"Class Card"

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art has asked about the words "class card" in the Arthur Crudup recording embedded in my last post. (Some people may hear "draft card," but I don't think that's what he sings.) The entire line in which those words are found has caused problems. One version of the lyrics has the following:

Well, I got my quiet canary, my class card, too
My baby's wonderin', lord, now what am I to do?

Another has:

Well, I got my white canary, my class card, too
My baby's wondering Lord now what am I to do?

It's clear to me, however, that Crudup isn't singing about a canary, quiet or white or otherwise; the word is "questionnary," that is, "questionnaire," and that's reinforced by the fact that Crudup has another blues ("Give Me A .32-20," sometimes called "Questionnaire Blues") that opens with the following lines:

I've got my questionnaire, and they needs me in the war
I've got my questionnaire, and they needs me in the war
Now if I feel murder, don't have to break the county law

Here again Crudup distinctly adds an extra syllable to "questionnaire."

The "questionnaire" Crudup refers to is presumably the document authorized in 1948 by President Harry Truman in Executive Order 9988. This "Classification Questionnaire" (SSS Form No. 100) was sent to potential draftees in order to determine their eligibility for concription. (There may have been earlier versions.) And Crudup's "class card" was probably the "Notice of Classification," which was one of the two "draft cards" issued by the Selective Service System, the other being a "Registration Certificate."

Sources:
Executive Order 9988—Prescribing Portions of the Selective Service Regulations
Selective Service System: Draft Cards

The Wisdom of the Burrowers

Anthony J. Martin, from the author's website:

Burrows are a refuge from predators, a safe home for raising young, or a tool to ambush prey. Burrows also protect animals against all types of natural disasters: fires, droughts, storms, meteorites, global warmings―and coolings. On a grander scale, the first animal burrows transformed the chemistry of the planet itself many millions of years earlier, altering whole ecosystems. Many animal lineages alive now―including our own―only survived a cataclysmic meteorite strike 65 million years ago because they went underground.

The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet

Arthur Crudup:

Flight (Eduardo Halfon)

Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona has released the seventh in a series of slim, elegant volumes by the writer Eduardo Halfon. Like the others, Tarántula explores in quasi-fictional form the complicated matter of being a Guatemalan-born secular Jew and descendent of Holocaust survivors.

Born in Guatemala in 1971, Halfon left the country as an adolescent when his family fled political turmoil there and resettled in Florida, where he temporarily adopted English as his preferred language. (He now writes in Spanish, but is apparently fully bilingual or more likely multilingual.) When he was thirteen, the narrator of Tarántula, who is also named Eduardo Halfon, was sent back to Guatemala, along with a younger brother, in order to attend a camp that taught survival skills, or, more pointedly, survival skills for Jews. The experience soon took a dark turn, and Halfon took to his heels, hiding in the countryside until he came across a sympathetic campesina. The book relates how, years later, he encountered a female fellow-camper and, eventually, had a confrontational meeting with the former director of the camp, a man with apparent ties to shadowy security organizations.

Eduardo Halfon has described how an interviewer once asked him, provocatively, which two books that he had not read had influenced him the most. In response, equally provocatively, he cited the Torah and the Popol Vuh, the latter being the foundational mythological scripture of Guatemalan indigenous culture.

When I mentioned to a friend this bizarre question-and-answer exchange with the Spanish journalist, she asked me why I didn’t just read both books now? Why did I still doggedly insist on not reading them? And I told her, with as much gravitas as I could muster, that if I did read them now I’d undoubtedly explode.

The truth, however, is that I don’t feel I need to. I already carry both of them with me, written somewhere inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I’m allowed that oversimplification, and if I can call books those two monumental works that represent and define my two worlds—the two great columns upon which my house is built. But a house that for some reason, ever since childhood, I needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why I always felt that way, as if something was forcing me to run off and disappear.

I’ve spent an entire lifetime running away from home.

Halfon's declaration may or may not be strictly accurate; for one thing, he has provided a blurb for an illustrated edition of the Popul Vuh created by Ilan Stavans (a fellow Latin American writer of Jewish ancestry). Nevertheless, the powerful centripetal and centrifugal forces of influence and flight run through all of his work.

Tarántula is so far only available in Spanish (and several European languages), but an English-language edition is planned. The text of the above excerpt is available in English at the website of Tablet magazine.