922) Diamond Jenness
A particularly strange version of this underground fermentation is the northern Russian dish of kopalhen. A well fed deer is captured and starved for several days, to cleanse the intestines, before being strangled and placed whole into a swamp. The animal then ferments from the inside out whilst underwater, and the resulting food is probably best seen as an emergency cache against starvation. There isn’t a lot written about it in English, but apparently the meat is so full of lethal byproducts that the local people (Khanty, Evenki etc) have to be conditioned from childhood to be able to stomach it and not die a horrible death from neurotoxin overload.
I encourage you to read the whole thing (though perhaps not over lunch).
Ding Dong (Slight Return)
…anthem for a small Texas town.
That’s it for this issue of TSDK. I thank you for your kind attention and shall be back in your inbox soon with fresh wonders.
Regards,
DK
The piece on the Californication of Texas in Unherd is very good, acutely observed, recommended.
I cannot endorse Silverberg strongly enough. I’m also a big fan of The World Inside, The Second Trip, and Son of Man (although Silverberg experimented with stream
of consciousness and otherwise overtly experimentalist techniques in bits in his other books - Dying Inside often employs them - Son of Man is the only one where the whole book is written in such a mode), and the short story collection Beyond the Safe Zone.