Thursday, March 7, 2024

04Mar, 07Mar24

Today [Monday, 04March], daffodils first showed their delightful blossoms dotting several front yards across the neighborhood. 

Three days later, now, in the late afternoon of the 7th of March, rain has coated everything in a soft harbinger of this coming spring's temper. The drip outside my window, the chirruping of the robins, too, accent the sepia humidity in today's daylight. 

 It's been awhile since I've done this. 

It's been another eek-ly week again of terrible news. From the international to the local, the nearly constant storms throw up their torments. It's felt so bad with everything breaking or broken, or only partly mended, and for so long, that there remains little energy to talk about it. But President Biden gave a determined State of the Union Address to the US Congress this evening of the 7th. Here, it begins at 27 minutes into this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u42TQs4Pf2c 


But despite this there is much to be grateful over for those who can. With a barest employment I work not more than 32 hours a week which in turn covers rent, utilities, food and a much-valued satchel of discretionary spending. This is a norm and an expectation of social/civil accord established for most people of a certain age in the US: to pay for one's keep. And for most that means work, or some form of labor for pay. The time that I work also allows for leisure time. Notice how this is constructed. Work is prior to leisure through the necessities demanded by regular, routine payment of enough forms of individual infrastructure - the material forms in housing, utilities, groceries - that can enable what is obtainable for security, heat/AC, water, lights & nowadays, cable. 

But with enough time off, at least I can read and watch the comedy shows on cable. Not much of a 'freedom to afford' in this life, but for now almost enough. 

Today's reading list is as wide-ranging as ever. 

"Iraq's Twenty Years of Carnage" by Joshua Hammer reviews two new books covering Iraq and it's twenty-first century. 

The Art of Fiction 123 in The Paris Review issue 118 is a too-short George Plimpton interview with Tom Wolfe c. 1990. Bonfire of the Vanities was his most recent magnum opus. 

Edith Wharton's A Son At the Front (1923) tells the modern story of a  young person flinging themselves into the uncertain future. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Beautiful and Damned (1922)finds Anthony and Gloria Patch (nee Gilbert) just learning that they will not receive his grandfather's largesse any longer since his death left the two "high-livers" out of his will. 

In the years that followed Rebecca West wrote a 1200 page 'travelogue' detailing her six-week exploration of Yugoslavia in 1937. Half way through that she goes into great detail revealing the horrific tale when the Serbs killed their last King Alexander mostly over his Queen Draga Masin, on June 11, 1903. And this was not fiction. Not fiction at all. In the chapters on Sarajevo, West also tells the tale of Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie's death, 28June1914.







Sunday, December 3, 2023

news 03Dec23

 So, this happened today. 


Saturday, July 1, 2023

Bad Times For The News 01July, 2023

Rain here in Kansas as the world appears from space to be bathed in a brown cloud in the Northern Hemisphere. Hundreds of fires in Canada have burned for weeks and blanketed everybody east of there with extreme smoke pollution. 

Another significant change in the news today is another reshuffle at Twitter, the global news disseminator, that now limits the amount of speech users can see depending on whether users choose to pay for their self-verification or not. So its users complained and made fun of it. Many more have said they are leaving for good.


Over and over in many ways. Meanwhile, there are serious riots & protests in France for a fourth night. 


The war in Ukraine blasts on. And reports of Israel dropping bombs on Syria Jenin in the West Bank are coming in tonight as well. Not a good omen for July.

Monday, March 20, 2023

Noon on 20March, 2023

The year's first daffodil appeared in my yard today. A Monday morning, a sunlit morning. Just to the right off the front step of my front door. Facing southeast it catches the sun peering over the tops of the huge tree across the street. It is the noon hour here. Daylight Savings time commenced here eight days ago and the spring equinox will happen in just under four hours local time. 

This is the perfect time to play Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Friday, January 6, 2023

January 6 Committee Hearings listed for future reference

Day one of the US House of Representatives Congressional Inquiry of the January 6 Committee held June 9, 2022: Day two of the January 6 Committee held June 13, 2022: Day three of the January 6 Committee held June 17, 2022: Day four of the January 6 Committee held June 21, 2022: Day five of the January 6 Committee held June 23, 2022: Day six of the January 6 Committee held June 28, 2022: Day seven of the January 6 Committee held July 12, 2022: Day eight of the January 6 Committee held July 21, 2022: Day nine of the January 6 Committee held October 13, 2022: Day ten, the final report of the January 6 Committee held December 19, 2022:

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Lula da Silva Wins Run-Off Presidential Election In Brazil

Saturday, October 29, 2022

October 2022 - Abandoned Places

 The month of October 2022 has sped by with most of the narratives of last month shambling on, with the impending US elections - only nine short days away - aggressively perp-ing its way into the lead of our national horse race that our collective news chain subsists on launching full-throated into some explosive, fiery unknown. The war in Ukraine drags on blindly with Putin still insulting millions with life and death and promising still millions more with no heat this winter. China's Xi Jinping takes another unprecedented term for himself and had Hu Jintao ejected from their politburo seeming to promise other future autocratic movements. Unlike France in April, Italy elected far-right nationalist Giorgi Meloni to their top post late September. Meanwhile the pandemic has been ignored in the US by its forgetful many though overall cases in the US decreased in this last month. Brazil holds a crucial run-off election this weekend.

It's all so tiresome, unnecessary and insulting. Everything seems broken or in only partial, hoped-for repair, with the snide broadcasts of future destruction on every other person's lips. As if winter has already come and we have only the uncertainties of climate change to depend on instead of the dim light of some far-off spring. Dejection and apathy reign over any chance of light or hope around any corner. Elon Musk closed the deal on his Twitter acquisition yesterday. He's appointing a new board to oversee things there regarding content. No one knows what that may mean. Who knows, maybe the fascists will blow up the market tomorrow or the elections next week. Who but the innocent bystanders will notice anyway?

Any arguments or answers on how we got here have been daily erased for so long now by nearly every next random 'news story', the twists and turns of the tumult have caused 'national concerns' to normatively blur. "What does that mean?" has become a national obsession and no one has any answers. Everything just falls apart. Nothing to do but count the ways affairs have gotten more bleak. 

Still there remains things to see and talk about. So here's a few from this month. With the prevailing mood so full of uncertainty and fear, abandoned places have some allure. 



Monday, September 12, 2022

later early September 2022

 Things are moving so fast over the last few days it seemed important once again to get some of it set down ... at least as a snapshot of several moving parts. 

... 

Advances in the last week by Ukrainian troops in the southern Donbas region of Ukraine and the quick retreat of Russian forces there give rise to much acclaim in the west. Meanwhile in now both St. Petersburg and Moscow reports of deputies and ministers in various bodies there have asked for Putin's removal. It's now Wednesday morning there and verifiable reports - in a war zone - should of course be treated with more than the usual extreme scepticism regarding sources and frames and basic veracity. 

With that caveat, an article from yesterday's Moscow Times (moscowtimes.ru) has stated that Putin has cancelled a meeting with his generals overseeing the war in Ukraine. By evening there electrical power generation and distribution has been cut in Kherkov region, the scene of the heaviest fighting in the last few days. 

________________________________________ 


In the US a video has surfaced of the former US President purportedly from May 2022 boarding a plane that includes aides delivering boxes to the plane on the runway with him in attendance and boarding. Said plane took the former President from his club at Mar-a-Lago in FL to his club in Bedminster, NJ, where most recently, in July his former wife, and mother of his most known children, Ivana Trump was buried. Calls in the press for investigations into these matters stem from the recognition this week that some of the classified materials kept by Trump and then seized last month by the FBI have to do with foreign nation's nuclear secrets. This last poses all sorts of problems for the US and the world in ways that range from bad to worse in ever increasingly bad, but yet untold ways. The worst frightening dramas of course are the ones you can't predict how they might turn out. 

Granted a Special Master to oversee the 11000 plus set of documents seized last month by the FBI, the former president is now reportedly in negotiations with the US Department of Justice over who that person might be and who will pay them to oversee the many kinds of materials stolen and then kept hidden at Mar-a-Lago by the Trump team. The lawyers representing his various cases are reportedly again having trouble finding lawyers of their own to represent themselves. 

Last Thursday, on the 8th of September, Steve Bannon turned himself in to NY prosecutors over charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. He was paraded before the press in handcuffs. 

DJT himself left Florida and went to his golf club in Virginia and met with a number of men on the fairway of his golf course there, the Trump National Golf Club, outside Sterling. Although he mentioned on his own social media network that he would be travelling to DC on a 'working trip', members of the press were surprised to find him deplaning at Dulles looking dishevelled and in golf attire. This prompted some to guess he was instead coming to DC having been called out of his normal routines to appear in court or answer some legal summons. Instead he just met a bunch of associates at the golf course and they talked yet no one seemed to be carrying golf clubs. 


Sunday, April 18, 2021

Luther Can't Recant, Charles Can't Excuse: Diet of Worms April 18, 1521

The Diet and the Emperor agreed about authority regarding Luther. How could one monk be right and all the other authorities be wrong? It was much more likely any error was with Luther. But to him, authority didn't matter since 'Scripture was unambiguous.' For him, Scripture was the authority, not himself, not the Church or its ministers, or the young bearded Emperor. Luther after all was willing to be taught what was correct if anyone in the Church could explain it better for him to understand. But in his mind, he knew they could not. For their part, they did not want to try to argue any of these points and understood that because of their political office they did not need to try. The Diet was presided by the Emperor and he had the last authority here, while the Pope in Rome had already made his decision.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Luther Appears Before Diet of Worms: April 17, 1521

This is a post that could head a cluster of a dozen or more posts about what happened, how it happened, and what were the results. One of the biggest arguments Europe would have with itself was the one over Luther. The stories and meanings, the changes that came out of Worms led on this day with the appearance and reception of Martin Luther at the proceedings before the Diet. But there were several antecedents and this appearance, and his response tactically, put off his own execution or banishment, branded a heretic, cut off from his communities.


There's a lot here. Luther affirmed he had written the offensive books [ detailed elsewhere] but, called it a 'matter of faith' that he could not explain or deny them or recant without first having 'proper consideration'. He asked for an adjournment til later, and that was granted. Until the next day.


Friday, April 16, 2021

Luther Arrives at Worms, April 16, 1521

Martin Luther had left Wittenberg on the 2nd of April. He'd traveled with a small group across German lands, at the summons of Roman Emperor Charles V, in order to affirm or renounce his published beliefs before the Diet assembled in Worms to answer the charge of heresy as lain down by Pope Leo X the previous year.

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

parade of daily notes in process from 07- 08 March, 2021: excerpts, and earlier


In the last hours of Sunday, March 7, 2021, I made some dinner and sat down to read. I had slept most of the day after having gone to bed near midnight the night before, i.e. the night of the 6th. This followed a busy day. Saturday I had taken care of errands and walked half way across town and back. Somehow I had turned my hips and ankles into tense ropes on these long walks and then made that worse by carrying a lot of groceries home. So, I figure my body needed the rest. But when I got up in the afternoon on Sunday I realized I needed again to get a few more things from the store. Happily I can report, I did that today and my aches are lessened, so I am more conscious of my posture etc. as I do this.

Many, many times over the years I take to writing down what I'm reading and researching. I do this in a number of ways for myself in order to keep track of what is in process. But now and then I get the urge to tell others. For this of course I have to write it down. There is always for me a wide range of materials. Longer views turn into lists as a result, by necessity, and might be interesting for no one but the far away in time. Still people ask what I'm doing and I laugh thinking what they may want or imagine is a finished product! But no, what gets the most attention is the constant process, after all.

After a normal morning routine when I think I may have cooked some pasta, and poured & drank a cup of cold coffee, it dawned on me that I wanted to finish the section in the recent Balzac novelette I was spending time with. First published in 1834 as a submitted manuscript in L'Echo de la Juene (or Young) France as "Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe)", it came a few years after the imposition of the new July Monarch of France. This was Duke Louis Phillippe from the other, 'lesser' Orleans branch of the Bourbon line.

The story though, takes place just a few years earlier when the other Bourbon line, that of the brothers of Louis XVI had wrestled for dominance after the fall and disgrace of Napoleon in 1814 and his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. A verbal contest of emotion is playing out here between a General and a Duchess. The time is the 1820's. The place for this contest is at the Hotel of the Duchess - her house - in central Paris, and near to the Palace Bourbon which lay on the south bank of the Seine. This neighborhood had for centuries been the domain of a number of noble houses close to that of the Palais Bourbon nestled in and among various churches and hospitals and charities. She is married to a Duke closely attached to the efforts of Charles X, and conveniently for the story, he was out of town on some extended mission. She had been close to the ladies in the House of Bourbon all her life.
 
The General is a hero from the Napoleonic wars. He had won battles and suffered much, got lost in the desert in Egypt, and had been away for so long that it took a man even with his commanding skill sets some time to return to the center of things back in Paris. When things changed in 1830 and Charles, the misruling monarch was replaced, the Duchess had already left and entered a Carmelite convent, far away, hanging off the end of Tarife at the southernmost tip of Spain. Then, Tarife was a British protectorate like Gibraltar is now and off limits for the French. The Bourbon family and entourage had also fled and spent the rest of their lives looking for safe haven.
 
This General had fallen for the Duchess who was inclined to let him visit her, and for some time, thus distinguishing him from other gentlemen, as her neighbors and nobles in the Court could point out. At this point in the story though they were both still in Paris. The Bourbon line and all the Houses with their deep associations still straining after decades of terror and reassemblage in the wakes of the revolutionary tumult, still felt far less than stable and it made some sense for ladies to make friends with powerful forces. These alliances and friendships however had to be carried out with a delicacy and finesse that the French fortunately had turned into an artform and which had existed for centuries. This Duchess knew very well who she was and what she would stand for and not. But, tragically for her she had never experienced real love. And this, unsurprisingly, the General still did not understand. He was a military man and she was a court lady and they both had different ideas about just what was going on. After months of his assertions based on his hopeful outlook, and her not quite denying how she felt for him, it is late, he is on his knees with his head in her lap. She runs her fingers through his curly dark locks, thinking to herself, realizing that he would kill her if he ever concluded she had been fooling him. Spurred by his expectations he meets the intransigence of her sense of self, and her appraisal of her responsibilities. The layers of proper behavior unravel where for him his endless sets of means reach out for an end that she will not abide. Because for her that end means death.
_____________________________________


The next thing within reach is the current NY Review of Books. In it, a brief overview of the writing career of American author Nicholson Baker is laid out alongside a new release for him called "Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act". Baker has been a regular author of fiction and sometimes essays since the late 1980's. His frustration with politics over the last twenty years in particular has led him to appeal to the US government through official channels to find out the answer to certain questions about the torture regime, drone strikes, and even the origins of COVID-19. He waits for years and time and again finds, when he does get responses, that they are so full of redaction he can't construct explicit enough answers or chronologies that could show what has actually happened. He laments that if we don't know what has happened then we don't know what is done in our name as Americans and so can't even say what we do or do not stand for. 

We thereby lose a sense of who we are in these redacted intelligence files. But, in this latest book, Baker writes out these searches alongside his day to day routines, He has a pair of dogs he dearly loves and who are his constant companions. He goes to the market, he makes dinner. He washes the dogs, they sit by him when he writes or sleeps. These quotidian rounds, the freelance author Peter Baker of this review [NYRB 11Mar21] tells us, are the explicit known forms of actual known life that are most important to all of us anyway. For Nicholson Baker, he seems to tell us, they act as a solace rather, that counters the sought meanings which Baker returns to again and again in order to try to confirm for him and us what we likely already sense but know are likely beyond certain proof.

The next article from Jenny Uglow explores the beauty of an old mapbook of England published in 1815. A section on the life and career of William Smith follows. Another look at Smith's methods also show how he and the book's publication were paid out. It was a beautiful volume and still is as it sat in the archives for centuries not seeing the light of day, but it was hardly ever purchased. Mr Smith spent ten weeks as a result in debtor's prison in 1819. He would work on several projects in his time though and give birth to the study of geology on a massive scale. The title of Smith's major work was "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland: exhibiting the colliers and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names". As the first ever geologic map of an entire country, subscribers could pay 5 guineas (in 1815!) for individual sheets or pay £12 for the whole thing which covered 8.5 feet by 6 feet. He had worked as an engineer working out problems in drainage and irrigation, he traipsed across the lands and dug up fossils, and in the beginning worked as a youthful surveyor in Somerset where he took an interest in the seams of local coal sediment. Where do we stand? How is that possible? It's not so simple!


In 1921, Six Characters In Search of an Author brought fame and a resolution of debt to Luigi Pirandello, a 53 yr old Sicilian. Pirandello's father, a wealthy owner of a sulfur mine lost it all in a major flooding in 1903, and so, 35 yr old Luigi started writing. He spent nearly twenty years at it before they caught the public eye and then he became famous for these satiric, dark stories of betrayal and vengeance. [...]
_____________________________

08 March

Awaking and looking briefly at the news, I get up to make some coffee and fill the water bottle. It is Monday and cool this morning but it promises to be 70F and bright, sunny with a strong wind from the south. The daffodil tops have slipped their spears above the crust of dead scrub in their little isolated clusters - first harbinger of spring I see here.

I returned to finish an interview with Toni Morrison from the summer of 1993 and published that fall in The Paris Review (no. 128), after having left off reading just a couple days ago. She had been talking about sources and inspirations and how to make plots work without detailing their central actions, leaving that til the end or for the reader's mind to work out and how understatement can work far better. She says she did this explicitly in her novel Jazz to be like the music, where the structure frames the improvisation. Where the work of endless hours, the years in countless measures, the practice polish is shown off in graceful paucity and crisp lines. Meanwhile the steady, propulsive beat is building all the while, working its underlying pulse where the melody accentuates, captures with some hovering hint, snatching and releasing from that driving undertow. Not only does she praise the understatement, she claims it as a must-be-so. The reader must never be satiated, she says. Instead they must be taught that the tune can be played again and again, but with endless variation. This can-can is a demonstration I see with a perfect number of steps, a flurry, and then it stops. A bow, the cheers, then the curtain.

Of course, because she can, a number of things rise to the surface in this interview. Asked about other structural elements in her work she tells of how migration and movement to the cities seems to have profoundly changed the course of so many lives but particularly African-Americans. The tumult, the difficulties, the density and diversity of wide-ranging populations, the grittiness and toughness of survival all proliferate new understandings and insights. Amidst all this, an individual can become themselves, can learn their own skill sets and hone them to a polish. The music and the dance and the words and the art become emblematic of self ownership. And then beyond that from that place of self-mastery, a person can become a center of one's own, of one's own circles with the ripples extending outward. The music gets heard and a person can learn of their own body, their own thoughts and then test them against so many others. Individuals stand out and an audience can hear and see - for the first time in the US - Black people aren't some indifferentiable, confused mass of inarticulate hordes. Duke Ellington is not like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis is not like Charlie Parker. You can hear anew, as Billie Holiday is not like Ella Fitzgerald or Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone. Of course, each of them, and us, have our own voices, often submerged. But we get the benefit when we witness their voices grow and change in time.

She explains how she was asked when she would write about white America. And to hear her say how she first wanted to be understood as an African-American writer gives a profound insight into her sense of place and being. And maybe the rest of us. She knows those asking that think it's a compliment that she can give her voice to the white experience, and she would, she said, if she wanted to. But primary for her was to write as an African-American woman. She defined for herself a place to write from. 

Joyce, or Tolstoy, she says, weren't asked to do that, it was demanded of them though, because it was assumed that they already were writing from the center of what already existed. And they were branded as hostile to authority when they wrote what they did. The place of western civilization already was the arbiter, the decider of what could be and what could not be written about. She had set about to make another, different center, another locus to view things from. As long as people keep asking the question of when artists or writers were going to come into the center, to talk about that center, she says, then she won't, she can't: "...I'm gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me."
She wonders that the French didn't ask Joyce when he would write about Paris. This provincial sounding nonsensical question makes her point plain.
And,
"Each subject matter demands its own form, you know."

__________________________________________________

The pandemic has sprung new habits for us all I think. This year I've been reading as much from the huge archive of the Paris Review that extends back to 1953 as anything else. It turns out to be a treasure trove of stuff I never knew existed before and every week I find more things I feel I have to make time for. Access to the archive is open to subscribers but will lock up when the subscription ends for me in September (I think). So I have an incentive to plow thru as much as I can, in case, for whatever reason, I can't renew. Since the beginning of January I've kept the pace of an issue of that per week. Jumping around decade to decade, for variety, I alternate one issue from the earliest years and one from some other decade. It seemed important to get as many of the earlier ones read to get a sense of how they started out, hopefully showing purpose and range of their material and consistency. For this scattershot reading approach I have to make lists of what I get done or I'll get lost. There's so much here for writers and readers alike. The earlier ones are shorter but sometime in the 1960's individual issues grew in length to around 200 pages, or more! My schedule is late with the 40 year anniversary issue no. 128 of fall 1993 finished today - with that interview with Toni Morrison.
...
_________________________________
17JAN21
There was a recent Paris Review I picked up to see if, or how quickly I could speed thru it.
The structure is simple: each issue has a bunch of poems, some short stories, a couple interviews, a photo essay or art conception.
It all has the thrown together feel of a few dozen unrelated articles, stacked and squared-off, then cut, shorn into crisp, thick-paged form.
Regularized font. 
Topics breeze in and sail out. Words dip and sway or jolt and cascade. 
Meaning, substance, chiseled like aphorae,
but catalogued like discount coupons tucked sublimely next to the fertilizer. 
A story of foreign agents? no. 
They're little kids, 
who comically clown, then, betrayed by the tectonics of culture, left brutalized, alone in fields of broken glass. Glass that time is viewed through. 
A turn of page finds shop-worn counters of durable vows, shiny from frequent scrubbings, lined straight along sills of windows
left unwashed, too cloudy for vision to penetrate. Redounding back, Interiors resound like drums, then settle as leaves in fall.

"Are we there yet?"

Dozens of poems. Short, long, catchy, self-contradicting, lines double up. Words separate, untie united.
...
~05JAN21
This issue, spring 2019, #228, went right along. In a day-and-a-half, it was two-thirds done.
The interview with the living poet (Carl Phillips) who teaches on the other side of Missouri,
rides along the regular track. The obstacles that made his path uneven get highlighted, some.
The output is prodigious, but the thoughts and their presentation seem ordinary to me. The expected tracks of Obvious.
His life read aloud putters round that track: 'Glad to meet you." "Charmed I'm sure." 
I should, I think, finish this issue up really quick.
~16JAN21
Ten days later... after a morning of this or that - the news, which treats the emotions like a yoyo with the string of reason made out of rancid silly putty - 
and a paragraph or two of Michel de Montaigne, for good measure;
Maigret the chief detective, [in Georges Simenon's "Maigret & the Apparition] is back at the office and knows he won't likely make it home for dinner.
The second night in a row. There are threads engaged seeking witnesses afield. Surveil watches posted, calls made to London and Nice, awaiting what the researchers may unveil. Left with no idea who did it or why and only a sixth of the story left - even that, I can leave it til tomorrow.

Dinner on the stove gets a stir. 
What there is left in this recent issue of the Paris Review can be mostly read backwards, piece by piece.
spring 2019, #228:
"Study of Two Figures (Orpheus/Eurydice)" Monica Youn 
21., 16., 8., John Ashbery
"Elvis Has Left The House" James Tate
"Monsoon" Eduardo C Corral 
"You're Gonna Write This" - Patricia Smith 

I'm also keeping up with the New York Review this year (and last fall) which is a task sometime as there is just so much material there.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

rainy day - 14march21

Today is the shortest day of the year. Daylight Savings Time in the US means that the clocks are set ahead an hour in the spring. This means today is only 23 hours long while sunrise and sunset will happen about an hour later than it did yesterday. People have different ideas as to what that means and why we do it. The history of it points to federal laws borne from Department of Commerce notions from fifty years ago about daylight for farmers, getting products to market in daylight, cutting down on traffic accidents. Saving insurance money. Most folks just seem to see it as a hassle and a day or two of jostled sleep patterns, the kids will need an explanation, the pets start bugging us for food earlier than what the clocks tell us.

Of course as the earth's tilt in the northern hemisphere brings longer daylight hours, the course around the sun makes sunrise happen about a minute earlier and the sunset about a minute later every day without this clock adjustment. Until late June. Sunset does come an hour later today and in a month's time this slow accretion of minutes does add up. 

But here today there is an absence of sun. It rains for the third day in a row. The daffodils have shot their spears up in alliance with their annual rhythms and today I've seen their very first yellow trumpet bell plop out. The rain makes it hang its head in dripping assent. That one will get plucked and brought in and lain out on a dry sheet of cardboard in the front room. When it dries out it will get set in a teacup on a book shelf just above eye level. A reminder. Last year's soldier will get taken out and placed with the others on a ledge in a closet where the others lie in quiet rows. Paper-thin fragile, crimpled brown testament to passing time on another scale.

An intermittent drip outside the window here counts an irregular beat. The coffeemaker's heater still clicks tho it's given off today's last heaving huff of steam. The thermostat clicks on to the right, and the drop furnace to my left with a whoosh comes alive. The low roar builds softly, the metal of the furnace creaks expanding in the heat generated. The thermostat clicks again, the furnace fire goes out. Again I hear the refrigerator has kicked on circulating it's fluid with the whirring of its motor hidden in, but making obvious, the layered blankets of white noise found everywhere these days. 

The rain outside comes harder again. The drip outside the window more insistent. I hear a train horn in the distance. It's good I don't have any reason to go out. Groceries gotten yesterday, rent and bills got paid the week before. The trickle of news I see seems dumb, numb like a shuddering worn out train slowing before a weather-beaten station. The AP and Washington-Post act as though they're hand-wringing over the President's forty minute commute every other weekend to go to church and see his grandkids. If that's what they think is news they should listen to the rain dripping outside my window. 

______________________________

Last year I got subscriptions on a whim to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. They give a good excuse for some performative discipline. If I read an article or two a day I can keep up with the relentless supply of topics fed out of the NY Review. Even though I have to stick with it this process I've allotted to myself feels easy since the topics range so far and wide feeding my parallel curiosities. More on that later.

Late last month they had a Zoom'd symposium with a number of their contributors talking about the crisis in journalism. Compiled and edited, the youtube clip of that runs just under eighty minutes. They talk about our cloistered indoor activity necessitated by the pandemic over the last year. Conversation grew around how social justice has been hampered, then exploded, then exploited over the last year and how the institutions of the media has come under simultaneous attacks, an ongoing mass delegitimization over the last several years. Also acknowledged is the hive-mind of internet-delivered social media where people tend to listen only to those like themselves, which in turn, tends to have a polarizing effect on our day to day thoughts. 

But the internet also exposes us to those outside our humid silos and people react to those 'other voices' generally out of ignorance. "Because they just didn't know about that." More people feel they are being forced to reckon with all of the old wounds and old disparities and injustices as each confrontation with supposed 'new information' flares up. There's plenty of hurt to go around. It will be a real series of hard tests to make sure these don't all metastasize, or get met with harsher, overcompensating forms of stricter authority. There are people in Congress and the Senate and all over the country who feel they don't need to learn anything new, and that the answers that only they can supply is just what 'those people' need.

________________________________

On the other hand I've been reading back issues of The Paris Review. Started in 1953 by Americans wanting to present new literature to a country that hungered for it, they've managed, despite the odds, to keeping itself afloat for over 67 years delivering poetry, short stories and interviews with writers and readers from all over the world. Adjusting to its format took a little slowing simmer. Perusing the 67 year digital archive whose access comes with the subscription, it quickly became apparent that the best writers and thinkers in print of the twentieth century were represented. And also there were so many that I had never heard of! Issue number 236 just arrived the other day but I won't get to that for months probably. Instead I try to read a back issue every week. Older issues are shorter, but recent ones run over 200 pages each so that keeps me busy reading every one cover to cover. So much variety!

Last week I read inspiring 1993 interviews with Toni Morrison and Don De Lillo. That one also had a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a 'lost' Ezra Pound Canto when he was running with the fascists in Italy. This week the spring 1977 issue I see sports a long interview with Kurt Vonnegut, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Soto & Frank O'Hara, and, a short story from William S. Burroughs telling when he spent a summer in The Valley of the Rio Grande in 1949. 

Next week in the queue, issue 7 from fall-winter 1954-5 has a bunch of work from writers I've never heard of but has a number of drawings from Pablo Picasso. Two weeks ago, in issue 5, there were a number of line drawings called Livres d'Or. Collected by Parisian restaurants and clubs and kept in closets for decades they show, leaf after leaf, momentary sketches from (now very famous) artists who sat for a moment in the darkened booths and, handed a pen and paper, delightful flourishes of another age's brilliance. Never having known these existed they appear before my eye like new flowers. One that really jumped out at me was by Leonor Fini who I had never heard of. This blog talks a bit about her


edit: Oh yeah! today is ฮ  (Pi) day: 3.14... round and round it goes. And I guess the Grammy Awards are tonight which is an especially weird thing this year since so much just didn't happen last year.

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

On The Brink

Last night the House of Representatives sent a resolution to Vice-President Pence to invoke Section 4 of the 25th amendment removing the 45th President from his duties. The deadline for that was passed and so the House voted on the resolution to begin debate on Articles of Impeachment against the President.

National Guard troops from several states including Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, & Delaware have begun arriving in Washington DC. Several have been assigned to the Capitol building itself. The pictures this morning feel epic, comic-tragic and banal.


Members began assembling in the Capitol for debate on Impeachment at 9AM. 


What this comes down to today is a straightforward matter that has all sorts of ramifications. Do we let the 45th President create a path here for widely accepted sedition that he intends to lead to his own assertion of extra-constitutional tenure, or, do we rather punish him by impeachment for inciting insurrection in order to contest the 2020 elections? In simpler terms, do we let him become something like a king or do we hold him accountable by impeachment for this his latest, but most important, dereliction of duty.

The House of Representatives voted after a five hour debate with 231 votes to impeach the President of the United States, and 197 votes against, with ten Republicans voting with Democrats. The entirety of these actions can be viewed here, with commentary from PBS.

Two more police have died since Sunday. One from injuries sustained during last Wednesday's insurrection attempt at the Capitol. Another committed suicide.


Monday, January 11, 2021

US Insurrection 2021: In the Wake

Five days after the storm of the Capitol by followers of the outgoing head of the Executive in the US a few things have become widely known. Five people have died as a result of last Wednesday's attempted insurrection. Two Capitol police and three insurgents succumbed to injuries or medical related injuries. There were widespread inconsistencies regarding policy that led to much of the breakdown of security at the Capitol, reaching as far as the the Pentagon and the National Guard. The heads of the Capitol police have said they will resign. 

There has not been an official explanation of what has happened with these events or this whole episode from the Executive or, from DC Security. Trump's preferred platforms for disseminating information have been cut off so he no longer has access to twitter. Parler, the platform popular with conservatives since the November 3 elections, has also shut down. This is a result of the major tech companies that supply its users the means via cell phone to access that platform having cut off access to it. The CEO of Parler announced Monday the company was suing Amazon for ending its support of the platform.

The Speaker of the House has asked the Vice-President to invoke the 25th Amendment which would remove President Trump from participating in active measures in that office. Madame Speaker has also stated that if the Vice-President will not do this by 11am today - Monday - then she is prepared to call for a voice vote in the House to approve Articles of Impeachment already drawn up against the President. When Madame Speaker called for a unanimous consent vote, a Republican member blocked the motion.

Meanwhile, it seems as though a major hack on an administrative level has occurred with Parler just prior to its shutting down, exposing the personal data of certain users on the platform. Seventy terabytes of user data including personal identifying information has reportedly been opened up which means anyone, including the Government or the FBI, now has access. Thousands of photos and video and the personal information of user data had been uploaded to the platform and other forms of social media throughout the last few months but particularly in the days around the January 6 storm of activity. 

As a result, there have been reports all weekend that hundreds of criminal cases have been opened, scores of arrests made by the FBI, and a rush of deletions of said material by the insurgency participants. Apparently a number of these individuals have also been put on 'no-fly' lists as suspected domestic terrorists. Also, individual politicians have begun denying their involvement, up to and including the President, professing a need for healing, unity. Many see these as merely moves by complicit members who are seeking impunity and immunity for themselves rather than unity for the country.


Wednesday, January 6, 2021

"...in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives..."

Today was the day that Congress was set to affirm the certified Electoral College votes officially recognizing the new President-elect Joseph R Biden and his running mate as Vice-President Kamala Harris. This did not happen today.

The morning broke with the news that the special election in the state of Georgia had concluded with two new Senators, Warnock and Ossoff having been elected. This was even more significant since their election as members of the Democratic party gave the Senate an entirely new tenor. Now the Senate is divided evenly with fifty members in the Republican party and fifty from the Democratic party. This is the first time in ten years the Senate will be led with a Democrat as the majority leader.

But, the counting of the electoral college votes did not begin because there were a number of objections that members had put forward to block the count. Since the November election, the current resident Donald J Trump has refused to concede the national election claiming numerous fraudulent processes, including ballot stuffing, ballot shredding, fraud inducing electoral officials, fraudulent vote counting processes and even the voting by dead people. His subordinates have taken to the courts and the airwaves and the social media platforms claiming all of the above and much more but without proof, spinning controversy and conspiracies in an environment that seems to thrive on such poisonous ignorance. There have been sixty cases that the courts have struck down or thrown out due to lack of evidence or lack of standing by the plaintiffs. This, rather than dispelling the illusions of his followers, has instead only increased their frustration.

So, today several hundred of his supporters convened in Washington DC set on disrupting this official, constitutional process of counting the electoral college votes. At the moment that objections were being heard in due order, in the separate bicameral houses brought by representatives and Senators from their respective districts and states, individuals outside the building began breaching the security perimeter. Before long scores and then hundreds of people had stormed the building claiming they were holding a revolution. 

Representatives were rushed out of chambers to secure locations.Rioters scoured the buildings looking for accomplices. One woman, a vet who had formerly been in the Air Force was shot in the Capitol building and has since died. Several instances of vandalism and graffiti occurred and Representatives offices were broken into and items stolen, but no further injuries have been reported. At least one pipe bomb had been found and taken away and defused. After a couple hours, Vice-President Pence called on the National Guard to come help. The President's twitter account after tweeting a number of incendiary remarks was shut down temporarily. The mayor of Washington DC declared a curfew in the city limits from 6PM to 6AM. And with reserves built up the Capitol police began clearing the Capitol building and complex which was completed by 6PM. 

About two hours later, the buildings having been cleared and cleaned, members were told they could return and did. After a few short speeches, members began again the process where they had left off, debating the objections with votes being held on whether to sustain those objections to holding the count. At this time, none of those objections have been sustained, being resoundingly defeated, but there are a few members who voted for sustaining those objections. They are as follows.


Today was Epiphany
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Front page of tomorrow's New York Times:

Monday, December 14, 2020

"... darkness at the edge of noon..."

Today I woke up and looked at twitter and saw there was important news.Today is the day when the electoral college gathers its members to vote and tally their numbers. By day's end the US should have a consensus on who their next President should be. Most people know it to be President-elect Joe Biden. This election though has not been an entirely regular process. Instead, the attendant activities performed mostly by the incumbent's partisans and his advocates across the country, in addition to the offices usually referred to as the outgoing administration, all follow rather irregular patterns. None of which follow previous patterns.

For instance, it's highly unusual that over fifty legal suits have been presented pressing and contesting various state's election tallies and their various bodies, all from the Trump factions. Of those suits decided, not any have yet to be won by the plaintiffs. There have been violent actions in the streets and various threats against public election officials, and others up to the level of governors, in the same party, in GA and AZ and PA. 

A couple plots of domestic terror against public officials are also extremely unusual, including a kidnapping plot against Governor Gretchen Whitmer in MI. These have been investigated and publicized and the culprits arrested. 

This morning an international breach of major internet platforms occurred disrupting access of popular sites and publicly available systems like google and youtube and facebook. Also big news this morning is the hack of US Dept of Homeland Security. That's highly unusual and rather worrisome but this follows late Saturday's news that an internet hack had compromised the US Dept.'s of Commerce and Treasury. Reuters confirmed the first elements of this story Sunday afternoon. Which means many are just today learning of the hacks and the compromised position of much of our publicly held personal information that has been affected. And many are saying of course that Russians are behind the hacks. If the Russian mob wanted to run our country they could largely do it on what those bureaus know. So there should be fallout from this story.

Of course there is a solar eclipse visible from South America today.

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The continuing death from the COVID-19 virus remains devastating. From six days ago:


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From December 1, 2020: 

As winter looms once again in the US, in the days following this year's muted, chaotic Thanksgiving celebration, a resettling of gloom slowly spreads. Not much of any dawning awareness or some scattered silver-lined boundary glitters much on the periphery. Not much to speak of anyway. All the concentric circles around the present moment seem hard, black, impenetrable, utterly opaque and without a bit of shine or polish, and still dusty.

The French were out this weekend to let everyone know that Black, is again, the New Black. Again.

In fact, a case could be made that the people in the street are just playing their role in the cycle. Souns simple enough but it is vastly more complicated then some high points I list here. Protests and demonstrations in France sprang in part from a brutal beating the previous week during strikes. On the 28th of November massive protests occurred all over France, this time in Paris over new guidance and surveillance orders set down from the government making it illegal to publish police in actions  anywhere. [ed. These state edicts have been somewhat curbed.]  These new edicts, of course, follow in part horrific attacks - including brutal beheadings - on peaceable citizens, in public in October. These attacks came following the publication of incendiary images published for the public which blatantly mocked the prophet Mohammad. It was just under five years ago that the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine was attacked killing twelve in a story that captured the world's attention. 

Never a good time but,


Across the Atlantic more hospitals and cities say their Intensive Care Units and morgues are full. El Paso, TX may be the worst case now. Can the Dakotas be far behind? 

The greater economies for the majority of the world's living inhabitants, is either in tatters or in the process of being meticulously shredded. Just in time for the Christmas season! But the stock market hit a new high topping 30,000 for the first time in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. Bitcoin too is reaching its all time high hitting $19,000 this past Tuesday.

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But late last year I had instead decided to read more history this year of 2020, following a couple years having focused more on fiction. Still I didn't really put down the Dos Passos for very long except when things at work got too busy for the time. Then in March when the pandemic hit hard, and continued, and now it seems, I take more downtime since ...April. The writing habit fell by the wayside.

This last weeks (November 2020) or so my tight circle of focus has been reading early fiction of Dos Passos & Georges Simenon, & alternately, the Paris Review and the New York Review of Books in subscription. In September I saw an ad for a cheap subscription to both of the latter and looked up and thought, 'Oh! I used to love that and felt I learned so much! And look, it's twenty years on, and ... the world looks very different today."

Reading that avidly has been a blessing as a discipline in disguise for me since I quit my other job recently, as those should keep me mentally active with new stimuli. I had received that and Granta twenty years ago and loved them then when I lived downtown. Anyway, I had looked up and thought, it would be good to see how those many voices see the world today as those, as it turns out, still regular publications, still have their reach in topics and clarity, and both depth and breadth of perception. This week in particular I started looking at the archives of the Paris Review in their Interviews with writers and poets. For their techniques, and for what they listen for. That goes back some sixty odd years.

Last year, as I was saying, there was the Russian history I'd committed to read this year. Bios of Lenin, and Trotsky by Dmitri Volkogonov got finished with most of the Stalin one done too. A couple dozen short stories from Anton Chekhov followed a British history of Eurasian intrigue by Peter Hopkin. This led up thru WWI from the 1860's on. It focused on explaining the conflicts and aspirations among mostly western powers, the UK & Germany, but Persia, Russia & the Ottomans, all over central and west asia. Hero stories of spy networks amid competing paths to the Indian Ocean with the UK playing the dominant role (and therefore always a bit behind the ball) ... encounters with central Asian heads, the fight for Baku, how 1917 affected things,etc.

Once mostly done with the earlier bios (reviews to come later, maybe), I started A People's Tragedy, by Orlando Figes. Making a splash in the 1990's, it's a straight ahead narrative that pulls in lots of different walks of life and perspectives to establish multiple settings, and then steers a course through late 19th and early 20th c. Russian history up to the Stalin era. In just over 800 pages. I should be reading it right now and wanted done with it last month. It's a rich well-told story and gets all the praise in the western press as the accepted standard still. It's just so sad and so full of so much promise made so useless. A few chapters from the Will Durant series - on Peter, Catherine and Frederick II of Prussia - helped some for the basic background. I have to be careful with him though. He tells such a good story I have to remember he leaves out so much and de-emphasizes or prioritizes certain areas which create lopsided views. I have to remind myself it's just one 'viewing platform' among many, which is harder to do when there's so much in the Durant's telling. The Orlando Figes tome I started in July.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

earlier 2020: July to January


It's July. These are very turbulent times. Nothing seems at all normal. The number of COVID-19 cases is on a dramatic rise again, especially in FL, TX, and AZ. Many countries around the world have seen declines in their cases and rates. But the US leads them all, and in deaths too. The news cycle this Saturday has President Trump at last in public wearing a mask. A blue one with the Presdiential Seal on it. He doesn't look very happy about it either. But it was a photo-op in a hospital.
...
If it seems like I'm just thrashing about in the dark, that's pretty much how it all feels. Raphael died on April 6, five hundered years ago. Leo X issued the papal bull Exsurge Domini in June of 1520 telling Martin Luther he had to cease preaching, threatening him with excommunication, and to be branded a heretic if he did not stop. In it Pope Leo, formerly known as 'the Happy' Pope, the latest Giovanni Medici, petitions God to arise and judge his cause:

"Be mindful of the daily slander against you by the foolish; incline your ear to our supplication. Foxes have arisen which want to devastate your vineyard, where you have worked the winepress. ... A roaring sow of the woods has undertaken to destroy this vineyard; a wild beast wants to destroy it."

By 1520, everyone in Europe seemed to be talking about Luther and, he himself after the Liepzig debate, had begun a profound change that was coupled with a period of great creativity. August, October and December would see new works by him.


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Better hurry up. If I can make another post in June I'll be surprised. I also need to eat and remember to drink this water. The reading continued at a good pace this year despite both typical and untypical ups and downs. History repeats and rhymes and pulls the rug from under all at once these days.

Demonstrations, faked riots, statue pulling, police brutality have become constant, numerous, and widespread . The name 'Karen' became a thing. 'Cancel Culture' should not. For the last three weeks straight, somewhere in all fifty states. Most of the basics are well summed up here -  33 minutes of anyone's time - in three wide-spread videos from Killer Mike (from June 01), Trevor Noah (on May 29), and the author broadcast by John Oliver, Kimberley Jones . You can get her young adult novel that came out last year I'm Not Dying With You Tonight  here.

All the rest of the news over the last month seems to pale in significance. Even the drastic increase in COVID-19 cases.
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But today I read Goethe. June 21, Goethe's pale anti-hero Werther wrote his friend about going and yearning. All he wanted was 'to be near' a young woman that was already engaged to someone else, but who was himself absent. Still it was this popular fictive story that set Europe alight nearly 250 years ago. It was also semi-autobiographical. Highlighting that when individual yearnings can never be satisfied, terrible inclinations are manifested. Napoleon claims he read Werther seven times.

Yesterday I'd finished a 20th century take on the beginning of the French Revolution up to the storming of the Bastille. This one centered on much of the politics and debt debate, the arraying of factions, the call for the States Assembly, its disastrous dissolution. This section followed a romp through European-wide politics and art and culture, literature: the salons of France mid and late-century, the noisy, smoky arguments in British Parlement, the rise and fall of Poland, the intrigues of Frederick and Catherine, Mirabeau and Necker. The debates excited by Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant, Schiller and Goethe, the music of Mozart, the drunken decline of Venice.

It's in the Will Durant series called the Story of Civilization which did for armchair histories much beginner work for as popular as it was, and widely distributed too. As its stated goal of being 'integral history', the series tried to bring as much from as many parts of lived history as possible. If not everything we know about all areas, then at least the brightest and broadest of swathes, the basic elements disentangled, and lain out in human set pieces, one after the other, revealing the home and family, the land, the places, the society, politics, religious practice and ideals, the politics, the art, and changes in thought, in colorful, human prose. 

No one needs another Will Durant fan even now, fifty years after this massive series was finished. Nowadays, the hugest detraction from this amazing work was how unawarely silent it remained for much about Asia and Africa. Which is where his generation of American was - they just didn't know or have access to know. But his, and his wife Ariel's multi-volume, life long work remains a decent inroduction for Americans for, in this case, European history.

Also restarted, or reengaged with two more in the Durant series, The Reformation and the Renaissance. For me, this revisits a 'going back out' to a 'larger view' from rummaging in the details of all the specific threads of my studies in the last several years and looking again from a more general point of view. I read these when I was twenty and they got me enthused in the idea of broad-ranged historical study. I knew they were 'general knowledge' but the style was more personable than much else I saw in the American 1980's. And so this year in a return to history rather than mostly the fiction reading of the last couple years, I also return to a favorite author, despite his frequent mistakes and popularizing manners.
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brief dailynotes On February 1:
Experiencing several brief encounters with old friends early last month: co-workers and people in town. Weather changes too from dry to wet to snow. Already three fairly light snows blanketed the ground and after a couple days receded. I've also had time to read a lot of book introductions this month. So many so until I'd started several different books this first month of the first year in this a new decade. Yet this month's over, a new one begun, and I'm just now looking for the first time at what has transpired, just thinking without much of any documentation.

There are at least three different places I write (or type) activities and doings outside of work and here. One set of continually added drafts on 'regular' activities, 
one handwritten set of both activities and books, and then 
the (also) handwritten booklist that gets renewed (and rewritten) when enough of that page gets filled up over time. 
The last two are there to remind me where I'm at with the various projects I have in progress. The first, the set of 'regular' drafts of activities show daily routines and is online in email drafts. None of that has been documented here but explains what I'm up to.

Fiction had become a focus across the last couple years. A return to history is in store for the coming year and compared with what I've done here, in other periods and places.

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Next day (31Jan) I took care of bi-weekly errands. Leisurely I went about it until it took up all morning.

The day after that I read.

Volkogonov: Lenin, Stalin
Durant: Isabella, Ximenes, Rousseau
John Dos Passos: letters from 1916

Saturday, May 16, 2020

May Day 2020

Got a letter from the IRS today. Strange days when the government has resorted to sending out free money. A month ago the nice teller at the bank said $1200 had been deposited in my account on April 15.
Told her it all didn't seem real. But I did make the transaction outside having walked up to the drive-thru window, with me on the outside looking in and her on the inside looking out.
The lobby has been closed since late March.
Still the letter sent and addressed from the Internal Revenue Service thanked the hardworking people of the US and also the House of Representatives and the Senate for making this 'economic impact payment' possible. They're calling it assistance rather than a stimulus or the more accurate relief.
At the bottom of the page though is what looks like a radio wave scribbled with a thick grease pencil. On the other side is the same thing in Spanish. Which I found hilarious.

And so yes, I walked downtown on the first of the month and deposited my rent check as per the landlord's request at the convenient bank not more than 15-20 minutes away. This beautiful quirky town, all in bloom, with springtime gusts blowing my hair all around makes for a pleasant walk. Don't even notice the cloth mask around my neck in case I pass or have to meet someone. Correctly odd, the few people I see are all already distant. And all of it together as if it were just to remind us how lucky we are to merely witness it. 

May Day. A distress call and a holiday. Don't think they ran any parades today. Except in the US, in Huntington Beach, California where some poorly informed yahoos decided to get them some attention and put all themselves in danger all at the same time. Because of stupid notions about 'Freedom': 'We made the news!' As pathetic as watching lemmings, except they seem to know that's what they're doing, and today, they like it. Or like, later they'll just say 'that was opposite day'. Meanwhile as the rest of us look on in horror, they needed to tell the rest of us that they cared a whole lot about showing that they don't care at all. Somehow that's supposed to be something to prove. I remember being twenty in the US 1980's. Glad I'm not now.

Saw someone I know on twitter who said their grandpa had just died of the virus. He was a Trump fan, watched FOX all the time, thought the Covid-19 would be like the flu, couldn't believe he'd gotten it. While the world looks on in horror and takes the precautions they can or are allowed, the wife of the vice president tells us today that her husband "didn't know" he was supposed to wear a mask at the MAYO clinic in NY while visiting patients and doctors. With everybody else around him wearing masks. If you wrote this as a script for a play or a movie, the editor would laugh at you not the script: it's so unrealistic and unbelievable. His wife says he didn't know, but the clinic says they had in fact told him he should wear the mask. I say it again, the Vice President of the United States didn't even wear a mask, and the implication from this administration and his wife was that was because... I guess, 'freedumb'?

There's something deeply wrong here and yet others are carrying on like it's just Friday and there's still nowhere to eat. Or to get their hair done. And they need a little attention and they don't want to hear any bad news. Seven weeks is a long time to not be able to put this sort of thing together. Don't need to be oblique about it, they'll tell you right to your face. But it might kill ya.

So it's easy for me to stay indoors and read. I've always liked to read, only seemingly these days, when there's supposedly so much more time for it. Especially with so many others who can just stop long enough to complain about being in a hurry, right after they re-post this meme. I don't need to explain the virtues of reading this season.

But the pattern had already been set for me. The last few years I've read a bunch of fiction. Last year close to 9000 pages and for me that seems like a lot. This year I've gone back to more history. One of the best from last year was a trilogy that came out in the 1930's called USA, by John Dos Passos. The central book in that was titled 1919 and covers the years of WWI. This year I read non-fictional travel diaries and essays by the same author.

Dos Passos worked the ambulances out of the trenches of Verdun in 1917 and elsewhere when he was twenty and -one. He'd been brought up in a distended family and lived early life on the US east coast. Born out of wedlock but his father was accomplished and had connections with the old world. Young Jack spent several trips in Europe with family yet still remained an avid student and passed his entrance exams to Harvard in 1912. But then he lost his mother at nineteen, and his father a year later. He finished graduate work anyway in 1916 and as the war in Europe exploded, Dos Passos took a steamer to Bordeaux and then on to Spain. 

He wrote continuously, and sent copious letters.  He was ambitious enough even creating literary circles at Harvard in the 19-teens. You can tell at this young age he already knew he had to write to stay afloat. Also in 1916 he published an article in The New Republic titled 'Against American Literature'. In it he wrote: "We find ourselves floundering without rudder or compass, in the sea of modern life, vaguely lit by the phosphorescent gleam of our traditional optimism." Somehow at the tender age of twenty he could ring a familiar bell that still sounds perfectly American. Wish more could do that in 2020.

During his trip to Spain he receives word that his father is ill and he needs to return to the States as soon as possible. He does in two weeks time but his father had died, and two months later in April, the US entered World War I.   After attending anti-war and socialist rallies (May Day in 1917 was a rather important year for that), and nearly getting arrested in Greenwich Village, by summer he'd decided to return to Europe and work for a Harvard-organized ambulance corp under the auspices of the Red Cross. In June he left aboard the SS Chicago returning across submarine infested waters back to Bordeaux and the war that he already despised.

Quick to pick up on the garish layers of twisted absurdity, he writes to friends he knew from school and tells them what he sees. Excerpts from his diaries clatter like stuttering camera shutters.

[from Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941 John Dos Passos, The Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. NYNY 2003]

"Band playing hula hula on the wharf people dancing in and out among the luggage --
Man who wanted a paper as a souvenir - "cause you see sir I'm seein' off my son. I don't reckon they'll mind do you, sir?"...
La traversee - uniforms - smoking room crap games. Singing, champagne -
"For we're bound for the Hamburg shoal to see the elephant and the wild kangaroo.
God help Kaiser Bill
Oh old Uncle Sam,
He's got the infantry
He's got the cavalry
He's got the artillery...
Then by God we'll all go to Germany
And God help Kaiser Bill"
General atmosphere of expectation of raising hell in Paris."
...
And they arrive and there are orders and classes and drills where they tell them about 'Whores - protection - champagne, etc.'
Then a poem listed as 
"Poitiers -- July 2nd
Wide grey-green fields,
Dappled with swaying vermillion,
Everywhere glowing with stains of poppies,
Poppies sprung from old sad fields
Of a battle long fought out...
How many years, oh God,
Before the blood of battles springs up
Into the arrogant glowing youth
Of poppies?"

To a friend July 12,
"I wonder where you are... But America seems infinitely far off now -- I can hardly imagine it exists at all. I've never experienced anything like the strange break with everything past that has seemed to come over me since that sleepy quiet trip... Life since then has been a grotesque -- a jumble of swooningly pleasant and strangely sinister despairing times. A sort of Alice in Wonderland with the world at stake instead of the March Hare's watch...
I'm still in training at a camp in the middle of heavenly French hills within distant hearing distance of the big guns to the north -- "

From the diary July and August:
"The abandon of complete misery - My God - how ridiculous it all is - I think in gargoyles
The men of the Middle Ages had the right idea in their rollicking grotesque dance of Death...
I'm dying to write - but all my methods of doing things in the past merely disgust me now, all former methods are damned inadequate - The stream of sensation flows by - I suck it up like a sponge - my reactions are a constant weather vane...
How damned ridiculous it all is! The long generations toiling - skimping, lashing themselves screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of intelligence to end in this - My God what a time - All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas - The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men - the heroics about war - my country right or wrong - oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world."

As summer rolled on for him that year he got to more places whose simple images that he set down could be picked up later for fiction. Even his diary excerpts here confirm that much and, true to form, questions whether they will. East of Paris, the ancient town of Chalons was converted into a staging ground for transport vehicles and supplies and the many hands marshalling them destined for the front further east. Dos Passos sees it as a dusty but lovely Gothic place fit for an afternoon dip in the Marne with the fellows in their striped-tights, conscious of the novelty.  Or at a beer garden next to the inn "..in an arbor - how many pleasant drinks have been drunk here! how many wedding parties flushed with champagne have laughed and giggled and blushed and felt the world soft and warm...". 

In a few weeks he would describe with bitterness the widescale death, how everything what was told at home on the war were complete lies, how the vans they had to drive were full of bullet holes, about taking shelter underground huddled in gasmasks with the posion gas above and outside as the shells exploded.  How the actual combatants, or captors and temporary prisoners 'could laugh and chat and kid each other', where the actual conflicts there were only as heated as Harvard-Yale baseball games, how decent everybody was if they could just be left to themselves.  

Another hundred years before Dos Passos, another traveller and chronicler describes another part of France. As a boy this fellow was sent at seven to his grandmother's house in far western Placoet, a sleepy village on the Arguenon, itself a twisty stream that flowed into the English Channel at Saint- Malo in Normandy. He says it was perhaps the happiest place he had known. Called then as now a noble, a conservative, and a Royalist, but living nearly eighty years, Francois Rene de Chateaubriand is also called the founder of French Romantic Lit.  But we are far removed from him. It's been so long since then, that the term 'Romantic' no longer means what it meant for those in the middle and later 1800's. For them the facts of their Revolution and of Napoleon set many remembering former days with great yearning and a tremendous sense of loss but, also promise. 

So, long before all that, young Rene was sent, at an age his mother deemed wise, off 'to Combourg' in order for him to receive a classical education in math and latin. Combourg was the site of the castle where his father worked and resided. The young boy would be taught by the clerics at nearby Dol cathedral not twenty km from Saint-Malo on the coast. The trip by carriage from Saint-Malo took all day. It was the first fortnight of May. There were sand cliffs and wooded gorges, broad fields of daffodils, jonquils, interspersed with marshland. The birds had come on schedule that spring with swallows and cuckoos, the quail and nightengales arriving just a few weeks before they would be seen nearer Paris. His heart pounds he tells us, so much that he has to stop writing as memories from thirty some years before flood his present. The year his pen was set to paper was 1812 and the French armies under the new emperor Napoleon were pressing on to Borodino on their way to Moscow. But Chateaubriand was in Dieppe, on the coast of France, north of Rouen and Paris, and far away from the fighting, and trying to think about something, anything else.

He was likely eight to eleven years old so the year was 1776 or '79, in a carriage with his mother and sisters.
"At sunrise one morning we left Saint-Malo, my mother, my four sisters, and I, in an enormous old-fashioned Berlin with gilded panels, exterior footboards, and purple tassels hanging from the four corners of the carriage. Eight horses, bedecked like Spanish mules, with large bells draped around their necks and smaller ones fastened to their bridles, sporting many coloured housings and woolen fringe, dragged us on our way. While my mother sighed and my sisters chattered without pausing once for breath, I looked with both my eyes, I listened with both my ears, and I marveled at every turn of the wheel.... For ten mortal miles we saw nothing but uplands bordered by woods, fallow fields that had scarcely been cleared, rows of black wheat-stubble and indigent oats. Charcoal burners led strings of scrawny ponies with tangled manes. Longhaired peasants in goatskin tunics drove emaciated oxen with shrill cries or trudged in the wake of heavy plows, like so many labouring fauns. At long last, we came to a valley, at the bottom of which, not far from a pond, there rose the single spire of a village church. The towers of a feudal castle loomed above a copse of trees lighted by the fires of the setting sun. ... After another half hour, we left the highway, and the carriage rolled along the edge of a quincunx into an avenue of trees whose branches interlaced over our heads. I can still remember the moment I entered under that shade and the dreadful joy that I felt there. ... we crossed a forecourt planted with walnut trees which led to the steward's house and the garden. From there, we went through a little gate into a grassy courtyard called the Green Court: to the right were a row of stables and a stand of chestnuts ... at the far end of the courtyard ... the castle stood between two clumps of trees. Its bleak and melancholy facade was dominated by a curtain-wall... that linked together two large towers of disparate age, height, girth and material. These towers were topped with crenellations and surmounted by  pointed roofs, like bonnets set upon Gothic crowns.
"Barred windows were visible here and there in the bare walls. A large staircase of twenty-two steps, steep and wide, without banister or parapet, had been built over the filled-in moat where the drawbridge used to be. These stairs led up to the main door of the castle, carved into the middle of the curtain-wall. Over this door, the coat of arms of the "Seigneurs de Chateuabriand" hung between the fissures through which the arms and chains of the drawbridge once had passed.
The carriage stopped at the foot of the staircase, and my father came down the steps to meet us. The reunion of his family so softened his mood for the moment that he favored us with the most gracious expressions. We climbed the stairacse and proceeded into an echoing anteroom with a high, ribbed ceiling, and from this anteroom onward into a small interior courtyard....
A supper served... which I ate without constraint, brought the first happy day of my life to a close. True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all....
My first appearance at Combourg was of short duration. Two weeks had scarcely passed before I saw the arrival of the Abbee Porchet, the principal of the College de Dol. I was delivered into his hands and I followed him in spite of my tears."  
 - book i, 7 in Memoirs From Beyond The Grave 1768-1800 Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, trans. Alex Andriesse, 2018 NYRB Classics, NYREV Inc.

His father, also called Rene, had left home at fifteen seeing there was no way he could be educated at home, or fed. From San Malo in May of 1734 the father Rene boarded an armed schooner which, as fate would have it, took him to a sea battle where the French were trying to give relief to the beseiged Poles under Stanislaus, then in Danzig. Rene was wounded twice but made it back to France and in further adventures was captured and beaten by pirates and eventually made a fortune in the French West Indies. 

Rene the son, our memoirist here, was very conscious of his nobility. The name which the father had taken great pains across his life to refurbish and maintain; the coat of arms above the castle at Combourg; the inheritances, the properties, or lack of them; the distance from court; the multiple times that Rene himself had to appeal to the Office in Paris to confirm his nobility, and what it took to become a Knight of Malta then, all show in that age how the once powerful had become fragile and imperfectly perceived when class distinctions tumbled, when government changed hands and form again and again. And all that was before their revolutions.