A new poetry program is starting up at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library featuring you and what you like. Drop in on the second Thursday of each month from 6:30 pm-7:50 pm starting October 9, 2014. Bring in a favorite poem to share and if you write poetry, bring one of your own too. We will be sharing poems in a reading circle. Discover new poets, hear new voices and ways of working the same old world into new words.
Poetry is not one thing. It can be wacky. It can be profound. It can be sad or ecstatic, heartening or surprising. It can make sense out of what never has. So come, participate in the friendly atmosphere, share a ready ear, read aloud (or recite), and let the words do their weave and swing. Bringing poems is not necessary — we will have plenty of poetry here to share — if you come with open hands. For questions regarding this program, call 510-981-6280.
This free program is sponsored by the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library www.berkeleylibraryfriends.org.
The Claremont Branch is located at 2940 Benvenue Ave, Berkeley CA 94705, and is open: Monday, 10:00 am-6:00 pm; Tuesday and Wednesday, 10:00 am-8:00 pm; Thursday 12 noon - 8:00 pm; and Friday and Saturday, 10:00 am-6:00 pm. For more information about this program call 510-981-6280.
Wheelchair accessible. For questions, to request a sign language interpreter or other accommodations for this event, please call (510) 981-6195 (voice) or (510) 548-1240 (TTY); at least five working days will help ensure availability. Please refrain from wearing scented products to public programs. Visit the library’s website: www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.
(I wrote the above press release for the new poetry program at the branch library where I work. Do come.)
Here's a link to future dates: BPL
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Monday, September 29, 2014
Whether it’s of any significance I don’t really know
Something happened this month. Whether it’s of any significance I don’t really know.
Most days I glance over the stats Google collects for my blog. Other than a rare comment I don’t get any other feedback. (When I share a post on Facebook I will get a couple comments there.) Blog visits have been poking along fairly consistently for years, about a thousand a month. There will be a weird spike once in a while. Such spikes tend to be some kind of phony stats boosting by other sites that are, I guess, doing the same thing to lots of other blogs in hopes of getting return visits by puzzled blog writers.
There was a big spike in the number of visits this month. 4,000+. Dunno why. Two posts I did this year on suicide seem to have suddenly been noticed by someone: “How does this even work” and ”he can shuffle off his present” … Not that either one is burning up the interwebs. Still, I hardly expected they would outdo my posts on J. Edgar Hoover or octopuses. I can’t figure out from the information Google gives me who is finding their way to those posts and why, as neither seems to be linked to by a prominent source. (Unlike my theft of the passage in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that provides the source for “Steely Dan.”) I’m not saying those two posts have spiked my stats. It’s just that seeing unusual visit numbers hit those two posts in particular is a little surprise.
In past stats spikes the spike was sudden and faded fast, spike-like, in other words. This month the numbers have continued at the peak, more or less. Not a one day spike, but numbers that have been going on most of the month. It would be fun to know the story behind them. Has Google changed an algorithm? Has the next generation discovered me?
Most days I glance over the stats Google collects for my blog. Other than a rare comment I don’t get any other feedback. (When I share a post on Facebook I will get a couple comments there.) Blog visits have been poking along fairly consistently for years, about a thousand a month. There will be a weird spike once in a while. Such spikes tend to be some kind of phony stats boosting by other sites that are, I guess, doing the same thing to lots of other blogs in hopes of getting return visits by puzzled blog writers.
There was a big spike in the number of visits this month. 4,000+. Dunno why. Two posts I did this year on suicide seem to have suddenly been noticed by someone: “How does this even work” and ”he can shuffle off his present” … Not that either one is burning up the interwebs. Still, I hardly expected they would outdo my posts on J. Edgar Hoover or octopuses. I can’t figure out from the information Google gives me who is finding their way to those posts and why, as neither seems to be linked to by a prominent source. (Unlike my theft of the passage in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that provides the source for “Steely Dan.”) I’m not saying those two posts have spiked my stats. It’s just that seeing unusual visit numbers hit those two posts in particular is a little surprise.
In past stats spikes the spike was sudden and faded fast, spike-like, in other words. This month the numbers have continued at the peak, more or less. Not a one day spike, but numbers that have been going on most of the month. It would be fun to know the story behind them. Has Google changed an algorithm? Has the next generation discovered me?
Friday, September 26, 2014
pile of reading
Far from the Tree: parents, children, and the search for identity by Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon devotes each chapter to a different category of child that presents to the parent as a person unlike them: the Autistic, the Deaf, Transgender, etc. I’m on the eighth chapter which is devoted to prodigies, music prodigies, specifically. Since Solomon himself is gay he’s more ready to notice when people he writes about are, too. Though there isn’t a chapter expressly on gay people, Andrew Solomon speaks about his own experience as a gay man (with straight parents) in the opening and closing chapters. The book is sometimes fascinating, sometimes depressing, sometimes intriguing, sometimes oddly diffuse.
Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on stage and screen to 1939 by Mark Evan Swartz
Real detail on the live version of Wizard that was the biggest stage hit of its day (1902). It was not much like the book or the MGM movie.
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
I loved George MacDonald’s fairy tales so I was looking forward to this novel. I enjoyed the first third where the North Wind is personified as a woman who picks up the little boy protagonist and carries him off to adventures. But then the North Wind goes away and the text gets preachy.
Poets of Our Time edited by F E S Finn
An anthology of English verse which was published in 1965, year of my birth. A lot more devotion to traditional prosody than in the anthologies I usually read. Not bad, though.
Sudden Dreams: new and selected poems by George Evans
“world of a thousand / eyes viewing a thousand things at once / and each thing equal”
Short: an international anthology of five centuries of short-short stories, prose poems, brief essays, and other short prose forms edited by Alan Ziegler
More like reading a poetry anthology than one of short stories. The usual anthology experience - worth the time but uneven.
Against Forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness edited by Carolyn Forche
I expect I will be reading this rather long anthology for a long time as I don’t see myself reading more than a few poems at a sitting. These are poems about living through terrible world events.
Mojo: the music magazine, August 2014 issue
Favorite song on the compilation CD that came with the issue: “Slowly” performed by the Haden Triplets. Pretty, folky singing.
Revenge: a story of hope by Laura Blumenfeld
This one is at my desk at work. I read in on breaks. It’s really working for me. Blumenfeld writes well and I love the way she thinks aloud and researches and debates and doubts and clings to her needs. Her father was shot in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. Father’s head was grazed by the bullet. When daughter Laura asks if he wants revenge (she does), Father is baffled by the impulse.
Andrew Solomon devotes each chapter to a different category of child that presents to the parent as a person unlike them: the Autistic, the Deaf, Transgender, etc. I’m on the eighth chapter which is devoted to prodigies, music prodigies, specifically. Since Solomon himself is gay he’s more ready to notice when people he writes about are, too. Though there isn’t a chapter expressly on gay people, Andrew Solomon speaks about his own experience as a gay man (with straight parents) in the opening and closing chapters. The book is sometimes fascinating, sometimes depressing, sometimes intriguing, sometimes oddly diffuse.
Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on stage and screen to 1939 by Mark Evan Swartz
Real detail on the live version of Wizard that was the biggest stage hit of its day (1902). It was not much like the book or the MGM movie.
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
I loved George MacDonald’s fairy tales so I was looking forward to this novel. I enjoyed the first third where the North Wind is personified as a woman who picks up the little boy protagonist and carries him off to adventures. But then the North Wind goes away and the text gets preachy.
Poets of Our Time edited by F E S Finn
An anthology of English verse which was published in 1965, year of my birth. A lot more devotion to traditional prosody than in the anthologies I usually read. Not bad, though.
Sudden Dreams: new and selected poems by George Evans
“world of a thousand / eyes viewing a thousand things at once / and each thing equal”
Short: an international anthology of five centuries of short-short stories, prose poems, brief essays, and other short prose forms edited by Alan Ziegler
More like reading a poetry anthology than one of short stories. The usual anthology experience - worth the time but uneven.
Against Forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness edited by Carolyn Forche
I expect I will be reading this rather long anthology for a long time as I don’t see myself reading more than a few poems at a sitting. These are poems about living through terrible world events.
Mojo: the music magazine, August 2014 issue
Favorite song on the compilation CD that came with the issue: “Slowly” performed by the Haden Triplets. Pretty, folky singing.
Revenge: a story of hope by Laura Blumenfeld
This one is at my desk at work. I read in on breaks. It’s really working for me. Blumenfeld writes well and I love the way she thinks aloud and researches and debates and doubts and clings to her needs. Her father was shot in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. Father’s head was grazed by the bullet. When daughter Laura asks if he wants revenge (she does), Father is baffled by the impulse.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
“lucky and full-hearted”
A mother speaks about her daughter:
I came across this quote in Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: parents, children, and the search for identity. Andrew Solomon investigated the way parents cope with finding out their child is unlike them. The topic chapters include the Deaf, Dwarfs, Down Syndrome, and Autism. Mostly Solomon interviews parents who cope well. Still, when I came across Betty Adelson’s description of her reaction to her daughter Anna’s coming out announcement, I was awed. Those are some seriously beautiful words.
I read the passage to Kent and couldn’t help choking up (made it difficult to get the words out). He kept patting me on the shoulder and telling me it was okay. Yeah. It was totally okay.
She came out to me by calling me from college … The next day I wrote her a long letter. I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well — that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.
I came across this quote in Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: parents, children, and the search for identity. Andrew Solomon investigated the way parents cope with finding out their child is unlike them. The topic chapters include the Deaf, Dwarfs, Down Syndrome, and Autism. Mostly Solomon interviews parents who cope well. Still, when I came across Betty Adelson’s description of her reaction to her daughter Anna’s coming out announcement, I was awed. Those are some seriously beautiful words.
I read the passage to Kent and couldn’t help choking up (made it difficult to get the words out). He kept patting me on the shoulder and telling me it was okay. Yeah. It was totally okay.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
word of the day: realia
context:
definition: objects, as coins, tools, etc., used by a teacher to illustrate everyday living.
definition courtesy dictionary.com
source: Marilyn Schwartz’s introduction to her translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s short story which appears in Two Lines: world writing in translation, no. 17
I looked again at the part of the story where the “woman who might have been [the narrator’s] schoolmate” appears. The woman’s way of speaking reminds the narrator of “a girl in my grade at school [who] was the school’s best at reciting the poem about the Soviet passport and ‘I’ve disliked the oval since a child and since a child have drawn an angle,’ and lots of other poems in that vein, and therefore she performed at all the Pioneer and later Komsomol assemblies …” I don’t see where the narrator remembers any “objects … used by the teacher to illustrate everyday living” — unless the translator is referring to a “poem about the Soviet passport.” I understand the Soviet passport wasn’t so much for travel outside the Soviet Union but rather something you had to produce to prove you were allowed to be wherever it was you currently were (even if it was where you grew up). In that case the passport, at least, would be an object of “everyday living.” In the U.S. you only get a passport if you plan to leave the country. Maybe the equivalent in the U.S. would be the driver’s license which is used more frequently for identification purposes than to prove you have the state’s permission to drive.
The narrator [of the story “Verily He Is Risen” by Mikhail Shishkin] harks back to Soviet-speak when he hears a woman who might have been his schoolmate and recalls the realia of a Soviet schoolchild’s life and the kind of verse they recite. [my bolding]
definition: objects, as coins, tools, etc., used by a teacher to illustrate everyday living.
definition courtesy dictionary.com
source: Marilyn Schwartz’s introduction to her translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s short story which appears in Two Lines: world writing in translation, no. 17
I looked again at the part of the story where the “woman who might have been [the narrator’s] schoolmate” appears. The woman’s way of speaking reminds the narrator of “a girl in my grade at school [who] was the school’s best at reciting the poem about the Soviet passport and ‘I’ve disliked the oval since a child and since a child have drawn an angle,’ and lots of other poems in that vein, and therefore she performed at all the Pioneer and later Komsomol assemblies …” I don’t see where the narrator remembers any “objects … used by the teacher to illustrate everyday living” — unless the translator is referring to a “poem about the Soviet passport.” I understand the Soviet passport wasn’t so much for travel outside the Soviet Union but rather something you had to produce to prove you were allowed to be wherever it was you currently were (even if it was where you grew up). In that case the passport, at least, would be an object of “everyday living.” In the U.S. you only get a passport if you plan to leave the country. Maybe the equivalent in the U.S. would be the driver’s license which is used more frequently for identification purposes than to prove you have the state’s permission to drive.
Friday, September 05, 2014
a tub is overflowing upstairs
Are there more than two ways to talk about music? There’s the technical - talking about keys and fifths and timbre or whatever. And there’s metaphor. The jargon of the technical quickly loses me. I have no way to conjure the sound in my head. On the other hand, metaphor is fun to read and creates a feeling that I can associate with the music. In neither case do I hear the music. But at least with evocative metaphor I am intrigued and more inclined to seek the music out.
The critic who writes about pop and rock for The New Yorker is Sasha Frere-Jones. I recently read a feature of his about the band Grizzly Bear. Let’s look at his metaphors:
“The songs on [the album] ‘Yellow House’ … seem to glow from within, as though the electricity had gone out and the house were lit only by candles.”
Frere-Jones likens the playing of a particular chord in one song to “a car coughing to life, or someone rising to his feet reluctantly.”
When later in that song “the backing vocals” come in, they “are bleeding in from above, like the tub upstairs overflowing.”
Grizzly Bear’s more recent album, “Veckatimest,” Sasha-Jones calls “a sprawling water park, sending you through different sluices and dropping you from pools down into slides that give onto small lakes.”
One of the songs on that album is “a big fat ice-cream cone.”
Another “manages to sink fully into its own honey without disappearing.”
The concluding song of “Veckatimest” shows us that, “The fog has lifted and now we can see an entire city, not just a house.”
If you’re curious, the metaphor about the tub overflowing refers to the song “Knife”:
source: The New Yorker, May 11, 2009
The critic who writes about pop and rock for The New Yorker is Sasha Frere-Jones. I recently read a feature of his about the band Grizzly Bear. Let’s look at his metaphors:
“The songs on [the album] ‘Yellow House’ … seem to glow from within, as though the electricity had gone out and the house were lit only by candles.”
Frere-Jones likens the playing of a particular chord in one song to “a car coughing to life, or someone rising to his feet reluctantly.”
When later in that song “the backing vocals” come in, they “are bleeding in from above, like the tub upstairs overflowing.”
Grizzly Bear’s more recent album, “Veckatimest,” Sasha-Jones calls “a sprawling water park, sending you through different sluices and dropping you from pools down into slides that give onto small lakes.”
One of the songs on that album is “a big fat ice-cream cone.”
Another “manages to sink fully into its own honey without disappearing.”
The concluding song of “Veckatimest” shows us that, “The fog has lifted and now we can see an entire city, not just a house.”
If you’re curious, the metaphor about the tub overflowing refers to the song “Knife”:
source: The New Yorker, May 11, 2009
Thursday, September 04, 2014
word of the day: besom
context: A little boy is being carried through the sky by a female personification of the North Wind. “He began to wonder whether she would hear him if he spoke. He would try.
‘Please, North Wind,’ he said. ‘what is that noise?’
From high over his head came the voice of the North Wind, answering him gently, —
‘The noise of my besom. I am the old woman that sweeps the cobwebs from the sky; only I’m busy with the floor now.’” [my bolding]
definition: a broom, especially one of brush or twigs
definition courtesy of Dictionary.com
source: At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
‘Please, North Wind,’ he said. ‘what is that noise?’
From high over his head came the voice of the North Wind, answering him gently, —
‘The noise of my besom. I am the old woman that sweeps the cobwebs from the sky; only I’m busy with the floor now.’” [my bolding]
definition: a broom, especially one of brush or twigs
definition courtesy of Dictionary.com
source: At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
word of the day: roscid
context:
definition: Dewy
definition courtesy the Collins English Dictionary
source: “What the Arctic Ground Squirrel Dreams,” a poem by Christopher Michel
appearing in Fourteen Hills: the San Francisco State University Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014
I remember going camping without a tent as a kid. Usually we slept under trees but sometimes we would lay our sleeping bags under the open sky and wake up roscid. I don’t think any dreams I woke from were roscid as well. Maybe those came later?
The Arctic Ground Squirrel lies / beneath the tundra … / temperature lower than ice … / … But every other week it shivers / into warmth and for a night, it dreams. … [D]etails of the creature’s fate must echo / the unsolved problems of our hearts. / Else why bother reading through / these words in quest of a frozen mammal’s / roscid dreams? [bolding mine]
definition: Dewy
definition courtesy the Collins English Dictionary
source: “What the Arctic Ground Squirrel Dreams,” a poem by Christopher Michel
appearing in Fourteen Hills: the San Francisco State University Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014
I remember going camping without a tent as a kid. Usually we slept under trees but sometimes we would lay our sleeping bags under the open sky and wake up roscid. I don’t think any dreams I woke from were roscid as well. Maybe those came later?
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
“that splinter of grandiosity”
Most of us would like to be more successful or more beautiful or wealthier, and most people endure episodes of low self-esteem or even self-hatred. … But we retain the startling evolutionary imperative of affection for the fact of ourselves, and with that splinter of grandiosity we redeem our flaws.
source: Far from the Tree: parents, children, and the search for identity by Andrew Solomon
Monday, September 01, 2014
What if everything you’ve been told is wrong?
Being gay is very different from a heterosexual’s experience, in which everything they see, hear, and have been told confirms their own experience. Whereas for gay men and lesbians, their experience is at odds with what they’re told.
That’s Robert H. Hopcke in an interview conducted by Mark Thompson.
source:Gay Soul: finding the heart of gay spirit and nature with sixteen writers, healers, teachers, and visionaries interviews and photographs by Mark Thompson
Sunday, August 31, 2014
what I got at SF Zine Fest 2014
Tyranny of the Muse, issue #1, written by Eddie Wright, illustrated by Jesse Balmer
plus Tyranny of the Muse stickers
Tyranny of the Muse website
Police Log Comics: comic strip interpretations of the police log of Carmel, CA, issue #2, by Owen Cook
sample Police Log Comics in color
Tortilla, issues #2 and 3*, by Jaime Crespo
The artist doesn’t seem to have a website of his own currently but here’s his Wikipedia entry: Jaime Crespo
The List by Maia Kobabe
Red Gold Sparks
Childhood, a mini-comics anthology by students at California College of the Arts
class taught by Justin Hall
Jin & Jam, no.1, by Hellen Jo
for more: Hellen Jo
paperdummy, issues #5, #6, #7, and #8, by Peter S. Conrad
paperdummy.com
Four Mission Mini-Comix: When Naked Hallway Dudes Attack!, The Thrill of Living in a Dying Empire #2, Quincy’s Terrible, Horrible, Worst-Ever Blind Date, and Do You Suffer for Your Art … Or Because of it?
Mission Mini-Comix
postcards by Lia Tin, Lauren Kawahara, Aki Neumann, Emma Judd, Shawn Eisenach, and a postcard-sized piece of original art by NubsArt
a reminder to attend the 5th annual East Bay Alternative Book and Zinefest in Berkeley on December 6.
_____
* actually Kent bought these, but I talked to Mr Crespo about Harvey Pekar and the work Mr Pekar left unpublished at his death - I would contribute to a Kickstarter to see that stuff.
plus Tyranny of the Muse stickers
Tyranny of the Muse website
Police Log Comics: comic strip interpretations of the police log of Carmel, CA, issue #2, by Owen Cook
sample Police Log Comics in color
Tortilla, issues #2 and 3*, by Jaime Crespo
The artist doesn’t seem to have a website of his own currently but here’s his Wikipedia entry: Jaime Crespo
The List by Maia Kobabe
Red Gold Sparks
Childhood, a mini-comics anthology by students at California College of the Arts
class taught by Justin Hall
Jin & Jam, no.1, by Hellen Jo
for more: Hellen Jo
paperdummy, issues #5, #6, #7, and #8, by Peter S. Conrad
paperdummy.com
Four Mission Mini-Comix: When Naked Hallway Dudes Attack!, The Thrill of Living in a Dying Empire #2, Quincy’s Terrible, Horrible, Worst-Ever Blind Date, and Do You Suffer for Your Art … Or Because of it?
Mission Mini-Comix
postcards by Lia Tin, Lauren Kawahara, Aki Neumann, Emma Judd, Shawn Eisenach, and a postcard-sized piece of original art by NubsArt
a reminder to attend the 5th annual East Bay Alternative Book and Zinefest in Berkeley on December 6.
_____
* actually Kent bought these, but I talked to Mr Crespo about Harvey Pekar and the work Mr Pekar left unpublished at his death - I would contribute to a Kickstarter to see that stuff.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
“migrant and unspecified forms”
[T]he right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecified forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.
This is how Wayne Koestenbaum descries one’s “rights” in regard to the experience of viewing abstract art.
source: My 1980s & Other Essays by Wayne Koestenbaum
Monday, August 25, 2014
word of the day: irrefragable
context:
definition: impossible to refute
per Merriam-Webster
quote source: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
Over the years I [Oliver Sacks] have seen … patients who, in consequence of a right-[brain]hemisphere stroke, have lost all feeling and use of the left side [of the body]. Often they have no awareness that anything has happened, but some people are convinced that their left side belongs to someone else (“my twin brother,” “the man next to me,” even “It’s yours, Doc, who are you kidding?”). … It needs to be emphasized that such patients may be highly intelligent, lucid, and articulate — and that it is solely in reference to their odd distortions of body image that they make their surreal but irrefragable statements. [my bolding]
definition: impossible to refute
per Merriam-Webster
quote source: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
Monday, August 18, 2014
“You don’t have to bend the whole world”
I always had hopes of being a big star … As you get older, you aim a little lower … Everybody wants to leave something behind them, some impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you left a mark on the world if you just get through it .. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy, pay your dues and enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you. [ellipses in original]
That’s Dorian Corey at the end of the documentary Paris Is Burning. Dorian Corey is a professional drag artist. Paris Is Burning focuses on the Drag Ball scene in New York City in the 80s.
source: Paris Is Burning: a queer film classic by Lucas Hilderbrand
Friday, August 08, 2014
Handwriting Rebels
A couple years back Kent & I were doing a tour of Northeastern California. We stopped in at a museum that featured gold mining equipment and Indian baskets and so on. I bought some postcards, as I am wont to do, and chatted a little with the lady behind the front counter. When I said we were from Berkeley, she said she was born in Berkeley!
Somehow we got onto the topic of education - maybe it was the ignorance of kids today, or some such evergreen - and she said she couldn’t believe schools no longer required handwriting, that is, cursive. How could you consider yourself educated if you didn’t know how to do that?
Probably nobody (older) has ever but agreed with this sentiment (not long ago my younger sister posted similarly on Facebook), so I must have surprised the museum lady when I rolled my eyes and said, “I always hated cursive. As soon as it was no longer required I stopped using it. The only time I write with cursive these days is when I apply a signature.”
Sadly, we suddenly lost our common ground!
In his book about the FBI and the Free Speech Movement Subversives, Seth Rosenfeld spends several pages on a biographical sketch of former University of California president Clark Kerr. Kerr remembered his grade school days and one of those confident predictions made by his teacher at the old one-room school:
I doubt Rosenfeld interviewed Miss Elba himself so I’m guessing Mr Kerr provides the quote from memory. It stuck in his memory! He did amount to something, the little rebel.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
Somehow we got onto the topic of education - maybe it was the ignorance of kids today, or some such evergreen - and she said she couldn’t believe schools no longer required handwriting, that is, cursive. How could you consider yourself educated if you didn’t know how to do that?
Probably nobody (older) has ever but agreed with this sentiment (not long ago my younger sister posted similarly on Facebook), so I must have surprised the museum lady when I rolled my eyes and said, “I always hated cursive. As soon as it was no longer required I stopped using it. The only time I write with cursive these days is when I apply a signature.”
Sadly, we suddenly lost our common ground!
In his book about the FBI and the Free Speech Movement Subversives, Seth Rosenfeld spends several pages on a biographical sketch of former University of California president Clark Kerr. Kerr remembered his grade school days and one of those confident predictions made by his teacher at the old one-room school:
[T]hough she insisted he learn the prevailing Palmer Method of cursive writing - unless he mastered it, she warned, he would “never amount to anything” - he clung to his block letters.
I doubt Rosenfeld interviewed Miss Elba himself so I’m guessing Mr Kerr provides the quote from memory. It stuck in his memory! He did amount to something, the little rebel.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
Thursday, August 07, 2014
What J. Edgar Hoover liked to see
This one’s not going in the “evidence disproving Hoover was gay” column.
Hopped up on pills to look good to a man.
Victims of the male gaze.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
[FBI agents] complied with a dress code enforced as much through fear of Hoover’s personal disapproval as through any written rule. They wore dark, conservative suits, white shirts, ties, and spit-polished shoes, their hair cut short and their faces closely shaved. They were subject to annual physicals and strict weight limits, though some of them complained that Hoover seemed well over the limit. “We were all taking pills to try to repress our appetite, to trim down,” [agent Burney] Threadgill recalled.
Hopped up on pills to look good to a man.
Victims of the male gaze.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
spying
Two FBI agents under Jessica Mitford’s house :
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
One evening in the [nineteen-]fifties, [Burney] Threadgill and another agent named Harold Hoblit were assigned to monitor a meeting at the [Mitford/]Treuhafts’ home [in Berkeley]. They sneaked into the crawl space beneath the house to eavesdrop on Mitford and her visitors, but as the meeting wore on, Threadgill fell asleep, and began to snore loudly. In a panic, Hoblit rousted him and they crept away.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Clyde Tolson at J. Edgar Hoover’s funeral
On the whole Seth Rosenfeld’s book about domestic spying and the government’s efforts to undermine dissent is not sympathetic to J. Edgar Hoover and the agency with which he was virtually synonymous. Still I found this passage about Hoover’s elderly (and now widowed) second-in-command Clyde Tolson a poignant portrait in a few words:
If you’re curious to read some thoughts on the relationship between the two men you might check out this slate article, which ends with a snippet from a letter Clyde wrote to Edgar:
And, no, I haven’t forgotten the FBI’s persecution of homosexuals, an irony (Hoover’s vicious defense of his closet?) that certainly colors any discussion of the Tolson-Hoover relationship.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
The casket was lowered and the flag shrouding it folded and presented to [Clyde] Tolson, who looked weak and confused. He had resigned the day after his companion’s death, and on inheriting nearly all of [J. Edgar Hoover]’s estate lived in Hoover’s house among his antiques until his own death three years later.
If you’re curious to read some thoughts on the relationship between the two men you might check out this slate article, which ends with a snippet from a letter Clyde wrote to Edgar:
“Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you,” Hoover wrote to Tolson in 1943. “I hope I will always have you beside me.”
And, no, I haven’t forgotten the FBI’s persecution of homosexuals, an irony (Hoover’s vicious defense of his closet?) that certainly colors any discussion of the Tolson-Hoover relationship.
source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
One Patty is not like the other
Jeffrey Toobin writes about the Supreme Court for The New Yorker. The New Yorker is famous for the rigorousness of its fact-checking. I don’t know if the biographical information about John Roberts that Toobin includes in his latest book also appeared in The New Yorker. Regardless, it’s time for a little correcting.
John Roberts, the future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Toobin says, attended a single-sex Catholic high school in Indiana.
A real jack-of-all-trades, eh? For a moment I was amused by imagining the young Roberts in drag as a female Peanuts character. Then I remembered that Peppermint Patty is not a character in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Toobin isn’t the first to make the mistake. My high school did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, too, and there was some confusion about the character in it named Patty. The original Patty had disappeared from the comic strip by the 70s.
The original Patty, a blonde, and her friend, Violet, a brunette, were a tag team who were alternately friendly with and harassers of Charlie Brown, more or less the role Lucy later filled. I’m not sure when the original Patty (and Violet?) disappeared, yet a second Patty had (coincidentally?) joined the strip’s cast at about the same time You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was being written. Peppermint Patty (unlike the original Patty) was a tomboy and was the first girl Charles Schulz didn’t draw in a dress. Peppermint Patty wore shorts and sandals. Had John Roberts played Peppermint Patty on stage he would hardly have been in drag at all.
A 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown switched out Patty for Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally.
source: The Oath: the Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
John Roberts, the future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Toobin says, attended a single-sex Catholic high school in Indiana.
Roberts was not just the valedictorian of the class of 1973. He served as captain of the football team, a varsity wrestler, member of both the student council and the drama club. (He played Peppermint Patty in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown …)
A real jack-of-all-trades, eh? For a moment I was amused by imagining the young Roberts in drag as a female Peanuts character. Then I remembered that Peppermint Patty is not a character in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Toobin isn’t the first to make the mistake. My high school did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, too, and there was some confusion about the character in it named Patty. The original Patty had disappeared from the comic strip by the 70s.
The original Patty, a blonde, and her friend, Violet, a brunette, were a tag team who were alternately friendly with and harassers of Charlie Brown, more or less the role Lucy later filled. I’m not sure when the original Patty (and Violet?) disappeared, yet a second Patty had (coincidentally?) joined the strip’s cast at about the same time You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was being written. Peppermint Patty (unlike the original Patty) was a tomboy and was the first girl Charles Schulz didn’t draw in a dress. Peppermint Patty wore shorts and sandals. Had John Roberts played Peppermint Patty on stage he would hardly have been in drag at all.
A 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown switched out Patty for Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally.
source: The Oath: the Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Keep your medicines out of reach of your octopus
[B]iologist Roland Anderson … helped to design an experiment for a female giant Pacific octopus … named Billye. … A fellow female octopus named Pandora had gotten tasty hunks of herring in a screw-top jar, which over several tests took her an average of two minutes to open. Anderson … decided to … ‘offer [their captive octopuses] childproof pill bottles.’ … Anderson and his team at the aquarium had drilled small holes in the plastic bottle so Billye would be able to get a whiff of the meat inside. Fueled with this incentive, she managed to open the bottle … in … about fifty-five minutes. … With a little practice, she was able to get it down to an average of about five minutes.
It was the kind of child-proof bottle where you have to push the lid down while turning it. I just got one of those from the pharmacy. After I open one of those I won’t tighten the lid again. My mother often had me open her childproof bottles. There have been times I’ve been tempted to saw the top off.
source: Octopus! the most mysterious creature in the sea by Katherine Harmon Courage
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