"A Mitzvah On Your First-Born." Or, "Sound, Fury, And So On."

"That's a good question. That--the explanation of that whole book is in that. It began with the picture of the little girl's muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw."
     William Faulkner on the genesis of The Sound and the Fury. From Faulkner in the University.

"Cry baby, Luster said. Aint you shamed. We went through the barn. The stalls were all open. You aint got no spotted pony to ride now, Luster said. The floor was dry and dusty. The roof was falling. The slanting holes were full of spinning yellow. What do you want to go that way, for. You want to get your head knocked off with one of them balls."
      The Sound and the Fury. 

Notes from a recent episode:––
                                                    thoughts resulting:––

1. Dog, post-bust, saying "God bless" and "Aloha" to the cops as they part ways. He goes too far, and calls one of them "sweetheart".

2. Perp's name was Alfred.  Dog, that old dotard, staggered through the perp's home, hoarsely hollering for him to give himself up; calling him variously "Howard" and "Albert".

3. The team have those huge Rob Liefeld Cable and X-Force-style flame-thrower bazookas that they carry abroad with them, but they can't possibly fire bullets, so what exactly do they fire?

              A: Ping-pong balls.
              A: Hot air.
              A: Cotton candy.

4. This was the episode which introduced a new character, Leland's benighted son DAKOTA, to the cast. Followed the usual hazing that verges on child abuse. Leland sprayed Dakota in the eyes with mace and tazed him. Tackled him hard in the street and gave him "noogies". Then he sat him astride a female masturbation device and forced him to "go ten rounds atop it." I didn't see quite how this was relevant to the successful learning of crime-fighting techniques.

To properly mark the solemn dynastic quality of the episode, Leland gathered everybody on the "Big Island" where he would have them go in pursuit of the son of a man he had arrested seven years earlier.

Dakota had graduated that week and Leland obviously felt the undeniable pull of the years and the miracle of time passing and the cosmic cycles and equinoxes and solstices that mark a man's time on this paltry planet. He was waxing philosophical, reminiscent: "My son's graduating. I'm so proud. He wants to be a bounty hunter. I actually had Dakota in my arms when I walked up my graduation line. So for his graduation present I'm going to buy him his first truck."

I spent about half a minute trying to determine how the one situation in the dim past (the magnificent  babe in arms scene) led ipso facto to his decision in the present to buy Dakota a truck. Then I caught myself, remembered that this was Dog and Beth on the Hunt, and as such had no debt to reason, and dismissed the speculation utterly.

This episode was Faulknerian, and not just from all the dwelling on doomed, collapsing white dynasties hellbent on vicious self-destruction. No, and not just the Myth of the Lost Cause. Faulkner's hand seemed to be directing Leland's gobsmacked awe as he recalled how seven years previous he had hidden in a "little room by the gate" and waited for the old scoundrel to return. It came back to him irresistibly in a stream of consciousness, like Caddy in her muddy drawers watching through the window––

Now Leland was coming for the son of the old rascal. Fatherhood was in the episode –– inheritance –– blood crimes. The sins of the father visited on the head of the first-born.

Absalom, Absalom. Old Colonel Sutpen. A mitzvah on your first-born. The remains of the family, reclusive in the neglected tracts, hidden out in his ruined old mansion –– the bougainvillea, the neglected porch swing, and cetera.

To add spice to the mix, the old man himself was only now out of his seven year "stretch" and he blundered straight into the middle of the arrest.

As Leland was hunkering down in his old hiding place, as if in a divine pocket outside time –– Zachary in the tree ––  ecstatically feeling the onrush of time and empires and dynasties, the smallness of Man and the largeness of God, the old man came onto the set roaring profanities and picking a brawl with Dog. Meanwhile, the old man's girlfriend was sitting in the cab of the pick-up putting on lipstick by the dashboard light!

"So ironic," Dog mused after the anticlimactic arrest. Summing up. "So ironic that this is the second generation that Leland has arrested, he arrested the father years ago, now arrested the son. It's the third generation of bounty hunters. It's ironic that, you know, how the world turns."

It would've been nice to end it there with that universal thought for the day, but hey killed the moment rather by showing a preview of next week's show where Dog brays, "We ain't huntin' alligators. We ain't huntin' boar. We're huntin' a man."

"Dog the Bounty Hunter: A Novel."

Since 1993 I have had the irresistible compulsion to write a novel, but when it comes down to it I only rouse idle trivial thoughts and bop them around dully like a kitten playing cup and ball - fetid leaves swept up from the flagstones which flare for a spell, flicker and duly settle again in a different corner.

Banana leaves -- sycamore leaves -- my leaves are autumnal and broke - - -

I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees / And before dying, I want to share these poems of my soul / My poems are soft green / My poems are also flaming crimson /My poems are like a wounded fawn seeking refuge in the forest.

This is another clump of the self-same dry leaves. A pot-pourri for the maw of Tophet, if you will allow the flourish. (If you will not, disregard the last sentence.)

I thought: there is a Faulknerian dynastic novel lurking within the seemingly banal and berserk goings-on of the bounty-hunting Chapman family.

Dog the Bounty Hunter is aired on TV in a muddle of repeats from different years in which we are tumbled back and forth through the time-space continuum willy-nilly in the company of the Chapman family. It is an anti-chronological negative-zone whirlpool in which even an experienced time-traveller could get confused. Even so, the current season of Dog the Bounty Hunter is easily recognisable from among the others.

In the new episodes, Beth looks pronouncedly younger and Dog looks conspicuously older.

Dog has lost weight and his lower eyelids have accordingly sunk eight inches as a result and he now looks gaunt and noble -- thwarted and impotent, like a Biblical patriarch. When he stares dolefully into the mist (mistily into the dole queue), as his family skirmishes around him, mace cans in their hands, I get to idly daydreaming about writing a thinly-veiled novel about Dog the Bounty Hunter and his family. The inevitable ageing and the doomed onset of wisdom would be my subject. Arms and the man would be my subject. My conjectures would be followed to their logical endpoints for a rip-roaring legend for all the family.

(Here everything disintegrates into sketchy notes written in a fever.)

Dog: firstly he is older. Obviously so. You can see his mind is no longer on the job.

His vacant expression at inapt times.

Reinstating his nephew Justin was clearly a poor choice and a clear sign that Dog had lost his tactical edge. Justin was and always will be a lovable fuck-up. Everybody knows this but Dog doggedly insisted on giving this dog another day. They brought Justin back to the pack and this proves to have been a fatal right poor decision later on in the novel.

Important: Leland has an affair with Beth. This was my first spark of inspiration, I must admit. As Dog gets older and Beth seemingly gets younger, she starts to look at the son in a way she never used to. She is a tough woman with a hide like a rhinocerous and a heart like an elephant. She needs constant warming-up and upkeep.

They carry on outrageously to the disgust of everybody except Dog who doesn't (or doesn't seem to) notice it. If he does notice it, he doesn't apparently care. Also Baby-Lissa (nearly wrote Amy-Liisa there) is so stunned by TV fame that she follows Beth around uncritically, narcissistically.

We, the readers, will have the inside knowledge that Dog does know about it; and he freely lets Beth and Leland "run around" together because Dog feels a dreadful guilt - no, not guilt - regret that he can no longer sexually satisfy Beth in the way to which she is accustomed.

Important to insert a quote here from "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town."

Duane Lee, however, knows of the disgusting incestuous affair and he at least shan't stand for the outrage of his father's good name and virtue. This is the set-up for the ancient mythological ur-tale of The Two Warring Brothers. Cain and Abel -- Duane Lee and Leland.

Duane Lee, in this season, has been filmed "working out in the gym" - assisting the one-legged Justin and helping him build his muscles up "so he can be tough like me." This is something of a strange character development for us viewers, who are used to seeing Duane Lee as a bit of a goof-off second-rater, a fat coward and a sneak. Dog always sends Duane Lee "round the back" of a perp's shack - where nothing ever happens. Dog places more responsibility in the lap of Baby-Lissa than the ample lap of Duane Lee for goodness' sake!

Anyway so there is this laughable idea that Duane Lee has been out in the wilderness building himself up into a Tough Guy, like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo - training, as I say, with that dependable misfit One-Legged Justin. Training for his bout with Leland.

Meanwhile Beth has had various surgical procedures to make herself thinner and younger-looking. She also spends more time - too much time it is whispered - with her personal assistants, who woo and wow her with ideas from New York and Los Angeles -- Paris, Milan and London. Even some ideas from Luxembourg.

Beth becomes more urban and "cool" just as Dog is become more rural and foggy and fazed-out. Beth is also ever more cruel and bloodthirsty on bounties. She is taking out her stress on the perps, just as Dog is becoming more humane and philosophical and magnanimous with them. Obvious rifts emerge, both in matters of bounty-hunting technique and in the vagueries of the boudoir.

Maybe it all comes to a head when Beth violently murders a perp who after all only has one measly misdemeanour for "alleged illegal custodianship of a propelled vehicle". Dog is shocked and wants Beth to turn herself in to the "County Sheriff" or the "Federal Marshall" [?] but she won't - worse, she makes Dog collude with her, forcing him at gunpoint and in tears to bury the corpse.

"Now you're implicated, Big Daddy!" she drawls through a curled lip - and sniggers.

Dog sobs, leaning on his spade. The scene resembles Millet's Angelus.

Dog becomes more and more abstracted as the novel goes on. Falls in love with a horse.

Duane Lee becomes crazier and crazier, under the absurd illusion that he is a tough guy.

Youngblood - you wonder about Youngblood. Where is he? I wonder this too. Youngblood, I decided, is craftily exiled from the gang by Beth's "Macchiavelian machinations"; she manipulates events so that Youngblood and Dog have a final falling-out over a seemingly trivial thing. (Cigarettes, say - - or the Samoan secretary.)

This could be connected cleverly to the real-life allegations that Youngblood was caught jerking off in his car a few years ago.

Anyway I'd have it end so that Youngblood comes through finally to redeem Dog's shame, his cuckolded humiliation, but at a horrific cost. Leland kills Justin and Duane Lee with consummate ease (he has, I should perhaps have mentioned, become a diabolical, monosyllabic ninja killer by this point; finds himself in the sinister, dazed, doomed thrall of Beth). Even so Youngblood kills Leland with nunchuks and then, in a heroic fury, Beth.

Dog enters the room hazy from an afternoon catnap to find Youngblood standing over the corpses and he goes, "Whu-- Tim-- bra! -- you killed Bethy!" He and Youngblood tazer eachother and that's how it ends - with the two men tragically locked in each other's tazers, electricity pulsing through them.

Incidentally, has a novel ever ended with a tazer duel before?