Another long hiatus. Hey, I’m busy!

Today in History:

• 1812: Charles Dickens is born. Fights broke out on the docks as people waited for the arrival of the latest installment of his work, including the criminally overlooked Pickwick Papers. For all the mammoth size of some of his works, they were often filled with pithy observations, such as:

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”

“…there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”

“Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself.”

and one I should keep in mind:

“A word in earnest is as good as a speech.”

• 1867: Laura Ingalls Wilder is born. Remember how freaky looking that witchy Nellie Oleson was? And Mary Ingalls may be the source of my semi-secret infatuation with blind women…
• 1885: Sinclair Lewis is born. I really should read some of his books.
• 1882: The last official bare-knuckles boxing match takes place in Mississippi. Glad that boxing is no longer a brutal sport with people trading an infinitesimal shot at riches for most of their brain functions.
• 1914: Charlie Chaplin makes his first appearance as The Tramp in the short film Kid Auto Races at Venice. Was Robert Downey Jr. amazing as Chaplin or what?
• 1964: The Beatles arrive at JFK for their first American tour. I still love all the sappy Beatles songs the best: “In My Life,” “Yesterday,” etc.
• 1979: For the first time since it is discovered, Pluto moves inside the orbit of Neptune (tell me again how it’s not a planet? And note my restraint in making no jokes about Uranus).

Events:

For math geeks, today is e day. Don’t hold back!

And today marks the Lunar New Year, aka the Chinese/Mongolian/Vietnamese/Korean/Cambodian/Thai/Singaporean New Year

From Today’s Reading:

“Holding Hands”

After weeks of yearning
half-taps and near-grasps,
my sweaty palm found hers
and we made a leaky basket
of our interlaced fingers
and that was it, hallelujah,
finally we were holding hands
in public, we were shaking
sideways on a visual contract
everybody could understand,
I was hers and she was mine,
the two of us had begun
becoming one clasped flesh,
now we were happily coupled
from the supple wrists down,
we were carrying the pet
with two backs between us
as if we’d never before
squeezed another human
in such a meaningful way,
as if she had never seized
her tall anxious mother
when first learning to walk
or cross a lethal street,
that firm grip saving her,
as if I would never clutch
a dying father’s calluses
in cardiac intensive care
and feel our shared pulse,
the mutual prayer of blood,
as if she and I would never
tire of each other’s touch
and try to figure out how
to escape this embarrassing
collision of crinkled skin,
this padded cage of bones,
these too-long opened fists
before somebody passing by
mistook for love our resigned
inability to quite let go.

–Michael McFee

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Today in History:

• 1880: Douglas MacArthur, hero of World War II, butt of the Korean War, is born.

• 1908: Stephane Grappelli is born. Jazz violin is a lot like rock flute– it works very, very rarely… but when it does, it is magical.

• 1918: Philip Jose Farmer, one quintology and done (though he didn’t know it and wrote hundreds more lesser works) author of the sci-fi classic Riverworld series.

• 1929: Jules Feiffer, awesome cartoonist, is born. I had no idea he’d done so much Hollywood work… not to mention that this speec from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill was apparently lifted directly from Feiffer:

Superman stands alone. Superman did not become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red S is the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses the business suit, that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race, sort of like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plumpton.

• 1955: Eddie Van Halen, the shultan of shred, is born. So his ego has the best of him and his band sucks now, he really was an innovator and VH really used to rock.

• 2004: A whale explodes in Taiwan.

Events:

Today is Liberation Day in Uganda. I’ll let that one speak for itself.

From Today’s Reading:

Message that my father (in S F) was dying. Hypochondriac family; my father less ill than that, the meeting in his hospital room as equivocal, as difficult, as dangerous to me as all our meetings– The nurse came into the room and asked me to wait outside a moment. I walked down the hall to a little waiting room and sat down. The floor-nurse on duty recognized me (I look like my father) She said, I guess what a man cares most about in his life is his son. I was startled and absolutely unprepared. My father’s temperature was running fairly high, I realized that he must have talked of me. My face must have shown how startled and how unprepared I was. The nurse saw it, and she began to cry God help us all.

–George Oppen, from a letter to Philip Levine

“Little Cork”

I am just a little cork, he said, trying to tell our daughter how it felt
at fifty-seven to be unfettered by purpose or possessions, without
a home or job, car, lifetime collection of books or music, not even
a dresser drawer of clothes, favorite faded tee or tennies. Tethered
to a hospital bed in his institutional gown, thinner arms floating free,
head awash with memories of other things that floated: Lindy rigs
before they dropped deep into Palmer Lake the summer we caught no
walleyes; a Portugese man-o-war in the quiet surf at Sanibel; cigarette
butts tossed off Tony’s boat into Lake Michigan. Things that spread
out on the skin of marine blue, floating broad as a ray’s back in the sun,
or were tumbled by the surf to rise again: a plastic juice bottle, tampon
case. Sad televised images of the plane’s flotsam in Long Island Sound.
Writing to her, he remembered objects seen at dusk he’d wanted
to reel in, knowing them still useful, but devalued by too much time
adrift: a dog’s sun-bleached play ball, Styrofoam cooler, aluminum
landing net. I am just a little cork, floating on the sea of life, he wrote
to our daughter from the prison hospital, as if she could dip her hand
into the icy water he’d fallen into and retrieve that tiny buoy, her father,
pocketing him while he slept, sparing him the hard float toward home.

-Deborah Fries

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Today in History:

• 1627 – Robert Boyle is born. I remember him for his simple and elegant formulation pV=k which symbolizes that the volume of a gas increases as pressure decreases (and vice-versa). The form p₁ V₁ = p₂ V₂ allows one to solve for changes in either pressure or volume. Simple and elegant. The kind of thing that makes me wish I could really see that same elegance in higher math and physics.

• 1741 – Benedict Arnold is born. His name is synonymous with traitor… his earlier heroism largely forgotten.

• 1759 – The Scottish Bard Robert Burns is born (which is why it’s Burns Night in Scotland, natch). He wrote many poems and songs but he will be forever remembered for just two of them. And he knew what he was talking about:

Tho’ women’s minds, like winter winds,
May shift, and turn, an’ a’ that,
The noblest breast adores them maist-
A consequence I draw that.

• 1787: Daniel Shays begins what would come to be known as Shays’ Rebellion, a significant force in the shape of the US Constitution and a mistaken inspiration for anti-government groups ever since.

• 1874: W. Somerset Maugham is born. One of the most famous and richly rewarded writers of his time, he is mostly remembered for the novels Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. The 1984 film of the former is greatly underrated. Bill Murray can act!

• 1882: Virginia Woolf is born, an author whose lyricism I admire but whose work as a whole generally leaves me cold. Someday I will be ready for them.

• 1919: The League of Nations is founded. It will achieve a lot early and little for a long time thereafter, very much like its descendant…

• 1927: Antonio Carlos Jobim, pianist, popularizer of Bossa Nova and major player on many great jazz albums (including one of my all-time favorites: Getz/Gilberto), is born.

• 1928: Etta James, blues/jazz/R&B singer who everyone knows for “At Last” even if they don’t know her name, is born in Los Angeles.

Events:

Today is Criminon day, in which Scientologists attempt to convert prisoners… as if the prisoners don’t have it hard enough!

It’s also Tatiana Day in Russia– not in celebration of my ex-wife– and The Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul who was blinded by the light.

From Today’s Reading:

“It’s not a dinner party until someone brings up the grim reaper”

Say a witty line, watch it dance
on the lip of a wine glass. Peck at the cannoli
though you are not hungry, have never known
hunger. Judge everyone at the table, the policeman
nonchalant as he flips an envelope
over and over in his hand,
the waiter’s toothy grin when no one is watching,
the grandmother doodling on napkins,
wondering what to do with the zygote
no one will believe is inside her.

You are hiding Ibsen’s lessons,
how what it is that brought you to this table
was buried long ago without fanfare.

–Jeff Calhoun

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A bit of a gap there… but that’s what the whole “intermittent” thing is all about. And it leaves me something new for next year.

Today in History:

• 41 – Caligula is assasinated by his own Praetorian Guard, paving the way for the much less insane Claudius. The Secret Service might take note. The exact day is in dispute, but I’m taking a stand here.

• 1670 – William Congreve, playwright is born. I tried to read The Way of the World once, but never finished. However, almost everyone knows at least one of his phrases, at the end of this bit from The Mourning Bride:

Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base Injustice thou hast done my Love:
Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past Distress,
And all those Ills which thou so long hast mourn’d;
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.

• 1848 – Gold is discovered at Sutter’s Mill, starting the California Gold Rush… another in many waves of people Californians didn’t want and were never able to be rid of.

• 1862 – Edith Wharton, another author I should have read but haven’t is born. But I have seen three of the movies

• 1925 – Alfred Hitchcock releases his first complete film The Pleasure Garden, which is sadly unavailable from NetFlix.

• 1945 – Neil Diamond is born. Come on, you’ve gotta love America, Sweet Caroline, and the pre-UB40 Red, Red Wine…

• 1947 – Warren Zevon is born. Enjoy every sandwich.

• 1949 – John Belushi is born. While considering what could have been, appreciate what was.

• 1959 – Nastasja Kinski is born. I can confidently say that seeing her in Cat People– while in the throes of early adolescence– changed my life.

• 1972 – Shoichi Yokoi, the next to last Japanese soldier to surrender after World War II, finally lays down his weapons in Guam. Amazingly, that same year another Japanese soldier still in hiding dies in a gunfight in nearby jungles…

• 2003 – The Department of Homeland Security officially begins operations. See Year 41 above.

From Today’s Reading:

“Funeral March”

Make flutes of my long bones,
dice of my knuckles
and play against all odds

Drum bony finger solos on my skull
scrub out a rhythm on my washboard ribs
and play a dirge to dance to

in a major key

–Paul Sampson, from his book Dirge in a Resolutely Major Key

“The Mysterious Romance Box”

You are in the geology rooms
of the Museum of Natural History
with gems all around and the walls
velvet and blue. No, there are no bees in it.
It is an air conditioned place,
small enough to fit two rings.
One ring falls through the other
like a jazz song from seventh grade.

–Jessy Randall, from The Salt River Review

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Today in History:

1605 – Don Quixote is published. Despite age and controversy, I still prefer the Smollett translation. Maybe because this is one of the few books my late grandma Ruthie was able to pass on to me.

1706 – Benjamin Franklin is born. A genius with many obsessions who wrote much– and about whom much has been written– I recommend starting with Fart Proudly

1882 – Noah Beery, so memorable playing Sergeant Gonzales opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro is born.

1899 – The US takes control of Wake Island… once a mythical land of exile and restoration, now the Pacific version of Area 51.

1899 – Al Capone, whose most lasting legacy may be the humiliation of Geraldo “the ’stache” Rivera, is born.

1914 – William Stafford is born. Like most, my first exposure to Stafford’ work was this much anthologized piece:

Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all–my only swerving–,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

While that remains one of my favorites, Stafford’s work is rich. He started publishing late, but published a lot. Another short example:

Simple Talk

Spilling themselves in the sun bluebirds
wing-mention their names all day. If everything
told so clear a life, maybe the sky would
come, maybe heaven; maybe appearance and
truth would be the same. Maybe whatever seems
to be so, we should speak from our souls,
never afraid, “Light” when it comes,
“Dark” when it goes away.

Read more…

1927 – Eartha Kitt– actress, singer, Catwoman, and just all around yowza! is born.

1942 – Muhammad Ali, who flew like a butterfly and stung like a bee, is born. In addition to being the biggest mouth in boxing, he has uttered some rather wise words: “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses– behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights. “

1945 – Raoul Wallenberg– credited with saving nearly 15,000 Jews during World War II– is detained by the Soviets, never to be seen again. His last words: “I’m going to Malinovsky’s … whether as a guest or prisoner I do not know yet.”

1949 – Andy Kaufman is born. A few snippets of Kaufmann’s genius.

1980 – Zooey Deschanel– way, way up high on my crush list– is born.

1984 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5-4 that the private use of home video cassette recorders to tape TV programs does not violate federal copyright laws.

1991 – Operation Desert Storm begins. And we’re still fighting it.

From Today’s Reading:

Train

Just where the grass
meets the woods
an old rabbit hutch
has fallen over.

Nothing inside it now
but the whistle
of the southbound train.

–Ted Macker

and a poem by a Maori poet who passed away yesterday:

Hotere

When you offer only three
vertical lines precisely drawn
and set into a dark pool of lacquer
it is a visual kind of starvation:

and even though my eyeballs
roll up and over to peer inside
myself, when I reach the beginning
of your eternity I say instead: hell
let’s have another feed of mussels

Like, I have to think about it, man.

When you stack horizontal lines
into vertical columns which appear
to advance, recede, shimmer and wave
like exploding packs of cards
I merely grunt and say: well, if it
is not a famine, it’s a feast

I have to roll another smoke, man

But when you score a superb orange
circle on a purple thought-base
I shake my head and say: hell, what
is this thing called aroha

Like, I’m euchred, man. I’m eclipsed?

–Hone Tuwhare

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Today in history:

• 1559: Elizabeth I, daughter of psychotic Henry VIII and inspiration
  for a cult of virginity, is crowned Queen of England.

• 1622: Moliere (aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) is born. If you haven’t read (or been lucky enough to see) Tartuffe or The Misanthrope, then you don’t know comedy.

• 1891: Osip Mandelstam is born. He would be purged by Stalin at the age of just 47. Here are two versions of a poem that seems apropos.

“The Stalin Epigram” (translated by W. S. Merwin)

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

“The Stalin Epigram” (translated by Darran Anderson)

We live, not feeling the earth beneath us
At ten paces our words evaporate.
But when there’s the will to crack open our mouths
our words orbit the Kremlin mountain man.
Murderer, peasant killer.

His fingers plump as grubs.
His words drop like lead weights.
His laughing cockroach whiskers.
The gleam of his boot rims.

Around him a circle of chicken-skinned bosses
sycophantic half-beings for him to toy with.
One whines, another purrs, a third snivels
as he babbles and points.

He forges decrees to be flung
like horseshoes
at the groin, the face, the eyes.

He rolls the liquidations on his tongue like berries
delicacies for the barrel-chested Georgian.

• 1908: Edward Teller is born, who I remember most fondly for his insane plan) to set off a string of nuclear explosions in Northwest Alaska to create an artificial harbor.

• 1909: Gene Krupa, influential jazz drummer, is born. Definitely in the top 10 of all jazz drummers, this was one white guy who could swing. Watch him battle it out with Lionel Hampton and Chico Taylor…

• 1929: Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. This deserves its own entry, but let me just say that King– despite (or perhaps because of) his very human flaws– remains a personal idol. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” So do I. So do I.

• 1947: The body of Elizabeth Short– The Black Dahlia– is discovered. There’s a lot out there about this case, but James Ellroy’s novel) remains the most intriguing.

Events:

It’s North Korean Alphabet Day, celebrating the creation of Hangul. The name is too close to Nazgul for my liking.

It’s also the feast of Saint Paul the First Hermit, who fled persecution to a mountain cave where he resided for nearly 100 years.

From today’s reading:

“The Compliance Branch”
By David Foster Wallace, from a work in progress.

(Wallace read this passage at the 2006 Le Conversazioni festival in Italy.)

My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can describe only as fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger-fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look all the fiercer. On those workdays when our Group Manager, Mr. Yeagle, brought it in to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against Mr. Yeagle’s, its large head resting in the hollow of its father’s neck and forcing our Group Manager’s head out and down into posture of classic oppression. They made a creature with two faces, one of which was calm and blandly adult and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce. The infant never wiggled or fussed in the device. Its gaze around the corridor at the rest of us gathered waiting for the morning elevator was level and unblinking and (it seemed) almost accusing. The infant’s face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its pale red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids I could see. I never saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all.

On the fourth floor, in Mr. Yeagle’s office, the infant had a crib and also a modem, ingenious mobile supporting and restraining device which it spent much of its time in, a large ring- or doughnut-shaped appurtenance of heavy blue plastic and a type of cloth or nylon saddle in the center’s hole in which the infant was placed in a position somewhat between sitting and standing (that is, the infant’s legs were nearly straight, but the saddle or sling appeared to support its weight). The toy or station had four short, equidistant legs, which terminated in rubber or plastic wheels, and it was designed to be movable under the infant’s power, albeit slowly, rather the way our own stations’ wheeled chairs could be maneuvered this way and that via awkward motions of their occupants’ legs. However, the infant declined to move the appliance, as far as I ever saw, or to play with any of the bright, primary-colored toys and small, amusing developmental devices built into sockets in the ring’s blue surface; nor did it seem much to occupy itself with the books made entirely of cloth, the dump trucks and fire engines, teething rings of liquid-filled plastic, intricate mobiles, or pull-string music-and-animal-noise-emitting toys with which its area of the office was replete. It just sat there, motionless and mute, gazing fiercely at whatever GS-6-class IRS auditor entered the Group Manager’s small, frosted-glass office on the days when Gary Yeagle (whose wife, J anine, was modern and had a career) brought the infant in with him, for which he had reportedly received special permission from the Asst. Regional Commissioner’s office. At first, many a GS-6 would enter the office on some thin pretext, trying to curry favor by smiling and making soft primal sounds at the infant and putting a finger or pencil in its field of vision, perhaps trying to stimulate its instinct for grasping. The infant, however, would gaze at the GS-6 auditor fiercely, with a combination of intensity and disdain, rather as if it were hungry and the GS-6 were food but not quite the right kind. There are some small children who you can tell are going to grow up to be frightening adults; this infant was frightening now. It was eerie and discomfiting to see something with hardly any bona fide human face yet to speak of nevertheless assume a fierce, intimidating, almost accusatory expression. I myself had abandoned all ideas of ingratiating myself with Mr. Yeagle via his infant quite early on. To be honest, I was concerned that the Group Manager might be able to pick up my fear and dislike of the infant on some type of mysterious occult parental radar.

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In history:

1832 – Edgar Allan Poe publishes his first short story, “Metzengerstein: A Tale In Imitation of the German” which demonstrates that Poe was fully Poe-like very early in his career. The whole story is given away in the story’s epigraph: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens tua mors ero,” which can be read as “Living, I was a plague to you; in dying, I shall be your death.”

1886 – Hugh Lofting, creator of Dr. Dolittle is born. I was obsessed for a time with Dr. Dolittle stories when I was a kid. What child doesn’t love the idea of secret worlds, particularly when the real one so often sucked so hard?

When the Cat’s-meat-Man had gone the parrot flew off the window on to the Doctor’s table and said,

“That man’s got sense. That’s what you ought to do. Be an animal-doctor. Give the silly people up–if they haven’t brains enough to see you’re the best doctor in the world. Take care of animals instead–THEY’ll soon find it out. Be an animal-doctor.”

“Oh, there are plenty of animal-doctors,” said John Dolittle, putting the flower-pots outside on the window-sill to get the rain.

“Yes, there ARE plenty,” said Polynesia. “But none of them are any good at all. Now listen, Doctor, and I’ll tell you something. Did you know that animals can talk?”

“I knew that parrots can talk,” said the Doctor.

1919 – Andy Rooney is born. I hope he lives a long time because he is my personality barometer. The minute the old fart’s senile ravings resonate at all with me is the minute I should be put to sleep.

1925 – Yukio Mishima, enigmatic Japanese author who should have won a Nobel, is born. I don’t understand most of, but still enjoy, Utsukushii Hoshi (Beautiful Planet). The best starting place is probably The Sea of Fertility, a tetralogy that is both complex and unrelentingly bleak, a picture of Japan and a retrospective assessment of his own legacy. I highly recommend John Nathan’s biography to learn more about the man himself.

1948 – Carl Weathers is born. I liked him way more than Rocky. Damn you, Ivan Drago!

1963 – Stephen Soderbergh, one of our most interesting (and inconsistent) directors is born. Want to see an underrated Soderbergh flick? Try The Limey.

1967 – Zakk Wylde is born– the only guitarist who could do right by Randy Rhoades’ (RIP) solos.

Events:

Today happens to be the Medieval Christian Feast of the Ass which is nothing like it sounds. Whether that is a disappointment or not is purely a personal thing…

It’s also the Feast of Saint Basil (on the Gregorian calendar) which is, to continue our earthly bodily theme, celebrated in conjunction with the Feast of Circumcision. Incidentally, Basil’s head is preserved in the Great Lavra Monastery. Why does this all sound like an episode of Seinfeld?

From today’s reading:

Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain–adults and wise persons never speak it. Parkman, the historian, says, “The principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity.” In another place in the same chapters he says, “The saying is old that truth should not be spoken at all times; and those whom a sick conscience worries into habitual violation of the maxim are imbeciles and nuisances.” It is strong language, but true. None of us could live with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so–and this ignorance is one of the very things that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies–every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception–and purposely. Even in sermons–but that is a platitude.

[...]

Lying is universal–we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others’ advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then–But am I but a new andfeeble student in this gracious art; I cannot instruct this club.

–Mark Twain (from “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”)

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Today in history:

• 49 BCE – Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon. If he didn’t say “The die is cast” he should have… making him more badass than John McClane (at least until he was stabbed to death just 4 years later).

• 1776 – Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense. If only there were more of it to go around.

• 1869 – Rasputin is born. Most scholars think. Stabbed, poisoned, shot, drowned– who knows. He was super-freaky.

• 1887 – Robinson Jeffers is born. Neither praised nor forgotten, Jeffers wrote some beautiful poems. A snippet from “To a Young Artist”:

Tear the live mind: were your bones mountains,
Your blood rivers to endure it? and all that labor
      of discipline labors to death.
Delight is exquisite, pain is more present;
You have sold the armor, you have bought shining
     with burning, one should be stronger than
     strength
To fight baresark in the stabbing field
In the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness
     is the treasure, the tower, the fortress;
Referred to that one may live anything;
The temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints
     and shards in the temple porches, turn home.

• 1904 – Ray Bolger is born. Sixty years of acting and he’ll be remembered always as Dorothy’s scarecrow.

• 1924 – Max Roach is born. The greatest jazz drummer ever. Period.

• 1927 – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premieres. At a cost of more than 200 million (inflation adjusted) dollars, it’s still better than most of the Hollywood productions that cost as much or more today.

• 1938 – Donald Knuth is born. The Max Roach of computer science… I will die loving TeX, Metafont and The TeXbook.

• 1939 – Jared Carter, poet, is born. I have a fascination with geodes, subject of a Carter poem I have shared before:

Geodes

They are useless, there is nothing
to be done with them, no reason, only

the finding: letting myself down holding
to ironwood and the dry bristle of roots

into the creekbed, into clear water shelved
below the outcroppings, where crawdads spurt

through silt; clawing them out of clay, scrubbing
away the sand, setting them in a shaft of light

to dry. Sweat clings in the cliff’s downdraft.
I take each one up like a safecracker listening

for the lapse within, the moment crystal turns
on crystal. It is all waiting there in darkness.

I want to know only that things gather themselves
with great patience, that they do this forever.

• 1953 – Pat Benatar is born. When I was barely pubescent I pondered “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” often.

Events:
It’s Margaret Thatcher day in The Falkland Islands, celebrating something… Iron Hair’s opening of a can of whoop-ass on a 2-bit junta?

From Today’s Reading:

“Twenty-five years after N. R. Hanson, T. S. Kuhn, and so many other historians and philosophers began to map out the intricate interpenetrations of fact and theory, and of science and society, the rationale for such a simplistic one-way flow from observation to theory has become entirely bankrupt. Science may differ from other intellectual activity in its focus upon the construction and operation of natural objects. But scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits– from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful imagination that C. S. Pierce called `abduction.’ Prevailing culture is not always the enemy identified by whiggish history­in this case the theological restrictions on time that led early geologists to miracle-mongering in the catastrophist mode. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain– as in Darwin’s translation of Adam Smith’s laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds to not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.”

–Stephen Jay Gould

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Today in history:

• 1601 – Baltasar Gracian y Morales is born. I’ve quoted from his work before… there’s a reason The Art of Worldly Wisdom was atop the bestseller list as recently as 1992 (over 300 years after it was first published). More of his wise words:

Application and Minerva. There can be no greatness without both, and if they converge, greater greatness. More obtains an average intellect with application than a superior one without it. Reputation is purchased with hard work; what does not cost much has not much value. Even for the highest endeavors was application required of some; rarely is it incompatible with intellect. Not being highly successful in a common task because you prefer to be mediocre in a challenging task can be generously excused; but being content with mediocrity in the former, having the capacity of excelling in the latter, has no excuse. Nature and art, then, are required, and application seals it.

• 1824 – Wilkie Collins is born. The Moonstone is one of the first “detective novels” but I remember it most because it made opium sound awesome.

• 1862 – Frank Nelson Doubleday is born. His publishing company and its imprints have been responsible for publishing great literature from Kipling and Twain to the Fu Manchu series.

• 1926 – Soupy Sales is born. I never saw him, but I know he was a wise man because he said “be true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you.”

• 1935 – Elvis Presley. The Pelvis was born, influenced the course of rock and roll and thus all popular music, then got fat and died sitting on the toilet. That’s livin’ baby.

• 1942 – Stephen Hawking is born. I love that the same man can be a foremost scientist who said this:

  Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

And then appear on the Simpsons, playing himself, and straighten Homer out:

[As Homer and Stephen Hawking have a drink at Moe's]
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can’t believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me!
Moe: All right, it’s closing time. Who’s paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn’t say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes, I did.
[A boxing glove on a spring comes out of Hawking's wheelchair, bopping Homer in the face]
Homer: [still imitating] D’oh.

• 1944 – Terry Brooks, American fantasy author and wholesale Tolkien thief, is born.

• 1973 – The Watergate Trials begin. How is it that, 30 years later, Clinton was impeached while Bush faces nothing but sour-faced disapproval?

• 2002 – Speaking of Bush, on this date in 2002 he signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, sticking a fork in an educational system already essentially done.

From Today’s Reading:

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

–Walt Whitman

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Today in history:

• 1891 – Zora Neale Hurston, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and author of _Their Eyes Were Watching God is born.

• 1923 – Hugh Kenner, one of my intellectual idols is born. Among many books, including one of the best appraisals of Pound ever written, are two of my intellectual touchstones The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy and Joyce’s Voices.

• 1957 – Katie Couric is born. When will she go away?

• 1972 – John Berryman jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. As a teacher, he had significant influence on, among others, Donald Justice and Philip Levine. As a poet, his lifelong collection Dream Songs remains a landmark. One of the poems that continues to haunt me:

  Dream Song 29

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
  só heavy, if he had a hundred years
  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
  Henry could not make good.
  Starts again always in Henry’s ears
  the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

  And there is another thing he has in mind
  like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
  would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
  with open eyes, he attends, blind.
  All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
  thinking.

  But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
  end anyone and hacks her body up
  and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
  He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
  Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
  Nobody is ever missing.

• 1999 – President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial begins, irrevocably marking a political polarization from which we may never recover.

From Today’s Reading:

“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

–Khalil Gibran

and

“Spring and Fall”

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Today in history:

• 1256 – Gertrude the Great (or Saint Gertrude… but never Saint Gertrude the Great) is born. She’s known for a prayer in her name, each recitation of which releases 1000 souls from purgatory:

Eternal Father, I offer Thee the most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus Christ, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the Universal Church, for those in my own home and within my family. Amen.

• 1832 – Gustave Dore, painter, engraver, illustrator, and sculptor, is born. The Bible, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and many others have never seen a better illustrator.

• 1878 – Carl Sandburg, underrated (today) poet is born. Here is his poem “Grass”:

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

• 1883 – Khalil Gibran, whose book of essays The Prophet) presaged the American new age movement, is born.

• 1915 – Alan Watts is born. For all intents and purposes. Watts was Zen in America.

• 1931 – E. L. Doctorow is born. The books Ragtime and Billy Bathgate are much better than the films.

• 1945 – Barry Lopez is born. Known primarily as a nature writer, his short fiction is stellar too.

• 1951 – Kim Wilson, singer and blues harp player for The Fabulous Thunderbirds who has never received the recognition he deserves, is born.

• 1970 – Gabrielle Reece is born.

Events: In a haze of rich smoke, Rastafarians the world over are celebrating the ceremonial birthday of Haile Selasse. Sounds a lot more interesting than Christians celebrating Epiphany/Theophany).

From Today’s Reading:

“One of the strangest traits in the character of Socrates was his attitude toward teaching, although teaching was his lifelong occupation. He never did any other work. … Socrates was as much an itinerant teacher as the Sophists he (and Plato) are constantly denigrating…

He was a town character, a home-grown philosopher. The comic poets cracked jokes about him in the theater, and even devoted whole comedies to his eccentricities as a teacher…

Yet over and over again Socrates denies that he is a teacher. He takes pleasure in discombobulating everyone he encounters who claims to be a teacher. The more famous they are, the more he enjoys their discomfiture.

He exhorts his fellow Athenians to virtue, but claims that it is not teachable. He identifies virtue with knowledge, yet he insists that this knowledge is unattainable, and cannot be taught. To cap it all, after making his interlocutors feel inadequate and ignorant, Socrates confesses that he himself knows nothing. This ultimate humility begins to seem a form of boastfulness….”

I. F. Stone – from The Trial of Socrates

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Today in history (a big day):

• 1463 – Francois Villon– poet, raspscallion and criminal– is banned from Paris. He would later write, at the time expecting to be hung with others of his criminal crew:

Brothers and men that shall after us be,
Let not your hearts be hard to us:
For pitying this our misery
Ye shall find God the more piteous.
Look on us six that are hanging thus,
And for the flesh that so much we cherished
How it is eaten of birds and perished,
And ashes and dust fill our bones’ place,
Mock not at us that so feeble be,
But pray God pardon us out of His grace.

• 1825 – Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and other novels of swashbuckling finery and tomfoolery, fights in his first real duel. His trousers fall down… but he survives.

• 1895 – Eizabeth Cotten is born. Libba with her upside down, backwards finger-picking was a true original. Some great YouTube video is available. My favorite: this performance of “Freight Train”.

• 1900 – Yves Tanguy, awesome surrealist painter, is born.

• 1926 – Uber-Confessionalist poet William Snodgrass is born. “April Inventory was one of the early poems that put him on the mark.

• 1932 – Umberto Eco, a brilliant thinker whose style alternates between enervating and stultifying, is born.

• 1941 – Hayao Miyazaki is born. His films transformed my understanding of animation, particularly the popular trio Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle.

• 1942 – Charlie Rose, master of the non-combative interview, is born.

Events: Today is (finally) the 12th day of Christmas and the Feast of St. Stylites, who would spend 37 years atop a series of higher and higher pillars. Take that David Blaine!

From Today’s Reading:

“So, let’s assign NPR to the first circle of hell, where virtuous pagans hang out and bitch about dental deductibles. And let’s put John DePetro in the second circle.

DePetro is the former morning guy on WRKO, Boston’s official AM-radio Hateocracy outlet. He bills himself as “the Independent Man,” an independence he recently affirmed by calling a public official a “fag” on the air.

I’m not sure how many of you have been a guest on a right-wing talk-radio program, but I can tell you exactly what it’s like: it’s like throwing a book at a monkey.”

–Steve Almond, from “Demagogue Days”

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Today in history:

• 1643 – Isaac Newton is born. One of the most brilliant and strange thinkers of all time. He made more amazing discoveries as a byproduct of his interest in alchemy than most leading scientists do on purpose. Then he revolutionized the Royal Mint and the world of currency, receiving a knighthood (not for his science!) for his troubles.

• 1785 – Jakob Grimm is born. Though a significant linguist, he will always be remembered as one of the Brothers Grimm (along with brother Wilhelm), curator, collector, and creator of fairy tales known mostly by their bastardized version. Want to lose some sleep and terrify kids? Read them some of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales…

• 1936 – Billboard magazine releases its first musical sales chart. A few songs that hit the top: Benny Goodman’s “Eeny Meeny Miney Mo”, Fats Waller with “It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie” and Wingy Manone performing “Please Believe Me.”

• 1942 – John McLaughlin, guitarist so good he will make many aspiring players choose fast food careers instead, is born. I’ve worn out a few copies of Passion, Grace and Fire (with Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucia ), not to mention having it stolen. Twice.

• 1943 – Doris Kearns Goodwin– unrepentant serial plagiarizer– is born and starts copying infant sounds from the basinette next to her.

• 1958 – Sputnik I falls back to earth… almost as interesting as the launch, while in 1959 – Luna 1 (also Russian) almost reaches the moon, missing due to a control system malfunction.

• 1999 – Jesse Ventura is sworn in as governor of Minnesota, continuing a tradition of mediocre politics by even worse celebrities.

• 2004 – Spirit, the first Mars Rover, lands safely on the red planet.

Today is the Feast of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, first American Saint, who must have guided Seton Hall’s basketball team on their improbable 1989 run, leading to one of the most exciting NCAA finals in history.

From today’s reading, more Beowulf (this time from the Seamus Heaney edition, which apparently takes many “liberties” but is a damn good reading experience):

“But the earl-troop’s leader was not inclined
to allow his caller to depart alive:
he did not consider that life of much account
to anyone anywhere. Time and again,
Beowulf warrior’s worked to defend
their lord’s life, laying about them
as best they could with their ancestral blades.
Stalwart in action, they kept striking out
on every side, seeking to cut
straight to the soul. When they joined the struggle
there was something they could not have known at the time,
that no blade on earth, no blacksmith’s art
could ever damage their demon opponent.
He had conjured the harm from the cutting edge
of every weapon. But his going away
out of this world and the days of his life
would be agony to him, and his alien spirit
would travel far into fiends’ keeping.

Then he who had harrowed the hearts of men
with pain and affliction in former times
and had given offence to God
found that his bodily powers failed him.
Hygelac’s kinsman kept him helplessly
locked in a handgrip. As long as either lived,
he was hateful to the other. The monster’s whole
body was in pain, a tremendous wound
appeared on his shoulder. Sinews split
and the bone-lappings burst. Beowulf was granted
the glory of winning.”

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In history:

• 106 BC – Cicero is born. Over 2000 years ago he wrote: “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
• 1841 – Herman Melville begins an 18-month stint on the whaler Fairhaven, inspiring and informing a book that will be the source of more bad childhood jokes and more adult reader awe than anyone can say.
• 1882 – Oscar Wilde arrives in the U.S. When asked if he has anything to declare he replies: “Just my genius.”
• 1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien is born. The Lord of the Rings, which I still re-read every few years, was a central influence on far more people than would like to admit it. China Mieville doth protest too much…
• 1945 – Stephen Stills is born. Why can’t he and Neil Young just get along? Check out this live performance of “Treetop Flyer”
• 1956 – He Who Shall Not Be Named– I mean Mel Gibson is foisted upon us
• 1959 – Alaska becomes the 49th state, though when it is -15F I wonder why…
• 1962 – Francesca Lia Bock, author of one of the best “young adult” books ever written (Weetzie Bat) and a couple of collections of poetry.
• 1977 – Apple Computer company is incorporated

Today is also the Feast of St. Genevieve, honoring neither of my former girlfriends of the same name.

From today’s reading (The Epic of Gilgamesh):

“You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.”

and

“I stood alone before an aweful being. His face was sombre, like the black bird of the storm. He fell upon me with the talons of an eagle and he held me fast, pinioned with his claw, until I smothered. Then he transformed me so that my arms became wings covered with feathers, and led me away to the Hall of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no turning back. There the people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds, with wings for covering, they see no light. I entered the house of dust and saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away for ever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old.”

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Today in history:

• 1920 – Isaac Asimov is born. Allegedly, Asimov could type 90 words-per-minute with just index and middle fingers. It’s cool to dismiss Asimov today, but I retain a real affection for him, particularly the Robot and Foundation books. He has a great number of nonfiction books that should– on their own– be an enduring legacy.

• 1947 – David Shapiro, poet, is born. Read 6 poems and a conversation.

• 1960 – Todd Haynes, director, is born. Far From Heaven should have won an Oscar. I’m Not There which includes Cate Blanchett as one of six actors portraying Bob Dylan looks intriguing.

• 1971 – One of the most read phrases in history debuted (by law): “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health” — second only to “close cover before striking”?

From today’s reading (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus):

“Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man’s heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came.
Thee feathery follies of his youth once over,
What trouble is beyond the range of man?”

and

“Though he ask little and receive still less,
It is sufficient:
Suffering and time,
Vast time, have been instructors in contentment…”

and

“As they say of the blind, sound are the things I see.”

and

“Why is it your pleasure is to be amiable
To those who do not want your amiability?
Suppose that when you begged for something desperately
A man should neither grant it you nor give
Sympathy even; but later when you were glutted
With all your heart’s desire, should give it then,
When charity was no charity at all?
Would you not think the kindness somewhat hollow?
That is the sort of kindness you offer me:
Generous in words, but in reality evil.”

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from today’s reading (Sophocles, Oedipus the King):

“Now I’ve exposed my guilt, horrendous guilt,
could I train a level glance on you, my countrymen?
Impossible! No, if I could just block off my ears,
the springs of hearing, I would stop at nothing–
I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison,
blind to the sound of life, not just the sight.
Oblivion– what a blessing…
for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.”

In History:

• 1660 – Samuel Pepys begins his diary…
• 1818 – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published… the first sci-fi?
• 1879 – E. M. Forster is born. A resonant quote: “I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.”
• 1919 – J. D. Salinger is born. A few years ago I revisited The Catcher in the Rye and was agog anew.
• 1923 – Milt Jackson is born, the original and only Wizard of the Vibes
• 1970 – Time begins… in Unix at least.

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