| Howard E. Cook His professional name is Howard of Athens. Athens, Tennessee that is, where he was born and where he now lives and works. With an undergraduate double major in philosophy and comparative literature from the University of Tennessee, he went on to earn an MA in English from CCNY beforen going to Paris to pursue advanced studies in French language and literature at Schiller International University Paris. During the fabulously radical sixties he lived in Greenwich Village and did free-lance copy editing for various book publisher – Macmillan, McGraw- Hill for example – as well as for TIME, Life, Fortune and Look. He lived at that time on storied Gay Street, an easy walking distance from Washington Square, where in those heady days the hippies and the folk singers gathered, where the counter-culture and sex revolutions were finding a rallying point. While doing postgraduate work at Hunter College and City College he taught English at Columbia Grammar School in Manhattan. Better pay in the New York City public school system lured him into attempting to teach English at Ben Franklin High School in Harlem – a futile undertaking. He gave up, shook the dust of Gotham from his shoes and went back home to Athens. He taught French and English at Calhoun High School, near his beloved Athens until that school closed, after which he taught French at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and at Hiwassee College in Monroe County. The above just jacket was designed by the author for Swifter than Eagles: Bill White and the Battle of Athens, 1946, his non-fiction novel about an election-day shootout between returning GIs and a corrupt political machine in Athens. An immediate best-seller on the local scene, it quickly sold out and is now out of print. Swifter than Eagles is now eagerly sought by collectors of rare books. Alas, only one unsold copy of that limited first edition remains in the FRIENDLY CITY PUBLISHING inventory. All the other copies on the market, though they are selling at collecteor prices, are second-hand at best. The soft-cover, revised edition, of The Weed & the Winter Solstice pictured above is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, a dedication inspired by the author's admiration of Kubricks talent for profoundly provocative symbolism.. The complex allegorical symbolism in The Weed & the Winter Solstic, its rich ambiguities should remind the sensitive readerof Kubrick's best films, particularly of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, of which he said this: "the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded." We resoundingly concur wit Kubrick's view. In art cinema, in literatue, in mythology, associations seem to occur at the subconscious level. And Kubrick's phrase "penetrates the subconscious" suggests the secret of the Frankie Silver story's astonishing longetvity, vitality -- and, yes, if we may be pardoned for using that much abused word -- viability. The iconic image -- a marijuana bud that looks like a Christmas tree with the all-seeing eye topping the tree in place of the traditional angel -- on the cover of the revised edition was put together by the auhor. The marijuana bud is shaped like a Christmas tree, and is meant to stir memories -- at least at the subconscious level -- of the Christmas tree, our common festive symbol of the winter solstice. The white blossoms on the bud should, in that context, suggest the lights on a Christmas tree. White will, hopefully, also suggest snow; and the green should call up images of summer, the growing season. The eye and the Sun have both religious and mundane associations: the all-seeing eye of Diety and a "Byrd's eye" view, for the story is told from Mr. Byrd's point of view. Need it be said that marijuana means Mary John and is commonly called 'the weed'? Kubrick may also have been intrigued by the symbolic significance of the name of Mr.Byrd's grandson by adoption: 'Space.' Another cinemtic element Kurbrick may have seen in The Weed & the Winter Solstice is the way the story shifts constantly from long shot to close-up, and the great variety of characters in the novel -- ranging from the almost saintly Mr. Byrd to his arch enemy Charlie Jim (real name Cheter Pesterfield) -- from the the sophisticated and highly intellectual Brenda -- astronaut and mother of Space -- to the ignorant, backwoodsy preacher-woman Pest. - The above images were put together by the author for his work-in- progress COGS: From Tower to Pyramid. The symbolic imges chosen for the cover are The Tower of Babel and The Pyramid from the Great Seal of the United States. COGS; From Tower to Pyramid embraces FAP (the final anthropic principle) and develops the thesis that the current human situation, viewed from a millennial and cosmological perspective, is in a phase transition. That millennial and cosmological perspective has been characteristic of this author’s work from his first novel The Weed & the Winter Solstice as is evident from the account of how The Weed & the Winter Solstice came to be written. See "About this Novel." The black and white photo of the author at the top of this page was taken at a dinner party in Washington DC (given by his friend Sue Tracy ( proud descendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson BTW) to celebrate both his birthday and the acceptance for publication by Houghton MIfflin of his novel Waiting for the Sunrise, which after many revisions became The Weed & the Winter Solstice. For when he read the proof pages of Waiting for the Sunrise he saw that the omniscient author point of view was all wrong and withdrew it from publication. The story needed a first-person narrator involved in the action. That narrator became Mr. Byrd and Waiting for the Sunrise eventually became The Weed & the Winter Solstice On the symbolic and philosophical level the novel was deeply influenced by Jose Arguelles' book Earth Ascending. Hence the iconic significance of the black and white dust jacket on the limited first edition. |
About the Author
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