Brave Ulysses – Books and Art and Politics

A very brave cat

Post author By cbothwell
Post date November 1, 2021
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I dropped out of college in 1970 to paint, showing my abstracts at sidewalk shows for a couple of seasons which naturally enough led to marriage, formation of a rock band, a career as a general (GREEN) contractor, a stint as editor of a literary journal, winning the 1993 Southeast Poetry Slam, ten years as a syndicated columnist and radio commentator, creating the Warren Wilson College enviro journal Heartstone, Mountain Xpress managing editorship, and election to Asheville City Council in 2009. I returned to painting in the mid-00s. Since leaving Council I’ve focused on writing and music and kept up a part time business as a Mr. Fixit.

Today I am drawn to realism: land- and water-scapes, decaying barns and chickens. Lots and lots of chickens. In 2016 I commenced to paint a series of sunsets from places where I’ve watched the sun set—from Key West To Alaska and Mazatlan to Newfoundland. And to Unrealism in the form of meta-fiction.

In 2000 I decided to start publishing books and decided to call my company Brave Ulysses Books. Brave Ulysses was my very best cat ever, the runt of a 9 kitten litter, and so-named to give him courage. Sadly, he was killed by an idiot with a gun when he was only 10 years old. Here, he lives on.

In the past 24 years I have published eighteen of my own titles , and published or facilitated publication of four other authors.

Books

The Looneyness of the Long Distance Rumor

Post author By cbothwell
Post date December 28, 2024
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You hear so much. Y’know? And how much of it is true. Somebody told you. They said it. Your ear received. That’s why it’s called hearsay.
Here we sort out what was said. Follow Koa into the Australian outback or Dirk to the International Space Station. (Long distance, or what?) Funny, of course. But way deep.
Free will? Free Willy?

See? This is number 18 for your author, and the eighth collection of short fiction. You miss it at your peril. (More than 334 Footnotes!)

From Footnote #79:

Couples separated for lengthy periods are apparently more likely to split. There seems to be a tendency to “love the one you’re with” as Stephen Stills® framed it in 1970. Koa, in the present instance, was alone. Well, no, he’d picked up a tick a couple of days before he ran by Connie and Bill, but the attraction wasn’t mutual. We may agree with Boudleaux Bryant® who wrote “Love Hurts” back in 1960 (first recorded by the Everly Brothers® and subsequently by a wide range of pop stars) but the essential hurt in most cases involves parting. Koa felt no remorse when he removed the over-affectionate arachnid from his epidermal sheath. (For every tick there comes a tock, whether early or distressingly late. Satisfaction is ever and always in the belly of the beholder. The tick clearly felt a sense of attachment. But, mostly, Koa runs alone.)Mostly. There was that stretch way west of Walla Walla where a high school track team joined him for about five miles, but the kids were panting too heavily to engage in conversation, so it was company without companionship. Of course, in the course of a long distance run it seems possible that a person might consider the BIG PICTURE. Where do we come from, where do we go? Or, de minimus, (Latin!), where did I come from and where am I going? He’s obviously had some time to think. This sprint might appear to be a short hop to those of us who have only been following it since page 14, but hold your horses! (Or wallabies.) This adventure has obviously transpired over many years. Even for those of us in top physical condition, chasing sheep from Down Under via South and East Asia, through Siberia thence Alaska, across western Canada and the Pacific northwest, over the Rockies, via the Great Plains, stone-stepping some minor tributary of the Mighty Mississippi, and so forth and so on (as my grandfather so often said) … takes some serious clock.

Tags Madness

Books

That’s Life! (as we know it)

Post author By cbothwell
Post date December 28, 2024
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Getting down to the nitty of the gritty here, with 20 General Rules for living! And earthworms! And alien mattresses! And the ever present question “Where do ideas come from?”

Books

Lucky Breaks (breaking good)

Post author By cbothwell
Post date December 28, 2024
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The sixth collection in my storied story adventure. This time around a focus on how bad things are good from time to time. Hence we have bad things happening to good people but not in a bad way.

Tags Short stories

Books

Cede Catalogue: giving it all away

Post author By cbothwell
Post date November 21, 2021
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The next in my parade of mischief, this one was inspired by a catalogue, as you certainly can imagine, from a local company called Sow True Seeds. The protagonists in these tales all yield in one way or another. (As the cover indicates this one has a record-breaking 378 footnotes!)

From the opening story

Sew True Cedes

I don’t think there ever are. True ones, I mean. They’re inherently reluctant. Anything ceded is, ipso facto, something that someone didn’t want to yield, else it would be “gifted.”

Does that make sense? What I’m driving at here is that if a person truly gives something up it suggests a heartfelt letting go, which one does with a gift but not a concession. A concession is extracted, like a tooth, and face it: No one goes into a serious dental procedure full of glee. (Well, maybe after nitrous?)

But here I’ve set myself up (see story title above) with the task of stitching together some sort of fictional quilt out of whole cloth regarding the up-giving of something or another. That’s the name game I play, starting with a title for a book that forces my hand—or my pixels, I guess—demanding something like 200 pages devoted to the beast thus conjured.

It’s a difficult task, to be sure. But someone has to do it.

Truth be told, I don’t honestly believe very many are up to the job. I mean to say, “I’ve been around the block a few times.”

Here I’m throwing myself into the breach. Think of me as a sacrificial lamb fed raw to the ravenous muse of fiction.

Or, hey, a scapegoat. Whatever gets ceded from here on in? Blame me. I can handle it.

Books

Tags Books, Fiction

Books

Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths

Post author By cbothwell
Post date April 17, 2021
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More of what you came for!

“I think it goes without saying—which is, of course, ever and always a lead-in to saying what the speaker has just told you didn’t need to be said in the first place—that it is the unvarnished tooth that draws our attention. Am I right? Of course I’m right.

“Sometimes, I’ll be the first to admit, it is “tooth and claw” (italics mine) that rivet us. “Red” said Tennyson and he was occasionally on point, but I submit it is the tooth that most bemuses us. As I faithfully recorded in “Jack,”¹ when I was on that rocky ledge looking down and the bear was looking up at me the claws were an afterthought.”

1See Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver, p. 59 (Fiction, yes, but faithfully recorded.)

You see? Of course you see. So, order already!

Tags Books

Books

13, really? My 13th book? Waist Not Want Knot

Post author By cbothwell
Post date August 8, 2020
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So, lucky or not, here we go again. Another collection of improbable stories. But, actually, did you expect better? Really? Am guessing the Trumpidemic and its attendant seclusion has gone viral.
The latest eruption from my fevered head revolves around midriffs, stretch pants, rigging, rope, quipus, and what knot. This time with more than 256 footnotes to amuse and confuse (257, actually.) There’s an excerpt below the pic.

Waist Not, Want Knot (the title story of this collection)

—Let’s get the nitty gritty out of the way at the outset. This story is not about waists or knots. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a heathen and a cheat.

If you bought this book under the impression that it would contain pop-diet information, something about how to lose ten pounds in ten days, or help in acquiring the Boy Scout Pioneering Merit Badge, perhaps a diagrammatic exposition of the Bowline or the Trucker’s Knot, you are going to be severely disappointed. Though, truth be told, if you haven’t mastered the Trucker’s Knot by now you are a sad, sad case and have likely lost numerous valuable items from your roof rack or pickup bed.

If you have not yet lost numerous valuable items from your roof rack or pickup bed, trust me, it is only a matter of time.

More than a few of you likely saw the word “waist” in the title and immediately pictured an attractive young woman being sawn in half by a stage magician. We might as well nip that one in bud as well. No magic here.¹

On the other hand, if you stumbled in here with an open mind and low expectations you might be pleasantly surprised.

**************

1But have you ever considered how many assistants those guys go through before they finally “get it right?”

Tags Books, Short stories

Books

More Moo

Front cover of Bothwell's latest short story collection. — **Bothwell’s 12th book**

Cecil is at it again with another collection of short stories. This time with more than 100 footnotes to titillate and delight! The perfect gift for readers in a hurry with one story contained within a brief paragraph!
Within these pages you’ll meet an electrician/goatherd with a “steer”ing problem, an inflated whistle blower, the woman left behind in The Last Train to Clarksville, a ball player with a big head, an art thief, Johnny Appleseed’s spiritual heir, the patron of an unusual library, unsuspecting sisters of different mothers, and more.

Here’s one story in its entirety! When’s the last time that happened?

It goes without saying

We all knew it would happen, or at least suspected as much. Given the circumstances, the proximity, the who, and the who knew who. The how. Particularly after what transpired the day before. No, make that two days before. That would have been the twenty-fifth.

I mean, if you couldn’t see that coming … no, I don’t mean you, personally, but “one,” though that one could be you. If the shoe fits, dear heart. But if one couldn’t see that coming, one had to be intentionally looking the other way.

Sometimes of course it is easier to look away than to face facts, particularly uncomfortable facts. Or incontrovertible and boldly graphic facts. Think bar graph where the bar over here on the right is a whole lot shorter, indicating real change. Facts that make one (you?) choose sides, when neutrality seems far safer.

There are a whole lot of fence sitters on this planet, with one leg in each pasture, so to speak, unwilling to take a stand what with their feet a foot off the ground, or each foot a foot, meaning that in one context they are arguably two feet up. Lucky indeed to be seated on the flat edge of a split rail, rather than, say for example, on a run of barbed wire. Ouch! Ready to go one way or the other as needed to maintain plausible deniability.

“No officer, I was over on this side the whole time.”

Not that there are officers involved.

Yet.

So as the whole thing unfolded like a paper crane uncreased to its pre-origamic pristine squareness, as the true nature of the substance of the situation was rendered plain as the Wonder Bread® Mom used for your PB&Js, right there, nakedly exposed, for you to examine, corner to corner, obverse and reverse, proximal and distal, I heard someone say “See?”

It was not at all clear to the rest of us whether your nod indicated mild agreement or slight puzzlement.

I think it would be accurate to say that anyone who has followed the whole sorry affair to this point shares my concern. This is not a happy situation.

But we’ve gotten to the bottom of it now. Am I right?

Order yours here!

Tags Book, Short stories

Books

Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver

Post author By cbothwell
Post date June 3, 2018
No Comments on Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver

Ronald Reagan once claimed school lunches were healthy because they included ketchup. — Cover pic

Cecil Bothwell delivers another improbable batch of short fiction. Deadly serious or wildly funny they cascade from his faulty noggin like lava into a community swimming pool. Relationships run afoul of disparate musical taste: Paul Simon or Bob Dylan? Angie has lists, lots of them. Almost no one in a work share co-op is satisfied with their trades and a bike shop owner ponders cosmology while adjusting brakes and chains. Oh, and then there’s the crocodile.
Brave Ulysses Books, 2018, $16

Order yours here!

Paintings

Sunsets I have seen

Currently doing a series of sunsets I have seen over the years, across the continent. The date in the title is the last time I saw the scene, the date following is the date I did the painting.