Since the last years of the past century, I have lived with a form of insomnia that restricts my sleep to less than six (sometimes as little as four) hours a sleep each night. I know that I am not alone. Recently I began taking part in a trial labeled SHUTi OASIS (Sleep Healthy Using The Internet for Older Adult Sufferers of Insomnia and Sleeplessness).

The study is based on cognitive behavioral therapy over the Internet. Of course the company hopes to cash in on the sleep drought in the future, but for now, I’m an unpaid guinea pig. I’ve only been involved since the beginning of December and I can’t yet report any significant changes. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I’m reading Zoë Heller’s Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t in the 10 December—yeah, I know, I’m behind—issue of The New Yorker.

“Those who master lucidity,” [Alice] Robb writes, “can dream about specific problems, seek answers or insights, stage cathartic encounters, and probe the recesses of the unconscious.” Fifty-five per cent of people have experienced lucidity at least once, apparently, but most of us need to train ourselves to dream lucidly with any consistency. The main training method requires you to ask yourself at regular intervals during the daytime whether you are asleep or awake. The idea is that, since waking habits have a tendency to show up in dreams, you are likely to pose the same question while you are asleep. When you ask yourself “Am I awake?” and the answer is no, lucidity should theoretically commence.

What a lovely thought. I do so enjoy a good lucid dream, but I only seem to experience them when I fall back asleep in the morning.

[Update at 1009 on 19 January—On the matter of that black old knife below. I knew I had read something on this but couldn’t put my finger on the reference. Mary Jo sent me
Order force: the old grammar rule we all obey without realising by Tim Dowling yesterday and he made the connection to The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth which I read back in November of 2017. Dowling writes:

The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. You simply can’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding, or leather walking brown boots. And yet until last week, I had no idea such a rule existed.

That Bishop most likely chose to ignore the convention makes here decision even more interesting.]

So, in this new year I want to continue to get away from the 24-hour news cycle and to adhere to my raison d’être: facilitating dinner-time conversation with a few good friends. One of my changes hearkens to my early blogger days. You can be see an example at the left of this post: a graphic bug of Eustace Tilley, the dandy mascot for The New Yorker.

As a child, adolescent and young man I was a voracious reader. I still am, but as I grew into a writer, my reading changed. I no longer can read for mindless pleasure. Like Akira Kurosawa—I have the final panel of this cartoon above my bed—everything I read informs how I write. I constantly take notes. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t read without a pencil in my hand.

My electronic chapbook is filled with such notes and I my current college-ruled composition is always with me. What follows are a few of those notes taken from two recent issues of The New Yorker. First, two lines (the second repeated) from Elizabeth Bishop’s At The Fishhouses in the 3 December issue (originally published in the 9 August 1947 issue).

…that black old knife.

Why those four words? Because I would expect the line to read that old black knife. Why Bishop chose that order is important. Thank about it.

The second, a repeated phrase further down in the poem, is:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear

Why not Cold, dark, deep and absolutely clear (Or for you degenerates who fawn over Oxford commas: Cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear? Again, Bishop had her reasons. What do you think they are?

Next is from Jean Stafford’s Children Are Bored on Sunday (originally published in 1947) where I came across this litany:

And almost at once, as she had predicted, the air separating her from the schoolboys below was populated with the images of composers, of painters, of writers who pronounced judgments, in their individual argot, on Hindemith, Ernst, Sartre, on Beethoven, Rubens, Baudelaire, on Stalin and Freud and Kierkegaard, on Toynbee, Frazer, Thoreau, Franco, Salazar, Roosevelt, Maimonides, Racine, Wallace, Picasso, Henry Luce, Monsignor Sheen, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the movie industry. And she saw herself moving, shaky with apprehensions and Martinis, and with the belligerence of a child who feels himself laughed at, through the apartments of Alfred Eisenburg’s friends, where the shelves were filled with everyone from Aristophanes to Ring Lardner, where the walls were hung with reproductions of Seurat, Titian, Vermeer, and Klee, and where the record cabinets began with Palestrina and ended with Copland.

A couple dozen column inches further on I found:

…and when she talked she was always lamentably off key; often and often she had been stared at and had been told, “It’s not the same thing at all.”

What adolescent can’t relate? Further down Stafford writes:

She imagined that even the boys down there had opinions on everything political and artistic and metaphysical and scientific, and because she remained, in spite of all her opportunities, as green as grass, she was certain they had got their head start because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves. [Emphasis mine, JH]

And…

In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class.

And finally…

…her cousin-german in the territory of despair.

I had never read or heard the term cousin-german before?

Next came a review/remembrance of poet W.H. Auden by Hannah Arendt originally published in 1975. These passages and lines grabbed me:

This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable. The moment poems of this kind are wrenched from their original abode, they disappear in a cloud of banality.

Ouch! Then:

(Geoffrey Grigson, in the Times Literary Supplement, reports the following dialogue between the very young Auden and his tutor at Oxford. “Tutor: ‘And what are you going to do, Mr. Auden, when you leave the university?’ Auden: ‘I am going to be a poet.’ Tutor: ‘Well—in that case you should find it very useful to have read English.’ Auden: ‘You don’t understand. I am going to be a great poet.’ ”)

Be careful, however, what you wish for. My father had this problem with his oil paintings:

He constantly revised his own poems, agreeing with Valéry: “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.”

This take, via Yeats, of the tortured-poet trope fascinated me:

I have become surer than ever that he was “hurt into poetry” even more than Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”), and that, despite his susceptibility to compassion, public political circumstances were not necessary to hurt him into poetry.

Arendt includes passages from Auden’s poems in her piece as illustration:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Praise is the key word of these lines, not praise of “the best of all possible worlds”—as though it were up to the poet (or the philosopher) to justify God’s creation—but praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its own strength from the wound: somehow convinced, as the bards of ancient Greece were, that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things toward mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.

Finally, I took to Nora Ephron’s Serial Monogamy—a dissertation on cookbooks—where she writes:

I began to osmose from a neurotic cook with a confusing repertory of ethnic dishes to a relaxed one specializing in faintly Southern food.

That’s writing.

The rise of white identity politics didn’t start with Trump explains Michael Tesler.

In his introduction, Hayes sets up his interview with Michael Tesler this way:

We think about this continuity, this long arc from the Civil War, to Reconstruction, to the Solid South of the Democratic Party, to the break with the Solid South of L.B.J. signing the Civil Rights Act, to the Southern Strategy of Republicans, to the Nixon campaign, to the Ronald Reagan campaign, all the way through.

But what [Tesler] finds is discontinuity. He finds there is a rupture moment, where something new happens, and that moment is Barack Obama’s election. And after that, everything changes.

And if you want to understand where we are right now—one week before the midterms—or if you’re listening (hopefully) later, they’ve already happened. You know what happened probably. This is definitely not the place to find out because I’m talking in the past to you right now.

But if you want to understand politics right now, you absolutely, absolutely have to listen to Michael go through the data of what he has found about what has happened to American politics since that beautiful, sublime night in 2008 when Barack Obama and his black family took the stage.

Yes, we do…

CHRIS HAYES: So, tell me what you find. I mean, what you find is that racial attitudes start to predict an ever larger set of people’s policy positions.

MICHAEL TESLER: Absolutely.

CH: Which is wild.** Your racial thermometer, or feelings about bigotry against African-Americans, starts to be a very good predictor of whether you like the stimulus.

MT: The stimulus, healthcare. I think one of the more interesting ones that plays out in 2016 is how you view the economy. Just objective questions like, “In 2012, was the unemployment rate going up or down?” a question that is objectively going down about two percent over that election year. Well, that becomes tied to your racial beliefs in a way that it never had been before.

CH: So, that’s a new thing. It’s not just that these correlations between your racial attitudes and your belief, in say, the unemployment rate going up or down is always there. It’s that a new association is embedded in people’s minds, where if you are a person who says, African-Americans need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and, They get too many special favors.That’s highly predictive of saying, The unemployment rate is going up, even when that’s not true.

MT: Yes. For a long time, this has been the case with partisanship, where we have this partisan alternate realities, motivated reasoning, whatever you want to call it, where people will alter reality in line with their partisanship. That’s been going on forever, but what’s new about Obama is you start to see these alternate realities form around racial attitudes.

I do wish people would stop talking about alternate realities or, the even more troubling, alternate truth. The first may exist in in some string-theory discussions, but the second never existed. What we have, what we have always had, are alternative points of view. What we see depends upon where we stand and we—and our opponents—can move. Tesler continues:

MT: We—you and me, anybody who’s listening to the show probably—take it for granted that the Democrats since at least the 60s (and if you read more work, since the Depression) have been the party of racial liberalism. But before Obama, if you were a low educated—meaning non-college-educated white voter [can you say elitist? JH]—less than 50 percent could place the Democrats to the left of the Republicans on which party was more supportive of, basically, government assistance to African-Americans.

CH: Wow! Wait, before Obama, this is an actual survey result?

MT: So the American National Election Study—it’s our gold standard survey in political science—since 1972 has asked respondents place the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate on a scale being how supportive of assistance to African-Americans they are. And before Obama, less than half could do it. Less than half of low-educated whites could put the Democrat to the left of the Republican. Now what Obama and then Trump do is they really simplify the politics of race, and so that number jumps up to about two-thirds in 2012.

CH: Wow! So basically there’s some marginal group of white voters, particularly white non-college voters, for who, basically, the election of Barack Obama makes them realize for the first time that the Democrats are the party more sympathetic to black Americans.

MT: Yes, and so he simplifies the politics of race. And that’s who you see leaving the party under Obama.

I’m far from convinced that going to college corrects the problem. I don’t doubt Tesler’s data, just that there is some casual relationship. I don’t think that getting a college education changes many people’s political views. Racial conservatives, as Tesler refers to them, are far more complex. Tesler continues.

CH: How much does racial conservatism predict Trump’s support in the primary?

MT: It’s pretty much the best predictor of Trump’s support in the primary. What’s interesting about Trump is that it’s a lot of different attitudes in that cocktail. It is racial resentment. It is anti-immigrant attitudes. It’s anti-Muslim attitudes. It’s white identity. These are all things that predict, independently of one another.

I don’t agree with Tesler across the board, but listening to the whole argument is worth your time.

*I’m really very much more of a Solstice/Equinox kind of guy.
**Hayes uses wild and crazy way too much in his reactions.

On the wooden board outside of the meditation hall in many Zen monasteries, there is a four-line inscription. The last line is, Do not squander your life.* Our lives are made of days and hours, and each is hour is precious. Have we wasted our hours and our days? Are we wasting our lives? When we practice sitting or walking meditation, it’s easier to be mindful and concentrated. During the rest of the day, we also practice. It’s more difficult, but it’s possible. The sitting and walking can be extended to the non-walking, non-sitting moments of our day. That is the basic principle of meditation.

—Don’t Waste Your Life from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

*The Evening Gatha…

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

The Property Is Carried Off:

The February morning looked gray and drizzling through the window of Uncle Tom’s cabin. It looked on downcast faces, the images of mournful hearts. The little table stood out before the fire, covered with an ironing-cloth; a coarse but clean shirt or two, fresh from the iron, hung on the back of a chair by the fire, and Aunt Chloe had another spread out before her on the table. Carefully she rubbed and ironed every fold and every hem, with the most scrupulous exactness, every now and then raising her hand to her face to wipe off the tears that were coursing down her cheeks.

—Chapter 10, page 88

Listen to Chapter 10.

For one who watches with too little rest
A body rousing fitfully to its pain
—The nerves like dull burns where the sheet has pressed—
Subsiding to dementia yet again;
For one who snatches what repose he can.
Exhausted by the fretful reflexes
Jerked from the torpor of a dying man,
Sleep is a fear, invaded as it is
By coil on coil of ominous narrative
In which specific isolated streaks,
Bright as tattoos, of inks that seem to live.
Shift through elusive patterns. Once in those weeks
You dreamt your dying friend hung crucified
In his front room, against the mantelpiece;
Yet it was Christmas, when you went outside
The shoppers bustled, bells rang without cease,
You smelt a sharp excitement on the air,
Crude itch of evergreen. But you returned
To find him still nailed up, mute sufferer
Lost in a trance of pain, toward whom you yearned.
When you woke up, you could not reconcile
The two conflicting scenes, indoors and out.
But it was Christmas. And parochial school
Accounted for the Dying God no doubt.

—Sacred Heart by Thom Gunn.

Cruising The Cut… No. 35. Watford Locks to Norton Junction by narrowboat.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: assuage, to lessen the intensity of (something that pains or distresses), ease; to make quiet, pacify; to put an end to by satisfying, appease, quench.

Scholars assume that the word assuage derives from assuaviare, a Vulgar Latin term that combines the prefix ad– (“to” or “toward”) and the Latin suavis, meaning “sweet,” “pleasant,” or “agreeable.” (Suavis is also the source of the adjective suave.) To assuage is to sweeten or make agreeable or tolerable, and it is far from the only English word for relieving or softening something difficult. Others include allay, alleviate, and mitigate. Allay implies an effective calming or soothing of fears or alarms, while alleviate implies temporary or partial lessening of pain or distress. Mitigate suggests moderating or countering the force or intensity of something painful.

Finally, a thought for the week, an exercise in sortes vergilianae taken from Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid:

He knew her at once—his mother—
and called after her now as she sped away:
“Why, you too, cruel as the rest? So often
you ridicule your son with your disguises!
Why can’t we clasp hands, embrace each other,
exchange some words, speak out, and tell the truth?”

—Book 1, lines 556-561.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man:

The light of the cheerful fire shone on the rug and carpet of a cosey parlor, and glittered on the sides of the tea-cups and well-brightened tea-pot, as Senator Bird was drawing off his boots, preparatory to inserting his feet in a pair of new handsome slippers, which his wife had been working for him while away on his senatorial tour. Mrs. Bird, looking the very picture of delight, was superintending the arrangements of the table, ever and anon mingling admonitory remarks to a number of frolicsome juveniles, who were effervescing in all those modes of untold gambol and mischief that have astonished mothers ever since the flood.

—Chapter 9, page 73

Listen to Chapter 9.

I sit by the window all morning
watching the planes make final approaches.
Each of them gathers and steadies itself
like a horse clearing a jump.

I look up to see them pass,
so close I can see the rivets
on their bellies, and under their wings,
and at first I feel ashamed,
as if I had looked up a woman’s skirt.

How beautiful that one is,
slim-bodied and delicate
as a fox, poised and intent
on stealing a chicken
from a farmyard.

And now a larger one, its
tail shaped like a whale’s.
They call it sounding
when a whale dives,
and the tail comes out of the water
and flashes in the light
before going under

Here comes a 747,
slower than the rest,
phenomenal; like some huge
basketball player
clearing space for himself
under the basket.

How wonderful to be that big
and to fly through the air,
and to make so great a shadow
in the parking lot of a motel.

—At a Motel Near O’Hare Airport by Jane Kenyon

Cruising The Cut… No. 34—Yelvertoft to Watford Locks by narrowboat on the Grand Union canal, Leicester Arm…

Meditation means being aware of what is going on—in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds and in the world. Each day thousands of children die of hunger. Plant and animal species are going extinct every day. Yet the sunrise is beautiful and the rose that bloomed this morning along the wall is miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects of life.

—Life Is Dreadful And Wonderful from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: compendious, marked by brief expression of a comprehensive matter; concise and comprehensive.

Compendious is applied to things that are brief in statement or expression, but oftentimes the brevity is chock-full of meaning. Its synonyms run the gamut, giving us concise, terse, succinct, pithy, laconic, and summary. Concise simply suggests the removal of all that is superfluous or elaborative (“a concise description”). Terse implies pointed conciseness (“a terse reply”). Succinct implies the greatest possible compression (“a succinct letter of resignation”). Pithy adds the implication of richness of meaning or substance (“pithy one-liners”). Laconic implies brevity to the point of seeming rude or indifferent (“a laconic stranger”). Summary suggests the stating of main points with no elaboration (“a summary listing of the year’s main events”).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

Eliza’s Escape:

Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight. The gray mist of evening, rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and the swollen current and floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her and her pursuer. Haley therefore slowly and discontentedly returned to the little tavern, to ponder further what was to be done. The woman opened to him the door of a little parlor, covered with a rag carpet, where stood a table with a very shining black oil-cloth, sundry lank, high-backed wood chairs, with some plaster images in resplendent colors on the mantel-shelf, above a very dimly-smoking grate; a long hard-wood settle extended its uneasy length by the chimney, and here Haley sat him down to meditate on the instability of human hopes and happiness in general.

—Chapter 8, page 59

Listen to Chapter 8.

They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great ‘ohias and the honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the red birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back

—The Solstice by W.S. Merwin

Cruising The Cut… No. 33—A look around Yelvertoft Marina and the facilities on offer…

Stress accumulates in our body. The way we eat, drink and live takes its toll on our well-being. Lying down and bringing gentle awareness to our breath, we can realize rest and recovery for our physical body. Find space in your day when you can practice mindful breathing and letting go of tensions. In just five, ten or twenty minutes, you can reëstablish mindfulness and dissipate stress. When you have trouble sleeping, follow your breathing in and breathing out. Bring your awareness to the different parts of your body in turn, and allow them to relax. Sometimes this can help you get to sleep. The practice is still very good even if you don’t sleep, because nourishes you and allows you to rest.

—Letting Go Of Stress from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: solstice, either of the two points on the ecliptic at which its distance from the celestial equator is greatest; the time of the sun’s passing one such point on the ecliptic which occurs about June 21 to begin summer in the northern hemisphere and about December 21 to begin winter in the northern hemisphere.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice usually occurs on June 20 or 21 and the winter solstice on December 21 or 22. In the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are reversed, the solstices are exactly the opposite. For several days around the time of the solstices, the sun’s appearance on the horizon at sunrise and sunset seems to occur at the same spot, before it starts drifting to the north or south again. Solstice gets its shine from sol, the Latin word for “sun.” The ancients added sol to -stit- (a participial stem of sistere, which means “to stand still”) and came up with solstitium. Middle English speakers shortened solstitium to solstice in the 14th century.

Christmas on I.C.E.: Part 1, Part 2*, Part 3, Part 4*, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9… *Parts 2 and 4 do not seem to be posted. There are lots of promos and other video on Sam’s YouTube page, however.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

The Mother’s Struggle:

It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom’s cabin.

Her husband’s suffering and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object,—the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband,—everything, as it lay in the clear, frosty starlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that?

But stronger than all was maternal love, wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy by the near approach of a fearful danger. Her boy was old enough to have walked by her side, and, in an indifferent case, she would only have led him by the hand; but now the bare thought of putting him out of her arms made her shudder, and she strained him to her bosom with a convulsive grasp, as she went rapidly forward.

—Chapter 7, page 47

Listen to Chapter 7.

I got away with it all summer will
I get away with it all fall
& more importantly winter.
Infinitesimal yearnings, the romantic
or western concept of love
(note Traheme’s)
familiar concept.

It fills
the cup in me with thoms
I am cruel to the children.
That is.
You stride up the street & I
get on a bus.
We got away with it for the past three years.

Another escaping & you are not so dumb
That you didn’t see that in it.
There are Xmas decorations in the windows.
Four Christmases ago or the summer before
and mostly ephemeral.
The seasons roll over it
flattening it out.
Still, a flicker of interest: what a funny hat
You’re wearing.

—Rondeau for the Yule by Diane di Prima.

Cruising The Cut… No. 32—A new plan to gut and re-work my narrowboat…

Do we need to make a special effort to see the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Where ever we are, at any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t need to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now. It would be a pity if we were only aware of suffering.

—Effortlessness from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: frenetic, marked by excitement, disorder, or anxiety-driven activity; frenzied, frantic.

When life gets frenetic, things can seem absolutely insane—at least that seems to be what folks in the Middle Ages thought. Frenetik, in Middle English, meant “insane.” When the word no longer denoted stark raving madness, it conjured up fanatical zealots. Today, its seriousness has been downgraded to something more akin to “hectic.” But if you trace frenetic back through Anglo-French and Latin, you’ll find that it comes from Greek phrenitis, a term describing an inflammation of the brain. Phren, the Greek word for “mind,” is a root you will recognize in schizophrenic. As for frenzied and frantic, they’re not only synonyms of frenetic but relatives as well. Frantic comes from frenetik, and frenzied traces back to phrenitis.

I take Ralph Nader’s point that directed giving, understanding where your money goes, is important and I cannot fault his list. The annual solstice orgy of begging that fills my inbox each December, however, always makes me uneasy. If only the schools and social programs were fully funded by our tax dollars and the pentagon held bake sales.

That is no going to happen, so, Nader, writing in For Year End Charitable Giving—Some Favorites, has some suggestions:

Here are some of my favorite, frugal, effective non-profit citizen action organizations that you may wish to favor with your tax-deductible generosity. They need your support, because few are doing their kind of important work.

1. Veterans For Peace: Composed of veterans from World War II to the present, VFP takes strong stands, including peaceful demonstrations and marches, for peace and against a militarized, aggressive foreign policy and wars of choice.

2. Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility: A group of U.S. Forest Service professionals started this remarkable group, which has since spread to civil servants in other federal agencies such as the EPA and the Department of the Interior. PEER’s staff is knowledgeable, organized and relentless in protecting federal employees’ right to bring their conscience to work and speak out against unlawful or reckless Continue Reading »

I’ve done my best to stay out of the weeds, so the case of Sealed v. Sealed has stayed off my radar until this morning. Ed Pilkington, writing in Sealed v Sealed: ruling sheds light on mystery case thought to involve Mueller for The Guardian, ledes:

A mysterious case playing out in Washington amid tight secrecy – and presumed to involve the special counsel Robert Mueller – has been revealed to concern an unnamed corporation, owned by an equally anonymous foreign country.

The US circuit court of appeals on Tuesday issued a ruling that answered some of the questions in a judicial drama that has increasingly obsessed Mueller-watchers intrigued by the exceptional lengths to which the US government has gone to keep it secret. In several other regards, however, the judgment merely deepened the mystery.

The case, referred to in public dockets as 18-3071 with the evocative title Sealed v Sealed, began in August. All that was then known was that it related to a dispute between a grand jury and an unnamed party against whom the grand jury had issued a subpoena.

So, which corporation? Which country?

My money is on Russia.

The frame of the house he lived in
supplied the wood for the gallows.
The floors where he walked were folded
into a coffin of moderate size. We
tried to make do with the materials
at hand, saving our precious resources.
A rope was braided from the hair of
his lover. The hood was sewn from his
pockets, which were large and empty
and without holes, and the fabric (as
it should be) was coarse enough to
close out all light, and yet admit the
air to prevent suffocation. So that,
his breathing as he stood on the trap
was deep and almost without effort, as
if in appreciation for the work done
on his bebalf, and we allowed sufficient
time before the drop for his eyes to
become accustomed to the darkness.

—Report from a Hanging in the Interior by Clark McCann

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

Discovery:

Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, after their protracted discussion of the night before, did not readily sink to repose, and, in consequence, slept somewhat later than usual, the ensuing morning.

“I wonder what keeps Eliza,” said Mrs. Shelby, after giving her bell repeated pulls, to no purpose.

Mr. Shelby was standing before his dressing-glass, sharpening his razor; and just then the door opened, and a colored boy entered, with his shaving-water.

“Andy,” said his mistress, “step to Eliza’s door, and tell her I have rung for her three times. Poor thing!” she added, to herself, with a sigh.

Andy soon returned, with eyes very wide in astonishment.

“Lor, Missis! Lizy’s drawers is all open, and her things all lying every which way; and I believe she’s just done clared out!”

The truth flashed upon Mr. Shelby and his wife at the same moment. He exclaimed,

“Then she suspected it, and she’s off!”

“The Lord be thanked!” said Mrs. Shelby. “I trust she is.”

“Wife, you talk like a fool! Really, it will be something pretty awkward for me, if she is. Haley saw that I hesitated about selling this child, and he’ll think I connived at it, to get him out of the way. It touches my honor!” And Mr. Shelby left the room hastily.

—Chapter 6, page 38

Listen to Chapter 6.

Cruising The Cut… No. 31—Trip to Welford on my narrowboat: part 2…

James Baldwin was a beautiful writer. Yesterday I read a reprint of a piece he wrote for The New Yorker in 1962 and pulled out these passages.

Letter from a Region in My Mind by James Baldwin.

School began to reveal itself, therefore, as a child’s game that one could not win, and boys dropped out of school and went to work. My father wanted me to do the same. I refused, even though I no longer had any illusions about what an education could do for me; I had already encountered too many college-graduate handymen. My friends were now “downtown,” busy, as they put it, “fighting the man.” They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was “the man”—the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long. The humiliation did not apply merely to working days, or workers; I was thirteen and was crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second Street library, and the cop in the middle of the street muttered as I passed him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” —page 32.

In 2018, school is, for too many students, still a game they cannot win.

Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. —page 32.

Again, 56 years later, that is still true on the street and in the White House.

Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. —page 35

Clearly, Baldwin agreed with Sartre…

I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoevski. —page 36.

Anndddd… The Russians raise their ugly heads.

If you practice mindfulness to release the tension, stress and pain in your body, you begin to feel better. Then, when you see a person who is tense, who has pain in their body, you can show them how to practice. That person will believe you because you have direct experience. You’ve walked your talk. That’s why ite’s very important that we’re able to do it for ourselves first. Just the way you live your life, the way you react to situations, can already be very helpful. Other people see you react in a peaceful and kind way, and they already begin to learn from you.

—Walking Your Talk from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: tchotchke, knickknack, trinket.

Just as trinkets can dress up your shelves or coffee table, many words for “miscellaneous objects” or “nondescript junk” decorate our language. Knickknack, doodad, gewgaw and whatnot are some of the more common ones. While many such words are of unknown origin, we know that tchotchke comes from the Yiddish tshatshke of the same meaning, and ultimately from a now-obsolete Polish word, czaczko. Tchotchke is a pretty popular word these days, but it wasn’t commonly used in English until the 1970s.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners:

Mr. and Mrs. Shelby had retired to their apartment for the night. He was lounging in a large easy-chair, looking over some letters that had come in the afternoon mail, and she was standing before her mirror, brushing out the complicated braids and curls in which Eliza had arranged her hair; for, noticing her pale cheeks and haggard eyes, she had excused her attendance that night, and ordered her to bed. The employment, naturally enough, suggested her conversation with the girl in the morning; and turning to her husband, she said, carelessly,

“By the by, Arthur, who was that low-bred fellow that you lugged in to our dinner-table today?”

—Chapter 5, page 31

Listen to Chapter 5.

The year of the hurricane
(we are speaking)
              bay roadway
              the drenching
leaves flattened to echo
dry velvet before
          hush

All quarrelsome
          of whether hibiscus
          shut

Tender magnificence

land in wake of Prospero

with splayed tendrils
        washed

          Now
Episcopal bells
        shudder
as when you placed water pails
Think what justice the liberty bells
        peal on moon base
in a peculiar climate
          and rusting

Rhapsody of helmet
          it also chants
a head burden to catch
          sun granaries
legacies the sea strokes up
            dried as weed cemetery
or blue ballooning stingarees
            thrown

Night temples of palms
        the rain blows tropique
as ceiling fans
          you go in your orphan feet
          crossing the tiles

You are two sinister people
          in your oleander suit
          your scorpion shoes
          your eyeglasses ground from sand

You whisper it is so silent
under the mosquito net
remembering the prisons from which you sprang
            the machinery of coral walls
            your bamboo crest
the stockade that encircles you

            as day the fresh water river
flowing from brow to throat
it cuts this salt thong
            you are released
            to the jointure of others

an amulet that is a beetle

to be fed by palmetto and cane

          cherished by the thrice blue seas

you shall reconnoiter

                    As a shell your dynasty

                    You are a porch with screens

You are a lucky person who hears
            the wild the luxurious birds
their scream is like yours
            when you fear the cold

they sing in the heat draughts
            they sip from the fountain

joy in their male coloring is yours
          and the neck reach

          the colonial language
          of tern sibilancy

Today you sit on the cropped grass
today looking at the map
          you blink

          Magnified world
          my education
          my craft

My fruit my oranges

—Colonial Hours by Barbara Guest

Cruising The Cut… No. 30—A trip to Welford by narrowboat: part 1…

We can learn to handle our own fear and pain. After that, we can help other people, because we have direct experience with how to hand the fear and the pain. Suffering and fear are not things that we just experience by ourselves. Our fear and suffering is also the suffering of our parents, our friends and our society. You are me and I am you. If something wonderful happens to one of us, it happens to all of us. This answer comes from the insight of no-self. With the insight no-self you see that your suffering, your fear, is a collective suffering. Withe insight of no-self, you see that happiness is a collective happiness. We are not separated.

—Happiness Is A Collective Matter from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: millefleur, having an allover pattern of small flowers and plants.

Millefleur (which can also be spelled millefleurs) came directly from French into English in the 17th century as a word for a perfume distilled from several different kinds of flowers. The literal meaning of mille fleurs in French is “a thousand flowers,” so it is easy to see how millefleur came to be applied to patterns or backgrounds of many tiny flowers or plants. A similarly colorful extension of “a thousand flowers” can be seen in the word millefiori. That term, which refers to ornamental glass characterized by multicolored flower-like designs, comes from mille fiori, the Italian phrase meaning “a thousand flowers.”

My battle with insomnia began in the last century.

I was surprised that Marina Benjamin, writing in Can a sleepless night awaken creativity? for The Guardian, didn’t mention fellow writer and insomniac, Charles Dickens, in her piece. Dickens famously took long nocturnal rambles around London that may have had a great deal to do with the characters he created for his readers.

In all my explorations of coffee I think my favorite is the story of how, shortly after the introduction of coffee into the community of Jewish mystics in Safed, they began rising at true midnight—the anti-noon—to study Qabala. What the Beats did with Benzedrine, writers and mystics have accomplished for centuries with humble coffee. The ritual is one that began long before Isaac Luria.

Benjamin writes:

In ancient Egypt, seekers after spiritual guidance could spend a night in incubation, which was a special institutionalised sleep undertaken in the temples of the gods precisely in order to descry meaning in the dark. Not unlike poets, they saw themselves as human lightning rods, privileged recipients of divine revelation. The poet after all longs to be a seer – the one awake enough to see things for what they are amid a world given over to slumber, and name them or call them out.

This is the ambition that Emily Brontë voices in her poem “Stars”, when she begs the twinkling deities to hide her from the sun’s hostile light: “Let me sleep through his blinding reign, / And only wake with you!” Brontë is famed for having experienced visions at night. Greedily, she invoked sleeplessness as the source of her imagination.

I found her conclusion, after citing all her sources, odd because she seems to stumble upon a truth that every writer I have had occasion to meet—and most that I have read—has shared. Walter Mosley, for me, expressed the though best when he wrote:

The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. I am, I fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by my fondest dreams.

But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. I pick up where I left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.

The best writing comes from our dreams, that which we yearn to understand. What better time to explore those dreams than when the world is quiet and dark?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

The cabin of Uncle Tom was a small log building, close adjoining to “the house,” as the negro par excellence designates his master’s dwelling. In front it had a neat garden-patch, where, every summer, strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, flourished under careful tending. The whole front of it was covered by a large scarlet bignonia and a native multiflora rose, which, entwisting and interlacing, left scarce a vestige of the rough logs to be seen. Here, also, in summer, various brilliant annuals, such as marigolds, petunias, four-o’clocks, found an indulgent corner in which to unfold their splendors, and were the delight and pride of Aunt Chloe’s heart.

—Chapter 4, page 20

Listen to Chapter 4.

Everybody has a point of view,
        a public expression when
                all is said and done,
and each man is his own achievement,
          even in, if only in,
              the bland face of death.
Here, at this remote oasis where
        a desert stretches away
              to eternity,
tourists don’t often tour, their flashbulbs
        unable to shed much light
                on caves and caskets
where the dead lay down with their beliefs
        to be made a spectacle,
                made the spectators.
Wide-eyed and incredulous, each one
        looks oddly startled by death,
                surprised in the act,
and each portrait, fixed in encaustic,
        preserves a final instant
                when the hot wax cooled.
Yannis (these faces have lost their names,
          but I return them, harmless
                words of convenience)
peers placidly out of his dim past
          into our dark forever;
                notice the slight smile:
he was happy perhaps and died young.
      Thea, though, had had enough;
              bejeweled and be-chinned,
she knew how other people saw her
      and couldn’t care; she finds us
              as unattractive
in our day as our kind were in hers.
      We give others our regards:
              Manos, with one eye,
though it’s wide and wondrous all the same—
        Maria, who’s just a child
              and is close to tears—
Julian, prematurely decayed,
        with both hair and skin gone gray—
              and Loukis, who looks
quite the scholar on the face of it:
      his gaze is faintly pompous,
              and faint heiroglyphs
attend him obscurely at each side.
        So many new faces for
                  the same old story!
Looking, we think of them as touching,
        or as vain, or as beside
                the point, depending
on our views; but then we return to
      sunshine, blind and blinking, as
                they, of course, cannot.
They lived in a time and place where death
        was already an art-form,
                an old observance,
and died for what they could not foresee—
      us, the future—things that have
            come to light at last.

—Caskets in the Fayoum by George Bradley.

Cruising The Cut… No. 29—Internet Explorer…

Our practice is to learn to take care of the present moment. Don’t allow yourself to be lost in the past or the future. Taking good care of the present moment, we may be able to change the negative things from the past and prepare for a good future. We tend to worry about what will happen in the future. The practice helps us to come home to the present moment, to our body, our feelings, the environment around us. We we breathe in and breathe out mindfully, our mind is brought back to our body, and we are truly there in order to take care of the present moment. If there’s some stress, some tension in our body, we practice mindful breathing in order to release the tension, and that brings us relief. If there’s a painful feeling in us, we use mindfulness to embrace our feelings so that we can get relief. The key point is that you are there in the present moment, in the here and now, to take care of yourself and what’s happening around you. You don’t think too much about the future or project too much about how it might be; and you’re not trapped too much in the past. You have to train yourself to learn how to go home to the present moment, to the here and now, and to take care of your body and your feelings in the moment. As you learn how to be in the present moment, you’ll gain faith and trust in your ability to handle the situation. You learn how to take care of your feelings and what’s happening around you. That makes you confident; and as your confidence grows, you’re no longer the victim of your worries.

—Letting Go Of Worrying from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: epitome, a typical or ideal example, embodiment; a summary of a written work; a brief presentation or statement of something; brief or miniature form—usually used with in.

Epitome first appeared in print in 1520, when it was used to mean “summary.” If someone asks you to summarize a long paper, you effectively cut it up, mentioning only the most important ideas in your synopsis, and the etymology of epitome reflects this process. The word descends from Greek epitemnein, meaning “to cut short,” which in turn was formed from the prefix epi- and the verb temnein, which means “to cut.” Your summary probably also presents all the key points of the original work, which may explain why epitome eventually came to be used for any person or object that is a clear or good example of an abstraction.

The other day, while listening to the Chris Hayes podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates, I noted a bit about Ta-Nehisi’s reading a new biography of Fredericl Douglass. I went looking for what the biography might be and first found Kendall Teare’s ‘Quite the jewel’ – honoring David Blight and his new Douglass biography, which, in turn, took me to the video above.

(Sadly, not on YouTube, but rather posted to Facebook, so the quality is a bit off-putting, but still worth the listen.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

The Husband and Father:

Mrs. Shelby had gone on her visit, and Eliza stood in the verandah, rather dejectedly looking after the retreating carriage, when a hand was laid on her shoulder. She turned, and a bright smile lighted up her fine eyes.

“George, is it you? How you frightened me! Well; I am so glad you ’s come! Missis is gone to spend the afternoon; so come into my little room, and we’ll have the time all to ourselves.”

Saying this, she drew him into a neat little apartment opening on the verandah, where she generally sat at her sewing, within call of her mistress.

“How glad I am!—why don’t you smile?—and look at Harry—how he grows.” The boy stood shyly regarding his father through his curls, holding close to the skirts of his mother’s dress. “Isn’t he beautiful?” said Eliza, lifting his long curls and kissing him.

—Chapter 3, page 15

Listen to Chapter 3.

This will be your office, Mr. Blank,
While you remain attached to the Poetry
Division of the Department of Mediocrity.
Prose is down the hall, but we all work together—
Except for the two snobs upstairs in Innovation,
Who pretty much stick to themselves.

Now as to categories: Gays are by themselves.
In this drawer. Women who fill in their name blank
With “Ms.” go in the Minority file (Drubb’s innovation).
Don’t file all the drug abusers under Nature Poetry.
Some are Deep Image; others get lumped, together
With younger academics, into regions. Mediocrity

Is not randomly distributed. True mediocrity‚
Like genius, aggregates into nodes. By themselves
A dozen mediocrities amount to nothing, but put them together
And you have a department. \you laugh, Mr. Blank,
But I am always serious when I speak of poetry.
What’s New Under the Sun? as Mailer wrote, and innovation

Isn’t the answer! The only genuine innovation
In the arts has been the belated recognition accorded mediocrity.
By forming poets into Schools and Offices of Poetry,
By helping them most generously to help themselves.
By encouraging their application to all forms of application blank.
They’re made to learn that only by colluding together

Can poets obtain the object of money. Together-
Ness! “One Tribe, One Wall”—that was the first innovation
Of burghers in their boroughs, and now, Mr. Blank,
It is the last. Artists now see in their united mediocrity
A means toward the Golden Mean, and in themselves
A collective force for forming—and re-forming poetry

Into a once-more-useful social institution. Poetry
Is no longer the mere serial stringing-together
Of apergus into prosodic masses, those masses themselves
To be collected in a book—even such a book as The Innovation
Sheaves (on which, by the by, I wrote my dissertation, “Mediocrity
In the work of Ezra Pound”)! Well, Mr. Blank,

I hope that you and Mrs. Blank can come to our Poetry
Day Raffle. If not. Mediocrity often has a little get-together.
Usually without that pair from Innovation. They stick to themselves.

—Orientating Mr. Blank by Tom Disch

Since David notes that he was a bit hesitant about leaving the canals and cruising a bit of river, I left a comment asking if, in fact, his narrow boat—built expressly for canal cruising—had enough power to push itself up stream in a current. He’s noted several times that his cruising speed is 3 mph/4.8 kph and rivers here in the states can exceed that speed.

Cruising The Cut… No. 28—Route Canal…

[Update at 0527 on 17 December—The answer is yes.]

So, checking my stats this morning I noticed an odd blip in readership for a post I wrote back on 11 June of last year concerning a bit of marginalia from Albert Camus. I’m always interested when I see a spike like this—the post has more readers in the past week than the next nine posts combined—but after further investigation using various tools, Awestats &c., I got nothing.

The next step was to leave an update on the post to see if anyone visiting HCWW would share what brought them here. I’ll keep you posted.

Being in solitude can help us relax. Solitude doesn’t mean being by ourselves or away from civilization. Real solitude means we’re not carried away by the crowd, by sorrows about the past, by worries about the future or by strong emotions in the present. We don’t lose our stability and our peace. We take refuge in our mindful breathing and come back to the present moment, and to the island of peace within ourselves. We enjoy our time with others, but we don’t get lost in our interactions. Even in a busy marketplace we can smile and breathe in peace, dwelling in the island of ourselves.

—Solitude from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: vitiate, to make faulty or defective, impair; to debase in moral or aesthetic status; to make ineffective.

Here’s one for word puzzle lovers—and anyone allured by alliteration. The sentence “Vivian vituperated the vicious villain for valuing vice over virtue” contains three words that derive from the same Latin source as vitiate. Can you identify all three? If you picked vituperate (a verb meaning “to scold”), vicious, and vice, your puzzle prowess is beyond reproach. Like vitiate, all three descend from the Latin noun vitium, meaning “fault” or “vice.”

Finally, a thought for the week, an exercise in sortes vergilianae taken from Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid:

We tossed her some beach to plow—on my terms—
and then she spurns our offer of marriage, she
embraces Aeneas as lord and master in her realm.

—Book IV, lines 287-290.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

The Mother:

Eliza had been brought up by her mistress, from girlhood, as a petted and indulged favorite.

The traveller in the south must often have remarked that peculiar air of refinement, that softness of voice and manner, which seems in many cases to be a particular gift to the quadroon and mulatto women. These natural graces in the quadroon are often united with beauty of the most dazzling kind, and in almost every case with a personal appearance prepossessing and agreeable. Eliza, such as we have described her, is not a fancy sketch, but taken from remembrance, as we saw her, years ago, in Kentucky. Safe under the protecting care of her mistress, Eliza had reached maturity without those temptations which make beauty so fatal an inheritance to a slave. She had been married to a bright and talented young mulatto man, who was a slave on a neighboring estate, and bore the name of George Harris.

This young man had been hired out by his master to work in a bagging factory, where his adroitness and ingenuity caused him to be considered the first hand in the place. He had invented a machine for the cleaning of the hemp, which, considering the education and circumstances of the inventor, displayed quite as much mechanical genius as Whitney’s cotton-gin.

—Listen to Chapter 2, page 12.

The near past and the near future are poor,
with no accession of hands, no bright legs—
useless, untender absences with bronze torsos.
Each day, there is the hollow of good works
and inside that, an hour with the statues
I have collected of such hard torsos,
parts of bodies I cannot comfort
with hands and legs, features and good works.
For my own comfort, I press my face against them,
It makes the bronze strange and that eases
the occult poverty of the hour,
a body smaller than mine. I’m poor. My house
has no hands or legs and the near silence
of the statues dies away as I move closer.

I like to believe that they were never children,
just as the near past and future never
lift their hands to the ribbons of a swing
or look to their mother, a distorted face
captured in the hard mirrors of bronzes.
I like to believe I say the things I must
the only way possible. I have a house.
It is poor. The way I feel about time is poor.
One hour in any direction looks starved
or distorted with anger, like the face
of the bad woman I refuse to remember
although a part of her body is repeated
many times in the next room, her limbs
the tenderness and silence of other houses.

It is time to know what everyone not wasted
in childhood knows. The body is too many
pieces, scattered among inexpressive
desires too strong and spiteful to end
anywhere but the poorhouse, the shanty museum
of torsos. I am no child and wasted nothing
in childhood that might explain this poverty
of cold change from hour to hour, from body
to one more casting of the same body
I will never use. I do not want my life.
It is safer elsewhere with limbs, in other houses.
I want to be set free in the next room
to press my face against the strange heat
of bronze whose silence could not love me less.

—Why History Imitates God by Donald Revell

Cruising The Cut… No. 27

I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on the matter of voice in fiction. The story teller may not be obvious to the reader, but the reader knows the storyteller is there. In fiction, hell, in all writing, the storyteller comes first, last and always.

Coates, in What Makes Fiction Good? It’s Mostly the Voice, wrote:

[Slaughterhouse Five] has none of the complicated, nuanced characters I claim to enjoy in narrative. But I did enjoy this narrative. I think it is because, in fiction, if you like the person telling you the story—which is to say the voice, not the author—you generally will let them tell you a story.

Pride and Prejudice, for me, is all about voice. I don’t find Mr. Darcy gripping at all, except when the Austen’s narrator is describing him. It is as though she is letting me on a secret. Ditto for Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. The voice belongs to society insider, one who believes in all of its trappings but also loves to gossip about its hypocrisies. It is as if the voice is saying to you—”If you don’t have anything good to say, come sit by me.” Same with Moby Dick and the vagabond intellectual Ishmael. Same with The Great Gatsby and its everyman, Nick Carraway.

I’ve actually been struggling with this while studying E.L. Doctorow’s work. Doctorow is my favorite author. The Waterworks, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, World’s Fair, I love them all. (The Waterworks is especially underrated.) But I love the voices telling me the stories in each case. I’m now trying to get through The Book of Daniel, considered one of Doctorow’s best novels. But I can’t get with the voice and I’m not sure why.

J.R.R. Tolkien may not have been a great writer, but he was a great storyteller.

To “let go” means to let go of something. that something may be an object of our mind, something we’ve created, like an idea, feeling, desire or belief. Getting stuck on that idea could bring a lot of unhappiness and anxiety. We’d like to let it go, but how? It’s not enough just to want to let it go; we have to recognize it first as being something real. We have to look deeply into its nature and where it has come from, because ideas are born from feelings, emotions and past experiences, from things we’ve seen and heard. With the energy of mindfulness and concentration we can look deeply and discover the roots of the idea, feeling, emotion or desire. Mindfulness and concentration bring about insight, and insight can help us release the object in our mind.

—Letting Go from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: nidus, a nest or breeding place, especially a place or substance in an animal or plant where bacteria or other organisms lodge and multiply; a place where something originates, develops, or is located.

Nidus literally means “nest” in Latin, and some of its relatives in English suggest this connection in a straightforward way. For example, we have nidification for the process of building a nest, and nidicolous, meaning “reared in a nest.” But nidus itself, when used as an English word, is apt to refer to a place where bacteria lodge and multiply. Consequently, the extended use of nidus in English often has a negative connotation referring to a source of undesirable opinions or behaviors.

So, I’m a nearly life-long Trekker (Trekkie is a pejorative). I was a week away from my 11th birthday in 1966 when Enterprise (NCC 1701) first flashed across my black-and-white television screen. I met Gene Roddenberry very briefly at a convention in Seattle in the late ’70s and I have seen every show more than once—some, dozens of times—and I’ve seen every theatrical release.

All of that is to say that I feel qualified to declare that the latest outing—Star Trek Discovery—sucks Klingon bathwater.

I started watching the first season on DVD last night and fell asleep. I fecking fell asleep watching Start Trek. The writing is pedantic and boorish. The star ships are crude, over-sized internally and boring. The lighting. Don’t get me started on the lighting. OK, I’ve already started on the lighting. J.J. Abrams’ lens-flare fetish is horrible enough, but Bryan Fuller’s need to repeatedly turn the brightness control from dark to bright to dark to bright. Yeah, I caught the bit about Lorca’s eyes, but please.

I guess this officially makes me a grumpy or fart.

Now get off my lawn.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe…

In Which The Reader Is Introduced To A Man Of Humanity:

Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlour in the town of P___, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.

—Chapter 1, page 3

The list of small deformities passed unrecorded
In the stupor of heredity,
Like our weather,
Clouding over the tiny barn
Where he said he saw Judas hanging
Behind the old tractor
But it was the Swensby boy in a blue and yellow plaid shirt
And no note.
He went screaming Judas into the cornfield
And couldn’t be hushed until evening.
Oh God the failure of prayers in the idiot days
Of summer behind the goldenrod,
Dusty on my hands; scattering doubts like the dandelions
Turned white and blown to seed—
More doubts and more prayers
Asking God not to hide his face:
The face of our weather, immense and old,
Covering the sky with clouds to smother the moon:
A small oval, like the small pale face of Jesus
In the blue book on the table with one unsteady leg.
Look at the sky, Marit,
Look at the bland green behind the leaves’ paralysis
In the minutes when panic is suspended
In an estranged color,
Before the cellar door is raised
And we descend into the air
Preserving canned goods,
Before the prayers in the damp on the cold concrete
And long before the rain.
Inga with a withered hand waves it over the uprooted maple
Where the swing hung for twelve years
And where we played the fields were an ocean
And the tree a ship,
Before the mosquitoes came at about nine
And we fled in to cards or stories upstairs:
Matching suits as one moth tries the screen
And flies for the bulb
A puny tremor of white over the grey mattress
Where you sat naked on a Friday that summer.
I fingered the scar on your hip in the empty house
And whispered anyway:
Our clandestine music in muggy weather
During a walk
Past the still green grapes and the clothesline
With one pair of socks and an apron;
Belated spectres of surprise in the night,
Belonging to no one, except the heat
And our tipsy inclination.
Those hours were unmartyred,
Almost unspent,
Requiring the same effort as a dream
When the scenery becomes illegible,
And I forgot the ache of familiarity in the outlines
Of the rainwater barrels and the pump
And I concentrated on the stars,
The dot to dot of the big and little dipper.
But they began to die as the storm
Gathered for the drowning.
Turn off the lights so I can’t see your face,
Hide your prints made in the mud
With your bare feet between the zinnias and the columbine
So they never reach morning,
And let me have your scent only.
When the hidden sun was just giving pink to the sky
You pressed me into a corner behind the door
And traced with your finger
The large violet birthmark on the left side of my face.

—Weather Markings by Siri Hustvedt

Cruising The Cut… No. 26

A final bit of the Hayes-Coates discussion beginning at time mark 54:28…

CH: Someone asked, what books besides your own, do you recommend to understand America’s racial history?

TC: Wow, oh man, we got all day to do this. Where do I begin … Jesus, these questions. Where do I begin? Okay, so I think to narrow it down a little bit, I’ll talk about probably what most directly inspired the work that I do. So this book, “We Were Eight Years in Power” is heavily, heavily rooted in W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, which is a tremendous… It’s a task to get through. I won’t lie about that. But it is a tremendous, tremendous book. I think it has one of the early actual retorts to actually something that we were just talking about just now. And that is the idea that if black people are civic minded and if black people do all the right things, America will then accept them.

And one of the things that Du Bois realized very quickly using Reconstruction as an example, is that, that clearly is not true. That’s tremendous, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which I would not have been able to write Between the World and Me if it didn’t exist. One of my great inspirations, in terms of my work is Ida B. Wells and there’s a great biography by her, about her, by a great historian, Paula Giddings. Paula Giddings’ book before that which is actually the first one that really gave me insight on Ida B. Wells, When and Where I Enter, which is a history of black women in America. Tremendous, tremendous, tremendous book.

In terms of how I write, Fire Next Time is there but Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is poetry. Just had a huge, huge influence on me understanding how you write is actually important, the beauty of writing is actually a really important thing. And the last book which is not about race but in America it always is, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Which my wife was in a book club and they were reading it and she was like, “You should try this.” And from page one I was like, “Oh, wow, this is what I want to do. I want to be this guy.” And again, the ability to mix, even in my non-fiction, the way he would mix history in with actual narrative and make it alive and make it living. Even writing non-fiction, I think about that all the time.

Previously: 5 December, 8 December and 10 December…

Say you have a notion of happiness, an idea about what will make you happy. That idea has its roots in you and your environment. Your idea tells you what conditions you need in order to be happy. You’ve entertained this idea for ten or twenty years, and now you realize that your idea of happiness is making you suffer. You idea may contain an element of delusion, anger or craving. These elements are the substance of suffering. On the other hand, you know that you have other kinds of experiences: moments of joy, release or true love. You can recognize these as moments of real happiness. When you’ve had a moment of real happiness, it becomes easier to release the objects of your craving, because you’re developing insight that these objects will not make you happy.

Many people have the desire to let go, but they’re not able to do so because they don’t yet have enough insight; they haven’t seen other alternative, other doorways to peace and happiness. Fear is an element that prevents us from letting go. We’re fearful that if we let go we’ll have nothing to cling to. Letting go is a practice; it’s an art. One day, when you’re strong enough and determined enough, you’ll let go of the afflictions that make you suffer.

—Our Idea Of Happiness from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: zibeline, a soft lustrous wool fabric with mohair, alpaca or camel’s hair.

Though zibeline is woven from the hair of alpacas, camels, or Angora goats, its name actually traces back to a Slavic word for the sable, a small mammal related to the weasel. The Slavic term was adopted into Old Italian, and from there it passed to Middle French, then on to English in the late 1500s. English zibeline originally referred to the sable or its fur, but in the 19th century it developed a second sense, applying to a soft, smooth, slightly furry material woven from a mixture of animal hairs. It’s especially suited to women’s suits and coats, or, as a fashion columnist in the December 6, 1894 issue of Vogue observed, “Zibeline … makes an exceedingly pretty, warm theatre cloak, not too fine to be crushed into the small one-chair space.”

How Fox News missed the inevitable racist comparison—wait, no, they didn’t miss the comparison they’re signaling the comparison to their viewership. Either that is true or they’re dumber than rocks and I choose to be charitable and assume they’re not.

Kissing The Virgin’s Mouth by Donna M. Gershten. Chapter 15, page 220.

I practice blindness. Though my vision is near good with my glasses, I remove them and make my way through my home. Three stair steps down—the cool slick of marble against the smooth soles of my slippers—five steps normal in length—a rough plaster wall. Isabel follows behind me whispering my path and hers: “one stair, two stair, three stair, one wall two wall…” The moist soles of her feet stick and release on the marble. Right turn and then four quiet steps over the wool rug to the sala and the altar of Guadalupe. La Virgen. My Lupa.

for Antonio Machado

  This rain has stopped, and the moon has come out.
I don’t understand the first thing about radio
waves. But I think they travel better just after
a rain, when the air is damp. Anyway, I can reach out
now and pick up Ottawa, if I want, or Toronto.
Lately, at night, I’ve found myself
becoming slightly interested in Canadian politics
and domestic affairs. But mostly it was their music
stations I was after. I could sit here in the chair
and listen, without having to do anything, or think.
I don’t have a TV, and I’d quit reading
newspapers. At night I turned on the radio.

  When I came out here I was trying to absent myself
from everything. Especially literature.
What that entails, and what comes after.
There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
For being still. Coupled with this
a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.
But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,
not always to be trusted. And I forgot that.
I listened when it said, Better to sing that which is gone
and will not return than that which is still
with us and will be with us tomorrow. Or not.
And if not, that’s all right too.
It didn’t much matter, it said, even if a man sang.
That’s the voice I listened to.
Can you imagine somebody thinking like this?
That it’s really all one and the same?
What nonsense!
But I’d think these stupid thoughts at night
as I sat in the chair and listened to my radio.

  Then, Machado, the advent of your poetry in my life!
It was a little like a middle-aged man falling
in love again. A remarkable thing to witness, perhaps,
but embarrassing, too.
Silly things like putting your picture up.
And I took your book to bed with me
and slept with it near at hand. A train went by
in my dreams one night and woke me up.
And the first thing I thought, heart racing
there in the dark bedroom, was this—
It’s all right, Machado is here.
Then I could fall back to sleep again.

  Today I took your book with me when I went
for my walk. “Pay attention!” you said,
when anyone asked what to do with their lives.
So I looked around and made note of everything.
Then sat dowii with your book in the sun, in my place
beside the river where I could see the mountains.
And I closed my eyes and listened to the sound
of the water. Then I opened them and began to read
“Abel Martin’s Last Lamentations.”
This morning I thought about you hard, Machado.
And I hope, even in the face of what I know about death,
that you got the message I intended.
But it’s okay even if you didn’t. Sleep well. Rest.
Sooner or later I hope we’ll meet.
And then I can tell you these things myself.

—Radio Waves by Raymond Carver

Cruising The Cut… No. 25

Ta-Nehisi Coates on his writing process at time mark 57:15

TC: I do, I do have a writing project and I love you people so much, let me tell you how much I love you. I was due on this writing project two weeks ago, it was like two weeks ago and yet I’m here with you. How much love is in my heart? Here I am. I do, man and I do and what I’ll say is, I love it and it’s the hardest thing ever. Writing is so … I want to talk really, I don’t know if they’re people who want to be writers, who are writers in the building. But I just want to talk really quickly about that process. And about specifically working with Chris, who is magnificent. I give him shit all the time but he’s actually magnificent, best editor and publisher, excuse me, make sure I get his title right.

I have a note that one day, we should have put it in “We Were Eight Years in Power,” and the note is, I wrote “Between the World and Me” four times. And every time I would submit a draft to Chris and he’d be like, “Hmm, I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know.” Basically, I had to go and rewrite before we even got to the level of actual line by line editing. So he sent me a note after what must have been the second or third draft. And it’s just like 2,000 words about why this does not work. And it was so depressing. I remember getting it at the time, I think you have to understand about “Between the World and Me” is, it’s a book that came out of my head. I had artistic inspiration in the sense of James Baldwin, the fact that I had been working through the death of my friend for 14 years at that point.

I had the fact of a black president which was sort of swirling around but I didn’t know what that was. Even the idea of a letter came at the very end of the actual process of us working together. And man, I got that note from Chris, ’cause every time you’re like, “Okay, I think this is it, I think I got it, I think I got it.” And it’s go again, go again. And I feel like at that point, I was well-known enough and this is how the industry works. Somebody would have published that draft. It’s an inferior draft, it’s not the same book. And this is, I’ve been blessed because this is actually the relationship we have even on this book, man. I turned in a draft about this time last year. Oh, I’m done, we’re gonna go to line edits. And Chris took forever to read it as is his way.

But when he did, he wrote, he did a little bit of line edit but he came over to the house and he talked to me about it and it was clear that I had to rewrite the whole thing. This is my third time, I’ve been writing this book for 10 years, this is my third time rewriting it. But he’s not gonna let me embarrass myself. You understand? I think I’m good as a writer, but I actually have much more confidence in the people around me because the people around me, they just gonna tell me, “It’s not time. It’s not time, don’t embarrass yourself.” I think a lot of writers, listen, I think talent is really important but I think what I have been blessed with, from the time I was in my mom and my dad’s house, you know what I mean? From the period of working for David Carr. From the period when James Bennett ran The Atlantic. I had hard people around me. You know who just pushed. Do it again, go again, go again, go again, go again.

So if you like what you see, and this is why I’m always a little uncomfortable with this, what you are seeing is not some innate thing. What you are seeing is, go again, go again, go again. And that’s the spirit I think of certainly good writing and any writing that hopes to be great. The bleeding on the page. And then bleeding again and again. I just tell him this all the time, I’m thankful to have a reader like that who push you in that sort of way.

Sometimes you have to share a room with someone who snores. You may get irritated. But With mindfulness you can bring about compassion. You can lean on the sound of snoring in order to get to sleep. Listen and say that is bring you home to here and now. They you can accept the snoring much more easily, and you can go to sleep thanks to the sound of snoring.

—Leaning On Snoring from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: perennial, present at all seasons of the year; persisting for several years usually with new herbaceous growth from a perennating part; persistent, enduring, continuing without interruption, constant, perpetual, regularly repeated or renewed, recurrent.

Nowadays when we talk about “perennial plants,” or simply “perennials” (perennial can be a noun, too), we mean plants that die back seasonally but produce new growth in the spring. But originally perennial was equivalent to evergreen, used for plants that remain with us all year. We took this “throughout the year” sense straight from the Romans, whose Latin perennis combined per– (“throughout”) with a form of annus (“year”). The poet Ovid, writing around the beginning of the first millennium, used the Latin word to refer to a “perennial spring” (a water source), and the scholar Pliny used it of birds that don’t migrate. Our perennial retains these same uses, for streams and occasionally for birds, but it has long had extended meanings, too.

Can 25 progressive democrats—with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading the charge—make a difference? Can they resist the evil influence of Nancy Pelosi? Can they just say no to the wads of reëlection cash poised to flood their coffers? How can voters tell who has been naughty and how has been nice. Ralph Nader offers 10 metrics.

Nader, in Are the New Congressional Progressives Real? Use These Yardsticks to Find Out, sets the bar:

In November, about 25 progressive Democrats were newly elected to the House of Representatives. How do the citizen groups know whether they are for real or for rhetoric? I suggest this civic yard stick to measure the determination and effectiveness of these members of the House both inside the sprawling, secretive, repressive Congress and back home in their Districts. True progressives must:

1. Vigorously confront all the devious ways that Congressional bosses have developed to obstruct the orderly, open, accessible avenues for duly elected progressive candidates to be heard and to participate in Congressional deliberations from the subcommittees to the committees to the floor of the House. Otherwise, the constricting Congressional cocoon will quickly envelop and smother their collective energies and force them to get along by going along.

2. Organize themselves into an effective Caucus (unlike the anemic Progressive Caucus). They will need to constantly be in touch with each other and work to democratize Congress and substantially increase the quality and Continue Reading »

I keep posting these social justice graphics from Andrew Marlton and there is a certain political distance involved because he’s writing about and illustrating problems on the other side of the planet. His topics, however, are universal and increasingly cogent in a reactionary world driven by populism white people crapping in their pants from fear.

The above is just another timely example as we here in Ohio contemplate the rightness of demanding labor as a requirement for healthcare. All societies must be judged by how they treat the least of those in their communities.

Kissing The Virgin’s Mouth by Donna M. Gershten. Chapter 14, page 211.

When Martina and I reached the winding roads of Durango, I wanted to put a little Guadalupe on the dashboard—a special Lupa in my purse with a suction cup just under Juan Diego. Just for this part of the long ride from Houston Teatlán.

Gasw, have we really been suffering from this shit for 20 years?

I can still remember the day that I was walking up Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights and hearing someone talking behind me. I turned to ask what they wanted only to be faced with my first case of walking while talking on a cell phone headset. You really can’t tell who is talking to their supplier and who is talking to Satan. Is there a difference?

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: lunette, something that has the shape of a crescent or half-moon; an opening in a vault especially for a window; the surface at the upper part of a wall that is partly surrounded by a vault which the wall intersects and that is often filled by windows or by mural painting; a low crescentic mound (as of sand) formed by the wind; the figure or shape of a crescent moon.

Lunette, a word borrowed from French, looks like it should mean “little moon”—luna being Latin for “moon” and –ette being a diminutive suffix. There is indeed some 17th-century evidence of the word being used for a small celestial moon, but that meaning is now obsolete. Earlier, in the 16th century, lunette referred to a horseshoe having only the front semicircular part—a meaning that still exists but is quite rare. Other senses of lunette that are infrequently used nowadays include “a blinder especially for a vicious horse” and, in the plural form, “spectacles.” (Lunettes is the usual term for eyeglasses in modern French.) The oldest meaning of lunette still in common use is “something shaped like a crescent or half-moon,” which our evidence dates to the early 1600s.

Cruising The Cut… No. 24

The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

was first performed in 1703, shortly after
the deaths that stirred Chikamatsu Monzaemon

to write his drama. Sometimes criticized
for its simple plot, the story of Ohatsu, a young

courtesan of the Temmaya Tea House, and Tokubei,
a poor clerk promised to someone else, is distinguished

by the beauty of the michiyuki, or love-journey,
of its final scene. In a brief, rarely included prologue,

Ohatsu visits the temples of Osaka looking for
solace. The text here consists of puns on sacred names,

prayers mixed with lyrics from the pleasure
quarter, fragments of classical poetry, and folk songs.

The music we shall hear is new, for the original
accompaniment of Ohatsu’s mournful pilgrimage has

long been lost. The play also hints at the changing
theater of the day: Ohatsu is represented by a delicate,

archaic one-man puppet of earlier times, while
other characters will be seen as complex and artculated

three-man Bunraku-type figures which suggest
the profound, conflicted emotions that moved the poet

and his contemporaries. Because they vividly
conveyed real events, the plays of Chikamatsu

were called “living newspapers.”

—The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Siri von Reis

We have to relearn the art of resting. Even when we have a vacation, we don’t know how to make use of it. Very often we are more tired after a vacation than before it. We should learn the art of relaxation and resting, and make more time each day to practice deep relaxation on our own or with others.

—Learning To Rest from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Julia Galef seems, to me, to be well worth further exploration…

Found via in The Guardian’s ‘What problem?’ When tricky solutions prompt an easy answer by Oliver Burkeman where he promotes the podcast with a listen to this tag.

In his piece, Burkeman ledes:

One of the most obvious truths about the modern world is that a whole lot of people believe a whole lot of nonsense–about climate change not being real, Brexit being a sensible idea, gun ownership helping reduce crime, and so on. By contrast, one of the hardest truths to accept is that you–you, of all people! –are just as susceptible, in principle, to the very same mistake.

That’s the gist of years of research into “motivated reasoning”: across the political spectrum, we use reason not simply to get at the facts, but for all sorts of ulterior motives, such as persuading others of our opinions, feeling a sense of belonging to our tribe, or reducing the sense of mismatch between our beliefs and reality. Ironically, therefore, the idea that only those idiots on the other side are guilty of motivated reasoning is itself a case of motivated reasoning. To imagine oneself immune to fake news is fake news–at least according to studies like the one that found leavers and remainers are equally likely to believe false stories that bolstered their views.

Then there’s Biff’s dilemma…

Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates, continued at time mark 47:56…

CH: I want to ask you a few questions from the crowd here. I think this is an interesting one and it’s one I think about all at lot. Does voting make a difference?

TC: Yes. Who asked that? You should have to stand up, that’s weak, they wrote it on the card, right? But if you had to stand up and ask that, would you … Oh, there it is, all right, okay. I appreciate it, okay, all right. I appreciate that. Actually, I want to talk about why it makes a difference, even though I’m being sort of comical. I respect where that comes from. I thought the same at one point. There are I think two problems here. The first problem is I think in our mind, voting has assumed outsize importance in the work of politics. It’s important to vote. It’s not singularly important to vote.

So we get ramped up about voting but we don’t talk about everything that you got to do after that. We don’t have a kind of … Then everything becomes, particularly in presidential years. So everything gets put on Hillary or Bernie Sanders. Or Hillary or … Well, I mean, it ain’t gonna be Hillary or Trump here but it’s gonna be Hillary or Bernie and that’s it. As though if you vote for one that’s the end. That’s a declaration of who you are. I talked to this … Greatest story out of Chicago, Barbara Ramsby and said that she was going this with a lot her students in the primaries.

And the thing was, “Well, I don’t want to support Hillary ’cause I don’t want to support … It’s the lesser of two evils.” She said, “Yeah that’s true but I’m in favor of less evil.” And that’s, in many times that’s what voting is. And this is me right here, right? I don’t go to vote to feel inspired about the world. A lot of times I’m preventing evil. That’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to not, I’m trying to hold certain things … It’s important to hold certain things at bay. But if your work is just holding certain things at bay and not doing work to hopefully one day to have a process where you can actually feel inspired, feel good, feel represented. Then the work is kind of incomplete. You aren’t doing the whole work of it.

I think, you gotta understand, listen. Eric Holder and Jeff Sessions ain’t the same, that’s not the same person. I mean, no matter how you feel about your critiques of Obama, your critiques of Hillary, you can have those critiques, you should make them, some of them are in this book, you should make them with all the force that you can. But at the same time, you should understand that those are not the same people. And let me make this beyond symbolic, if you are living under a police department, say in Baltimore, in Chicago, they’re not the same, it makes a difference. The election made an actual difference. I just know this to be true having talked to certain folks.

For those of us here who feel that it’s mysterious that we haven’t heard anything from the federal government in terms of the killing of Eric Garner. It made a difference. It made an actual difference, it mattered. I think of voting as hygiene. You understand? I’m taking out the trash, dude. I’m sweeping the floor, I’m vacuuming. It’s important to clean-

CH: You’re not gonna get an award for that.

TC: Right, I’m not getting an award for that, right? You understand what I’m saying, you should be clean. You should be clean, you really should take out the trash, you actually should. Is it inspirational to take out the trash, no, no, no, no. But you really should do it, it’s civic maintenance.

CH: The thing I always think about particularly-

TC: It’s just not the end.

CH: No, it’s not the end. When you look at the cross tabs, I mean, to me the tell about voting and the power of voting, is the fact that the most powerful people in society all vote.

TC: Right. Are they wasting their time?

CH: Go to a neighborhood that’s full of affluent, educated, rich folks, of course they all vote.

TC: They vote.

CH: It’s another means of wielding power in a society.

Kissing The Virgin’s Mouth by Donna M. Gershten. Chapter 13, page 199.

Abuelito used to say that con azúcar, hasta la mierda sabe a buena—with sugar, even shit tastes good. the sugar disease had come to me, though later in my life than to Abuelito’s. I inject myself daily, a needle piercing into my too-sweet thigh.

Cruising The Cut… No. 23

When you’re in bed and unable to sleep, the best thing to do is to go back to your breathing. Resting is almost as beneficial as sleeping, and you’ll know you’re doing the best that you can. Bring peace to your breathing and your body will do the rest.

—Sleeping from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: immure, to enclose within or as if within walls, imprison; build into a wall, especially—to entomb in a wall.

Like mural, immure comes from murus, a Latin noun that means “wall.” Immurare, a Medieval Latin verb, was formed from murus and the prefix in- (meaning “in” or “within”). Immure, which first appeared in English in the late 16th century, literally means “to wall in” or “to enclose with a wall,” but it has extended meanings as well. In addition to senses meaning “to imprison” and “to entomb,” the word sometimes has broader applications, essentially meaning “to shut in” or “to confine.” One might remark, for example, that a very studious acquaintance spends most of her time “immured in the library” or that a withdrawn teenager “immures himself in his bedroom every night.”

It could happen again. It will.
But this time the geography will be more final,
more certain of the rain and its echo
of something inexplicably sad:
your face drenched in the almost coastal
light of a long and regrettable seclusion.
Not that the grotto will be missing
its idol, for the poor women
will always go there to pray, but that time
may have masked the entrance with vines.
And yet, even apart we were always inside
a continental silence that seemed gorged
with jungles of pleasure. Certainly
we couldn’t turn from it without pain.
And why take the narrow mountain pass
when the village lights below are guilty
of a paralyzing beauty? Blessings
have never seemed closer
to malevolent spells, or the waves more
insistent on darkly giving. And not sometimes,
but always, we are still surprised
by what the undertow, our benefactor, conjures.

—Portal by Ann Snodgrass

Chris Hayes and Ta-Nehisi Coates, continued at time mark 46:24…

TA-NEHISI COATES: Right, and I think when that photo came out of Stacey Abrams burning the, what was it, the Georgia flag?

CHRIS HAYES: Confederate, yeah.

TC: Confederate Georgia flag-

CH: Well, the Georgia flag contained the stars and bars.

TC: It basically was though. I was like, “Just please don’t apologize.”

CH: I had the same thought.

TC: Please do not, do not apologize for this shit. They’re wrong. It should be burned-

CH: Burn that thing.

TC: It’s totally defensible and anyone who is gonna vote for you, you know who’s inspired by you, thinks that you should burn it and thinks that you were right. And she didn’t and she didn’t and came within 50,000 votes of being governor of Georgia. That’s not small. These are not small things. That Gillum line, you know what I mean where he says, “I’m not saying he’s racist but all the racists think he’s racist.”

CH: Instant classic.

TC: I mean that was worth it. That was worth it. That was worth it. Part of me was like, “Oh man, he’s gonna lose over that.” Some things are worth losing for.

Previously: 5 December and 8 December.

Science was a walk in the woods
Where my neighbour’s dad did his lecturing.
It was a tiny metal cannister, kept
In concentric wells of lead
Which perfectly interlocked.
If you eased it out with tweezers
And hid it behind your hand,
The counter would rasp like a dolphin.
The Sun through an oak-leaf—

For years it all seemed guiltless ,
Magical.
Back to astonishing corkscrew tracks
In bubble-chambers , and the blue glow
Of the air around polonium, and a badge
None of whose three arms resembled dead eyes.

On my behalf, though,
The ship’s cook of HMS Belfast
Saw the skull. He spent a day ashore
At the Hiroshima of plus three months:
“Like walking on soot,” he privately said.
(The birds had ignited in midair, agony
Lost in greater agony.)
The kindest of men, he taught me rather
The wily art of inaccurate chess
(He’d open h4—he was born contrary—
And we always castled opposite sides
So our pawns led brief but exciting lives):
While the gain of an ember, lodged in his lungs,
Waited to halve into fire.

“Three score and ten,” he said cheerily
(One hand superbly frying mushrooms).
:Nonsense, said Mum, with an edgy laugh.

But a waxwork cooks for the Belfast now.

Creation is violent, one sky quarried
From another. Like the gold in his ring
My grandfather’s death was fused
In the shock wave of an exploding star:
It lodged in the iron cloud of Earth,
In the drifting crust of Africa,
In hospital radium requisitioned
And taken to Clinch River, Tennessee,
To be refined. It was then employed
To kill about eighty thousand people
When the Hiro-Shima-jo Castle vanished
On the four winds: now it ticks away
In hair in marrow in fingernails
Ticks in the walls of a granite coffin
And a heaving Pacific wave, and it ticks
Under pages of lecture notes,
In the ears of steadfast men it ticks,
In Geneva clocks. As a moral lesson,
It diffuses and every 4 months
Half again dies into lead-206,
Mildly toxic and falling on Europe in
Snow. In the husk of dead bees.

Albert, my grandfather (White) v. Polonium (Blue)
1. h4
70. Resigns

Consider the isotope, how it decays;
It toils not, neither does it spin.
It blotches the air blue with alphas.
It hears neither Klaxon nor rumour.
It never suffers a nightmare,
I forgive it (which is absurd).
It is incontestably beautiful.

It has not long for this world.

—Polonium Elegy by Graham Nelson

So, the assessment here seems to me to come down to three views: first, that all the decision makers in the fossil fuel industry are experiencing cognitive dissonance and can’t deal with a reality where in order to save the planet they must sacrifice their wealth and life’s work; second, that they sincerely believe that climate change is a conspiracy created by evil people who hate them; or third, that they are full-on evil bastards who don’t give a shit because they’ll be dead before the shit really hits the fan and that their money will protect them and theirs for the foreseeable future.

(For those who don’t get the reference in the second panel, the quote comes from Lieutenant General David Morrison, Chief of Army, Australian Defense Force.)

I’m sure there are some in the first two categories, but my money puts the majority in category three. Brenda is right. Full stop.

Kissing The Virgin’s Mouth by Donna M. Gershten. Chapter , page 177

Love is birthed by burros. That is the excuse of most, but it cannot be mine. I’ve said it before that mine was no Pedro Infante swooning lose your reason kind of love. My pendejado error was in not losing my reason, but in keeping it. There are many times when our own beliefs fail us. It is the worst betrayal que hay.

Cruising The Cut… No. 22

One day during a retreat in the mountains of northern California, there was a wildfire nearby. All day long, during sitting meditation, walking meditation and silent meals we heard the sound of helicopters. In Vietnam during the war, the sound of helicopters meant guns, bombs and death. At the retreat there were many practitioners of Vietnamese origin who had gone through the war, so the sound not pleasant for them, nor was it pleasant for the other practitioners. But there was no choice. So we chose to practice listening to the sound of helicopters with mindfulness. With mindfulness, we could tell ourselves that this is not a helicopter operating in a situation of war, but a helicopter that is helping to extinguish the flames. With mindfulness we transform our unpleasant feeling into a pleasant feeling of gratefulness. So we practiced breathing in and out with the sound of helicopters. And we survived very well. We made the sound of helicopters into something helpful. And we practiced.

     I listen, I listen.
     This sound of helicopters
     brings me back
     to the present moment.

—Transforming An Unpleasant Sound from How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The Merriam-Webster Word Of The Day is: repartee, a quick and witty reply; a succession or interchange of clever retorts, amusing and usually light sparring with words.

One person often noted for her repartee was Dorothy Parker, writer and legendary member of the Algonquin Round Table. Upon hearing that Calvin Coolidge had died, she replied, “How can they tell?” The taciturn Coolidge obviously didn’t have a reputation for being the life of the party, but he himself came out with a particularly famous repartee on one occasion. When a dinner guest approached him and told him she had bet someone she could get him to say more than two words, he replied, “You lose.” Repartee, our word for such a quick, sharp reply (and for skill with such replies) comes from the French repartie, of the same meaning. Repartie itself is formed from the French verb repartir, meaning “to retort.”