James Joaquin Brewer
Pilgrim Ways and Voices:
Bryars’ Tramp and Salinger’s Glasses
mixed-genre essay regarding possibly “now-overlooked” works
Books quoted:
Franny and Zooey
J.D. Salinger
The Way of a Pilgrim
translated by Olga Savin
Musical recording quoted:
Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet
Point Music (CD D135396), 1993
became aware of “Jesus’ Blood” on a rainy freeway night many years ago as I drove north through Hartford on my way to Bradley International Airport. Radio crackle and static related to the remnants of a dark-night thunder-and-lightning storm led to my hitting the “seek” button on the FM dial in hopes of finding a clear signal. I sought. I found. A voice sounding simultaneously meek and sturdy, gentle but assertive, was singing the following stanza over and over and over and over and over and over and . . .
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
Never failed me yet
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
There’s one thing I know
For He loves me so
t was sung repetitively, with virtually no vocal variation. It stopped only when the radio host interrupted to provide commentary and engage in dialogue with a critic. I arrived at the airport before learning the names of either the host or the guest and after losing the FM signal and changing the station. As I approached the airport, I was aware of a special “ear-worm” experience: continual consciousness of resonant residues of the music I had heard, an internalized harmony of lyric, melody, rhythm, and tone. Despite the driving conditions created by the stormy weather and my concern that my flight might be delayed, as I entered the parking-garage I was feeling almost “serene”—a palpable, non-abstract sense of calm.
I did not want to forget about this music, so I attempted to write the composer’s name on the back of my parking stub. I wrote: “Breyers?” Never having heard before of a composer with that name, I didn’t know if the spelling should be like the ice cream brand or perhaps suggest the thorns of a briar patch. My moments of seeming serenity had been diminished only mildly by the radio critic’s pompous remarks to the effect that he had listened to the entire recording of “Jesus’ Blood” just once, requiring over an hour of his patience, and that he could not imagine himself listening to it “all the way through” again. He compared the experience to climbing a challenging mountain and coming back down accompanied by the thought that one could say without lying that one had actually done it—and would never have to do it again.
I, of course, had yet to listen to it “all the way through,” but on the afternoon I returned from my trip I did not look at the back of my parking ticket and drive straightaway to the nearest remaining record shop to find the recording. It would be a few months later, as I was skimming through junk mail, that I saw a record club offer (of the type now defunct) featuring a choice of CDs “for only one penny,” one of which was from a composer named Gavin Bryars.
“Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” appeared via vinyl in 1975 on Brian Eno’s Obscure 1 label. It occupied all of side B, with the album’s title track, The Sinking of the Titanic, owning all of side A. Several years later, the material on this vinyl album was re-issued on a compact disc from the Virgin label, but this was not yet the “full-length” recording Bryars had been envisioning. The full-length release would be the newer compact disc I had partially encountered that stormy night in Hartford. I joined the record club to get it: the 1993 recording on Point Music (CD D135396). It expands the “Jesus’ Blood” content from the twenty-five minutes on the vinyl LP to almost exactly an hour and a quarter on the updated CD.
In the liner notes to the 1993 release, Bryars describes the composition’s gestation, recounting how some inspiring tapes came into his possession. In 1971, filmmaker Alan Powers was making a documentary in London “about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station.” Not needing certain audio tapes from scenes edited out of the film, Powers gave them to Bryars so the composer could listen to the street music they contained. Among the singers’ voices was that of a man I will refer to hereafter as “Tramp”— “one old man, who in fact did not drink” (in contrast to some of the other “living rough” street people singing drunkenly on the tapes). Haunted by Tramp’s singing, Bryars made reel-to-reel tape loops of the then-short song (“Jesus’ Blood”) and composed a variety of musical accompaniments for it. Over the years he reworked the accompaniments and experimented with the looped recordings; but it was not until the advent of new compact disc technology that Bryars was able to realize his intentions for versions that would not require a listener’s experience to be disrupted by the need to lift a needle, turn an LP from one side to another, replace it on a turntable, and allow the needle to drop again.
While listening to the 1993 recording “all the way through” for the first time, I found myself thinking again of Franny Glass.
was raised in rural Oregon as a Roman Catholic. I was taught that it was an honor to serve Mass as an altar boy, and it was only after I entered college that I questioned that idea (and many other teachings as well). As a child, I was conscious of, sensitive to, and terrified by the tiniest temptations to occasions of sin.
One Saturday my high-school-aged big sister presented me with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I was in the seventh grade, allegedly past the age of reason. “It’s good,” Linda said simply. “But don’t let Mom or Dad see you with it. It contains . . . bad language.” It was an act—an act of sibling love. She was applying her own standards in only the first half of her assertion; in the second half she used code to apply mine. Yes, she deemed the book “good.” No, she did not believe its language was “bad.” But she understood her little brother’s altar-boy sensibilities, and she wanted to prepare the way.
First-person narrator Holden Caulfield fascinated me—alarmed and charmed me. I read the book in my bedroom in a late-night rush, heart (almost literally) pounding. Exhausted but committed, I read pieces of it again at intervals throughout the hours of the following day. When Linda asked me if I liked it, I felt my face flush red and said something like “Much.”
“
hen you’ll have to try this one too,” she replied. “It’s by the same author and it’s sort of the same in some ways but way different in others.” She held out the volume collecting both of the stories that had been published first in The New Yorker: “Franny” appeared in January of 1955, but readers concerned about (in fifties-speak) the title character’s “nervous breakdown” would have to wait until May of 1957 for the publication of “Zooey” to learn how her crisis was to be resolved.
In contrast to my claim that Holden Caulfield alarmed and charmed me, Franny frightened me. Many years after my first reading, her character’s conflicts retain for me some of the initial impact. “Franny,” as is well-known by many readers of twentieth-century American fiction, is J.D. Salinger’s third-person account of how Franny Glass’s college-football weekend date with smug Lane Coutell turns into a preemptive fainting spell “in a restaurant called Sickler’s.” A contributing antecedent to her collapse (with symptoms clearly correlating to Holden Caulfield’s concerns in Catcher) is her decision to stop performing in theatre productions because of her growing perception of how inherently “phony” the world of actors can be. During the ill-fated lunch, when Lane asks about a play she has been rehearsing, she says, “I don’t know. I’m not in it. I quit.” She nods in the affirmative when he asks, “You didn’t quit the whole department, did you?” When pressed by him for further explanation, Franny tells him “It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty egomaniac.” After Lane prods for additional justification for her attitude, Franny sums things up by stating “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s.” Lane challenges her motives, suggesting she is “afraid of competing.” Franny claims in response “It’s just the opposite.” She says, “I’m afraid I will compete—that’s what scares me.” She punctuates this by adding that she is ashamed of liking applause.
Prior to this confession (before ordering the Sickler’s chicken sandwich she will never taste), Franny had excused herself to use the restroom. Having hidden herself in “the most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures,” she cries for several minutes; then “she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book. She put it on her lap—on her knees, rather—and looked down at it, gazed down at it, as if that were the best of all possible places for a small pea-green clothbound book to be. After a moment, she picked up the book, raised it chest high, and pressed it to her—firmly, and quite briefly. Then she put it back into the handbag, stood up, and came out of the enclosure.”
Earlier, when Lane was assisting Franny with her luggage at the train station, he had noticed that book and asked her what it was. “Franny looked down at her left hand. She had a small pea-green clothbound book in it. ‘This? Oh, just something,’ she said. She opened her handbag and stuffed the book into it . . . .” When Franny returns from the restaurant restroom and Lane notes that she is perspiring, she empties her purse on the table in search of a tissue—giving him another chance to ask about the mysterious object. “She picked up the little clothbound book and put it back into her handbag. ‘Just something I brought to look at on the train.’”
After Lane’s initial attempts to learn about this book have been rebuffed, Franny finally allows that the book is called The Way of a Pilgrim. Her synopsis is reasonably accurate (if understandably naïve) in its broad outlines. She tells Lane of a nameless Russian peasant who struggles to understand the literal meaning of St. Paul’s New Testament injunction to pray without ceasing. Franny explains that the peasant finally learns that the solution to this puzzle is to say “The Jesus Prayer” over and over and over until it becomes internalized—becomes part of the rhythm of his beating heart, even when he is asleep. She tells Lane that “You do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about.” She emphasizes that “when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. . . . All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality all by itself.”
The text of The Jesus Prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Franny goes on to associate this with “Praises to the Buddha” and “Om” and similar callings out toward forms of divinity. Lane cuts right to the chase: “. . . what is the result that’s supposed to follow? All this synchronization and mumbo-jumbo? You get heart trouble?” Franny answers that “You get to see God.”
It is within a few moments of this exchange, as Lane is checking his wristwatch and worrying about whether they will be late for the college football game, that Franny excuses herself for a second time to visit the restroom. She does not arrive there, however. On her way, she loses her balance and faints to the floor. When she comes to, Lane is trying to attend to her needs; but the final sentences of the story find her isolated: “Alone, Franny lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move.”
hen I first read Franny and Zooey as a seventh-grader, I had never heard of a book called The Way of a Pilgrim. (It was certainly not to be found on the shelves of the Mapleton, Oregon, Public School District 36 library between volumes of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.) For a few years, I even wondered if Salinger had “invented” it—made it up out of whole (pea-green) cloth to serve the dramatic purposes of his story. But regardless of whether it had been a “real book” (which, of course, it most assuredly was and is) or a product of the fiction writer’s poetic license, my nun-washed brain would yet have been afraid of it. If it could do what it did to Franny (an intelligent college woman from a brilliant New York family), I feared what it could do to my sister (an intelligent high-school girl from small-town Oregon).
What did I think it had done to Franny? Instead of the words of The Jesus Prayer, my twelve-year-old heart was filled with words closer in emotion to “Poor Franny! Saying that prayer in search of mercy has brought her only the opposite of mercy!” I think I remember overhearing my inner voice intoning something like “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on my sister.” That feeling would have been shortly before I finished reading the longer “Zooey” and long before I began reading The Way of a Pilgrim.
he nineteenth-century Russian narrator of The Way of a Pilgrim introduces himself with humility: “By the Grace of God I am a Christian man, by my own actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer . . . .” Without delay he describes the problem. At the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Christians are instructed to “pray without ceasing.” The peasant interprets this exhortation literally and is perplexed by its impracticality. If a person were to actually pray without ceasing, the peasant wonders how that person could work, earn a living, attend to life’s normal tasks, and so forth. In “Franny” terms, the question might ask how a young woman can pray without ceasing and still be a college student who (among other things) might act in plays.
The peasant starts wandering about in search of Christian leaders wise enough to resolve the puzzle. His beginning efforts serve only to increase his frustration. He hears many sermons preached about the benefits of prayer, but “nothing was said about how to succeed in prayer.” He concludes that the answer will not be found in sermons, and he decides “to seek an experienced and knowledgeable guide.” (In Glass family lingo, he needs a guru.) He walks from village to village, carrying only his Holy Bible and a knapsack containing dried bread, always asking the locals he meets if they know anyone who is spiritually devout.
The first person to whom he is directed is a man who has an actual chapel built inside his house so he can stay inside all day engaged in prayer and religious study. When the peasant asks this landowner how to pray without ceasing, the offered answer is an unsatisfying tautology: “Pray more and ever more earnestly, and the prayer itself will reveal to you how it can become unceasing.” In short, pray without ceasing and you discover you are ceaselessly praying. Upon leaving this man, the peasant reflects ruefully that “He did not, after all, provide me with an explanation.”
One hundred twenty-five miles down the road, the peasant visits a monastery and communicates his problem to the abbot: “I have heard that one should pray unceasingly, but I do not know how to do this. I do not even understand what unceasing prayer is.” The abbot hands over a book titled The Spiritual Education of the Interior Man, by St. Dimitri. He directs the peasant to a passage saying “the mind can always aspire to God and pray to Him without ceasing.” The peasant, ever practical, asks how a person can do this “without being distracted.” The answer from the abbot is similar to the answer offered by the landowner having a chapel in his house: “That requires a great deal of wisdom, except for the one to whom God Himself has granted such a gift.” The seeker is as disappointed as ever and says of the abbot “He offered no further explanation.”
On the road again, the narrator hikes in frustration for five days before encountering a monk who invites him to take refreshment at the local monastery. As with many fairy tales and myths, the third time appears to be the charm. This monk assures the peasant that up until now God has been testing him, but “it is the humble, simple heart that attains to such prayer through poverty of the spirit and a living experience of it.” He criticizes church preachers who give sermons about praying without explaining how to pray. The monk says that such preachers lack “mystical insight that goes above and beyond mere academic knowledge.” He adds that “Many people treat prayer in an inverted way.” He says this means that the prayer itself leads to virtue, rather than the act of praying being the behavior of someone trying to do good works. The distinction sounds overly subtle, but he attempts to expand his meaning by asserting that of the many good works a Christian should perform, “it is prayer that must come first and foremost.” He says that in the absence of prayer “no other good work can be performed.” His main message contains a qualifying phrase that acknowledges the peasant’s perplexity: “. . . the heart cannot be filled with the light of Christ and united with Him [without] . . . frequent prayer. I say frequent, because the proper way to pray and to attain to perfect prayer lies beyond our abilities.” This reference to “frequent” instead of “unceasing” seems encouraging to the peasant.
The monk tells the peasant that instructions for learning how to say The Jesus Prayer can be found in the Philokalia, an anthology of religious teachings from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. With the Philokalia as written text and the monk as human guide, the peasant makes gradual progress in his attempts to learn to pray without ceasing. At first the monk directs him to say the prayer three thousand times a day. Later he is told to increase this to six thousand times a day. “And do you know what happened? I became so accustomed to the prayer that when I stopped praying, even for a brief time, I felt as though something were missing, as if I had lost something.” The peasant admits also that “If I happened to meet people, I no longer felt any desire to speak with them; I longed only for solitude, to be alone with my prayer.” The monk advises him to get up earlier each day and stay awake longer each night and increase his prayer count to twelve thousand repetitions per day.
Through diligent practice, the peasant makes such progress that finally the monk tells him “I now give you leave to repeat the prayer as much as you desire and as frequently as possible.” Shortly afterwards, the monk dies and the peasant resumes his wandering. He sums up his positive state of mind by saying “It was as if I’d become a half-wit, for I had no cares about anything, nothing interested me. I cared not for the vain concerns of this world and longed only for solitude.”
have listened (“all the way through”) many times to the 1993 recording of Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” Paradoxically, for what may be considered an exercise in repetition, I never fail to hear something fresh. It satisfies as a work of art, and it satisfies as something else—a “something else” that has no dependency, in my judgment, on one’s attitude toward religion in general or to a particular religious orientation.
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
Never failed me yet
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet
There’s one thing I know
For He loves me so
n all there are 171 iterations of the stanza. The “original” Tramp sings 122 of these alone. He is joined by a second “tramp”—gravel-voiced Tom Waits—for 45 iterations. Waits then sings the final four iterations by himself. It takes almost exactly 26 seconds to sing each iteration, providing the 1993 performance with 74 and three-quarters minutes of “prayer.”
The first 62 iterations are audible for 27 minutes and represent a “movement” of the composition (a “track” on the CD). For the first four or five seconds of the first iteration, Tramp’s voice cannot be heard clearly. Then it gradually increases in volume for about two minutes until it reaches a relatively steady state which it will mostly maintain until the last two or three iterations of this movement. During this gradual introduction of the voice and lyrics, hushed street sounds hover in the background: quiet cries of birds, faint echoes of automobiles on far-or-near streets, indistinct mumblings of passers-by (one voice seems to say “okay”). About two and one-half minutes into the composition, musical accompaniment starts to evolve. At first it seems to be four or five stringed instruments, probably a combination of violins and cellos, with bowing in the lower octaves predominating. The tone is warm—subdued but strong. The sound has consistent “heft.” In contrast, Tramp’s voice, closer to the middle octaves, has a light fragility, a spare vulnerability of tone, that is a perfect match for the words he sings. One is tempted to call it “sweet” or “wistful,” but that might unjustly undercut an unambiguously communicated mood of gentle assertion. At the seven-minute mark, moderately paced and open-spaced guitar notes insinuate themselves. As the ear becomes accustomed to the sounds of the acoustic guitar, it picks up hints of a somber string bass. The basic pattern of the melodic accompaniment remains almost-but-not-exactly uniform for a few minutes, with slight variations notable between ten and twelve minutes after the beginning, especially as one or two of the strings flirt with higher octaves. A subtle but dramatic change takes place halfway through this section (after about 30 iterations and about 13 minutes), with the introduction of a brass horn which seems to end each of its simple phrases with a swelling movement up the scale—as though aspiring to something “higher” than the other instruments have attempted. The blending of arching horn with delicate guitar and somber bass provides an undeniable gravitas as support for the somewhat “wispy” (though declarative) voice of Tramp. This emotional soundscape is neatly punctuated with the occasional plucking of what sounds like harp strings and the complementary sounding of bright bells. The resulting effect has near-subliminal complexities and beauties. Listeners might wonder if they are hearing the deep “whispers” of a church organ, or perhaps a few human voices harmoniously humming in the background. As the movement approaches its end at iterations 61 and 62, a decrescendo of the accompanying instruments fades into the final faint seconds—without losing the clarity of Tramp’s articulated lyrics.
The next track follows quickly. Beginning with iteration 63 and lasting fifteen and one-quarter minutes through iteration 97, the strings that now accompany Tramp’s voice seem “sadder” than earlier—denser cellos darken the sounds of the other strings. Through these 35 iterations, sometimes a harp is heard plucking scattered notes, sometimes stately phrases from a chime or shimmering gong are sounded, and other indefinite but palpable percussive effects enter the environment. Just before the four-minute mark, human voices (possibly a small choir) become part of the musical background. At around eleven minutes, a hint of the soaring brass from the first movement is detected again. Throughout this track, Tramp’s solo voice remains steady, consistent, confident.
At iteration 98 and lasting four and three-quarters minutes through iteration 108, the musical accompaniment is “thinned”—made starker, with less presence of the previously persistent and blended strings, with more reliance on isolated harp plucks and well-spaced chimes. Choral hints of human voices and implications of the aspiring horn are present; again, a subliminal sense of somewhat miscellaneous bits of fleeting sound comes through, filling in some of the emptiness between Tramp’s sung assertions.
With iteration 109 and lasting a few seconds beyond six minutes through iteration 122, the stringed accompaniment to Tramp’s vocals becomes fuller again, more “orchestral” and “denser.” The strings begin to build, the bass becomes more apparent, human voices blend behind the strings, bells announce themselves, and the horn soars some more.
And then, most movingly and surprisingly to a first-time listener, the up-until now lovely-but-lonely voice of Tramp is joined by the voice of another tramp. Tom Waits begins growling at iteration 123 and continues for nineteen and one-half minutes as Tramp’s partner in dialogue through iteration 167. At times, Waits seems to want to merely sing background—add harmony to Tramp’s voice. At other times, Wait’s voice seems to struggle against the very concept of harmony—seems to need to step up and speak out on its own (rather passionate) terms. Anyone appreciative of the sandpaper scratches of Wait’s bruised voice—as recorded in many of his word-dense masterpieces that channel the audible souls of the world-weary and the down-trodden—should recognize quickly that it was nothing short of brilliance on the part of Bryars to invite Waits’ participation in this project. Upon first listening to the interweaving voices of Tramp and Waits (a Samuel Beckett pairing, a Waiting for Godot vocal incarnation), I felt chills along the back of my neck. It is undeniable that the solitude of Tramp has been intersected and interrogated by the introduction of Waits. The higher register of Tramp and the lower register of Waits never meet in unison, but there is a complementary relationship, underscoring mutual vibrations on a soulful theme of survival. Waits’ performance (or Bryars’ rendering of it on the compact disc) touches a listener deeply. Sometimes he scats kazoo-like, sometimes comes close to echoing the soaring horn. Occasionally he “drags out” certain syllables, displaying depths below the surface of the repetitive lyrics. An elongated “I know” is especially notable, although the technique works as effectively with “loves” and “yet.” Waits becomes one of the accompanying instruments at the same time that he engages in distanced conversation with Tramp. For fairly long stretches of time, Waits seems to “argue” a bit with Tramp—that is, his voice begins to dominate and Tramp’s voice seems to shy away. Emotional resonance builds, flows, and ebbs as Waits searches for his place among the strings, the bells, the horns, the choirs. As the full orchestral environment evolves, the sounds become waves in an ocean of emotions, with Waits often the dangerous undertow or ambiguous undercurrent before emerging to the surface to move up the octave and aspire in his own way to whatever may be discovered above. He sounds tender at certain moments, as though in simple agreement with Tramp, and aggressive at others, as though altering the terms of a painful debate. Near the end of this movement, the human choir may be thought of not as a Greek chorus commenting on the implied dialogue but rather more simply as witness: as though verifying that “this really happened.”
After about 17 minutes of this movement, Tramp’s voice becomes gradually stronger and Waits’ voice less dominant. Each becomes a soft presence. Any sense of subtle conflict seems resolved. Waits sings some fragmentary phrases, with syllables widely spaced, just before both participants fade toward the end of this highly dramatic encounter.
In the four final iterations, Tramp has departed, leaving the coda to Tom, who waits alone, fading away with one and three-quarters minutes of scale-scattering echoes into indeterminable musical eternity. His rough tones are accompanied by sparse strings, high up the octave, as he seems to fly away.
Franny says that in The Way of a Pilgrim the narrator learns that when one starts saying the Jesus Prayer, one is not required to “even have faith in what you’re doing.” Listening to Tramp, I believe this man did have faith in what he was doing, and I wonder if his was not a “better” prayer. Instead of the prayer Franny is attempting to adopt—a prayer whose words take for granted the omnipresent pain and misery of the supplicator (why else would one continuously call for “mercy”?)—the Tramp Prayer suggests the singer has already received “mercy.” He is not asking for more than he has; he asserts faith, rather, that he will always possess what he needs (“There’s one thing I know”). In everyday terms, his song implies that “God” has always taken care of Tramp and will continue to take care of him (“For he loves me so”).
n “Zooey,” now at the Glass family apartment in New York, perplexed Franny receives a telephone call, supposedly from older brother Buddy. After Franny figures out whose voice is actually on the telephone, Zooey (Buddy’s younger brother) reminds his sister that another of their brothers, the deceased (by suicide) Seymour—whose copy of The Way of a Pilgrim she had been reading—taught the lesson that the Glass family’s young Wise Child radio quiz-show performers should always shine their shoes “for the Fat Lady,” the common person out there in the audience listening to the program after a tough day. Zooey, no longer trying to impersonate Buddy, then tells Franny that “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.” Finally, he adds that the Fat Lady is “Christ Himself, buddy.” The message from his voices-within-voices performance provides Franny with a crisis-resolving moment and she falls “into a deep, dreamless sleep . . . quiet, smiling at the ceiling.” Her lips, presumably, are not moving.
I am curious whether Bryars ever read Franny and Zooey or read The Way of a Pilgrim. I think the imaginary Franny would listen to the real Tramp’s singing with gratitude and in peace—as would that nineteenth-century Russian peasant. And I imagine Tramp, likely, would have simply smiled at Franny (perhaps at Zooey too) and resumed his song.
About the writer:
Raised on the rural coast of Oregon, James Joaquin Brewer currently shelters in West Hartford, Connecticut, while working on a novel about political protest on college campuses during the Vietnam era. Educational experiences influencing his writing include pulling endless streams of lumber in a sawmill while contemplating Camus’ version of Sisyphus and earning a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University. Published writing of a variety of genres appears in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Write Launch, LitBreak, The Hartford Courant, Aethlon, Jeopardy, Rosebud, The Poetry Society of New York, Closed Eye Open, The Manifest-Station, Quibble. James Joaquin Brewer’s story “Juan and Donne” was published in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters in February of 2023. His new piece, “Pilgrim Ways and Voices” is a mixed-genre essay/memoir inspired by his recent re-reading of Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and re-listening to Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.”
Image: Pilgrims under The Hollywood Split (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
“Juan and Donne” by James Joaquin Brewer :
Prose Discourse: Fiction|Short Story||James Joaquin Brewer|”Juan and Donne”
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
Explore O:JA&L’s Buttonhook Press offerings on Amazon.
Subscribe to the O:JA&L YouTube channel.
Become an O:JA&L Member through Patreon.
Support Pamelyn Casto’s text for writers: Flash Fiction: Alive in the Flicker
Support O:JA&L’s free presses.
