Thursday, March 31, 2016

UVA Jackie Argues Against Testifying In Court, Says It Could 'Re-Victimize' Her. RIGHT! RIGHT!

I can imagine how it would re-victimize a pathological liar to be confronted again by evidence of her lies, one by one. Sure, she would be re-victimized if she testified and had to repeat lies or else admit that she had lied. Either way, she would be re-victimized, Would Trump have a suitable punishment in mind?
Meanwhile, what about the men she accused and their horrific public victimization? Oh, well.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Ran a mile south with 40 MPH winds at my back; pushed back north against 74 MPH winds

Not another person on the beach.

Jay Leyda in 1947 and Jay Leyda in 1986--A Genius I was Lucky Enough to Know



With thanks to Scott Norsworthy for finding the 1947 picture and article, and Greg Lennes for publicizing it.
Because Roger Payne was here last week I have been thinking about geniuses I have been lucky enough to know and to revere.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Wayne LaPierre can help get guns legally to the Cleveland Convention

Surely LaPierre can get a handgun under every seat and rifles at the ends and middles of every row. The Trump faction may need to defend itself. Cruz will be watching out for Rubio. Mitt may be in disguise as Carly Fiornia. They all need guns.

Quick, everyone, sign this petition to allow guns at the GOP convention! Hurry!

Guns at GOP convention petition tops 35K, Trump wants to study 'fine print'--

Oh, don't waste time on the fine print!

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Imagine! "Lying Ted" accused the wrong villain: "Ted Cruz Sex Scandal: Marco Rubio Camp Accused Of Making Allegations"

Imagine, blaming Donald Trump when the real slime-bag was Little Marco! Can such things be?

1912 Report of a Conversation Melville had with C. F. Briggs during his Custom House years

There is plenty of evidence that young EJE knew CFB well. presumably in the early or mid 1870s. So the story could be true, in substance, though put on record 40 odd years after Edwards heard it.


I would like to find out more about Elisha Jay Edwards (1847-1924) and Melville. I was scanning Newspapers.com to get a sense of what to say in a paragraph of the preface to the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK when I found what purports to be Edwards's recollection of a conversation with Charles F. Briggs (1804-1877). Edwards reports a conversation between Briggs and Melville during Melville's Custom House years. It's not that great a story that Melville tells to Briggs, as Edwards recalls it, but there it is in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette 8 February 1912. Did anyone ever hear of this?
   
Edwards quotes Briggs as saying to him: "I suppose that until Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin there was no work by an American, in the nature of a romance, which equaled in popularity Herman Melville's Typee," said to me the late Charles F. Briggs, a contemporary of Melville, himself a famous novelist of that time and a co-worker of Edgar Allan Poe on the New York Broadway Journal. "It was not only popular in the United States, but it also attracted general attention in England, and was, I believe, translated into French and German." Edwards proceeds to tell about a time when Briggs queried Melville: "Melville took employment in the New York custom house in the late sixties, and one day, when I was chatting with him there, I asked him what had inspired him to write his great romance." That is, Briggs was chatting with Melville, and asked him about Typee, and what follows is put into Melville's words, as told to Briggs. It contains one "interesting if true" passage. Melville was telling his adventures to sailors on the Lucy Ann when one of them asked if he had ever read Two Years Before the Mast: "I replied that I had and had been fascinated by it. Then the sailor told me that I had material for a better book--because the adventures were more thrilling--than Dana had. That gave me the inspiration to write the story of my adventures; and as I wrote along I found that I was doing it very well . . . ."

There is no reason this could not be "true," allowing for vagaries of memory, since we have Melville's testimony that his story excited the warmest sympathies in sailors he told it to. Is Edwards' piece known already? If not, it's proof of my point, that we need to do what Scott Norsworthy is doing--search the newspaper databases from the comfort of our homes rather than what I did in the 60s and 70s--starve myself for funds to go to distant libraries and turn through bound volumes and spool through microfilms. 

Bill Maher: Ted Cruz less awful than Donald Trump. No, a Religious Fanatic is Always the Most Awful

If you want a theocracy, vote for Cruz.
If you remember Joe McCarthy with love, vote for Cruz.
Now, I am not saying vote for Trump.

627 Moreno Avenue Brentwood--the $5,100,000 teardown--all gone now

First time on the open market in over 30 years! Fantastic land value opportunity on the sunny, west side of extremely desirable Moreno Avenue -one of the Westside's very finest streets. 13,200 square feet of land (per assessor's map) and 80 feet of frontage, affording the best Brentwood lifestyle?within close proximity to the Brentwood Country Mart, Montana Avenue and the Brentwood Country Club. Available with architectural plans for a gorgeous Traditional Estate with over 7500 Square feet of living area and every imaginable amenity on 3 levels that are partially through the plan check process. Very rare opportunity!

Friday, March 25, 2016

Roger Payne Privileged to Read an Unpublished Page by Jonathan Lethem

It just happens that the man who first realized that whale sing gets to read about humpback songs on scrachy LPs.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

SALON: Robert Bentley’s hypocrisy. No, the Gov was no Hypocrite.

He did NOT have a physical relationship with Becky because he could not legally obtain little blue pills. He did not have to explain why he could not have a physical relationship with her. Groping does not count in the South.
He is a law-abiding citizen, in some ways.

‘Jackie,’ woman at the center of controversial Rolling Stone UVA rape article, to appear in court--HORRIBLE HEADLINE

Washington TIMES headline.
This is so prejudicial. "Woman"!!! Why, Jackie is a little girl and when you call her woman you act as if you believe she knew she could hurt real people by her vicious lies.
WOMEN have to take responsibility for their lies, and surely little college girls do not.
I warn you, things are going to go against Jackie fast now that they are treating her as a grownup.
Bad bad news when the language changes this way!

"I'm Religious but not Spiritual"--the only way I can deal with Politicians like Cruz and Bentley

I think this phrasing will get me through any crowd of beggars and hustlers and protestors.

Actually, I might sell it to Donald Trump as a campaign slogan. Or Kim Davis and anyone who ever hugged her. There's a market for this.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Shocked by Governor Bentley, Mortified by Republican Governor's Sex Talk--Holding Ears Shut

Maybe he is telling the truth about not having actual, well, actual, well--maybe it's a good thing he would have (as law-abiding Governor) had to get a prescription for those little blue pills. Maybe he was saved from the actual DEED by wanting to get the pills legally or not at all. Anything to justify his saying he did not have a physical relationship with the woman whose breasts he was groping.

Why do they pick on good Christian Southerners all the time? And that good man Sanford in SC who is now just in the House of Representatives and that good man in Louisiana, David Vitter, whose wife forgave him so sincerely. Why don't they pick on a Republican Governor who saves state money by poisoning children's drinking water?

And you just know that Becky tempted him real bad and long. And he did grope, and talk sex talk. He did.

Day to remind myself: I'm twice the Costner Kevin is.

Pushing hard on a deadline and needing to encourage myself. Bill Costner and I are the same generation, twice the Costner Kevin is. There! Onward!

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Great Documentary on Netflix--The Barkley Marathons

Great for watching while lying on the floor doing geriatric exercises.
Brett and Jared had winner again written all over them but John? Go, man, go.
This is a film that makes you proud to be an American. What an absurd Tennessee idea, what a sadistic set of rules, what a set of hills and the route under the prison, what an ad for yoghurt. Eat, Daddy! What strange and wondrous people.

Friends flying into SF. Telling myself the scariest thing I ever saw there was Ed Meese

The damage he did to our Republic.
The damage the bombers last night did to Civilization.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

A Blue Spring--Most of Ceanothus Blossoms Gone, but Lavender and Pride of Madeira coming












"Bernie Sanders uses Pope Francis to whack Donald Trump at border

Unattached from Kim Davis?

Refreshing Sourdough Starter

Nose to the grindstone or not, you have to refresh 2015 sourdough starter and make a couple of trays of whatever-the-hell bread, white,wheat, bran, eggs, honey, oil, &c. Gorgeous. Delicious. Time to confess that someone came home with some store-bought loaves while the nose was being abraded away hour by hour. Toast that stuff and it turns to iron. Soon.

Friday, March 18, 2016

Does anyone recognize the Costner man on top left? A son of John Andrew Jackson Costner


The family at the lower left is Mode Costner's (Moses Amariah Costner's); the woman at top right is a daughter of Uncle Mode; the beautiful women at lower right are grandchildren of JAJC by his daughter Ida. But who is the handsome dude at top left? Not my grandfather Gene Costner. but one of the brothers. Not Mode?



Thursday, March 17, 2016

Any week now I will piss my father off by outliving him

Nose to grindstone on NCE3 of MOBY-DICK but aware that any week or any day now I will piss my father off by outliving him. Another 12 years before my mother cheers me onward to outlive her!

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

What to do at 4 pm PDT: get a long massage

and avoid Wolf's ifs and Chris's ifs and Steve's ors and maybes and Rachel's next ups---

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Escaped murder suspect killed after taking family hostage, say Mississippi police


Now, all apologies to Nina Simone but sometimes you have to look things in the face and use her words to mean something different than what she was going through.
Misissippi Goddamn!
Escaped murder suspect killed after taking family hostage, say Connecticut police????  Oh no!
Mississippi! Mississippi!

Brodhead's conscience is clear about false allegations of rape; what about his lying about me in the NY TIMES?



Brodhead's conscience is clear. Maybe that means he does not have a conscience.

This is from his interview with the Duke Chronicle:


Ten years later, President Richard Brodhead says he has come to terms with the lacrosse case that rocked Duke’s campus. Former Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong was disbarred for his handling of the Duke lacrosse case 10 years ago. Brodhead noted that Nifong’s actions kept the case in the national spotlight.
“I am certainly at ease in my conscience with the role that I played,” he said.
Brodhead said he does not spend much time thinking about the incident that cast a shadow over Duke, but the episode—and the role he played during it—have had a significant impact on his legacy as president of the University. As the case was winding down, Brodhead apologized for his unwillingness to defend the lacrosse players earlier in the process.
“The fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they most needed support,” he wrote in a 2007 statement. “This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it, and I apologize." 

But what about his lies about scholars?
In the early years of the 2000s leading up to these two scholarly studies of Melville, historical and biographical scholarship was still being discounted or ignored by living intellectual heirs of the New Criticism. Those Melville scholars who had continued to pursue unfashionable scholarly investigations were stunned in 2002 to see just how seriously a generation or two of professors had taken the dismissal of biographical or historical study of Melville. In 2002, 80 years after Minnigerode printed the 1860 documents about Poems, 51 years after Leyda reprinted and supplemented the documents, 43 years after Leyda had reprinted the Log with a Supplement, three reviewers of the second volume of Parker's biography--a Yale dean (Richard H. Brodhead), a Columbia professor (Andrew Delbanco), and a Kansas professor (Elizabeth Schultz)--all denied that Melville had ever written Poems. In doing so, they ignored all the documents quoted and analyzed in the pages of the biography they were reviewing. Printing his accusation in the most conspicuous place possible, the Sunday New York Times Book Review (June 23, 2002), Brodhead declared contemptuously that only Parker “in his black hole” had ever heard of Poems. Available online, never corrected, Brodhead’s words can mislead any uninformed reader who encounters the review. Delbanco went so far as to warn that because of Parker’s unfounded surmises about the existence of the lost 1853 The Isle of the Cross and the 1860 Poems readers should regard all of his biography as untrustworthy. Delbanco’s review also remains online. Schultz echoed the groundless accusation that Parker had invented Poems, declaring that its existence was only “putative.” Damage to Melville scholarship (quite aside from damage to Parker’s reputation) has been compounded by this succession of false accusations. Yet Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz in 2002, however inexcusable they were in their denial that Melville wrote a book he called Poems, and however unfair in their assaults on Parker’s credibility as a biographer, were not the only Melville critics to deflect attention away from Poems.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Yesterday, Abrasive Therapy, Barefoot for 2 miles in Water--High Tide

Could not get a good picture of water crashing against dunes and recoiling. I swear I saw a hunk as big as a Volkswagen fall into the water. The dunes are half gone and the high priced development built on swampland, the Cloisters, is not secure
.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Rosemary and Ceanothus in Full Bloom Yesterday--Before the Rain--Too Late to Photograph

Now only the little volunteer ceanothus (a hybrid?) has retained its blooms, but some of the lavender is happy despite the rain. The ceanothus isin  the second picture.



Scary--Cruz and Sanders winning in the same places


How I wish I could believe that all the good folks in Oklahoma were voting for Sanders and all the bad folks in Oklahoma were voting for Cruz.

However . . . . 


Friday, March 4, 2016

Definitive Measurement: Smallest hands=Rubio---- Biggest hands=Carly.

I should have known but just forgot about her for a while until the measurements came.

Desperate Romney and the Definition of Quixotic and the Definition of Opportunistic

Not Quixotic. That would imply an idealistic goal.
Opportunistic? That would imply a fair chance at succeeding in becoming again the nominee of the Republican Party.
Desp'r't? Just desperate? How, I have Romney videotaped saying to himself, how can he be so unimaginably rich and be so helpless and, tell the truth, hapless?

What a bunch, but I don't think they will all implode together in my lifetime.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Why Rubio is toast: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

When you lower yourself to making sleazy comments about the size of Trump's hands, you remove yourself from serious contention for local dogcatcher. You become a joke for all the rest of your life.

So everyone should know that nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands as Marco Rubio.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

"Ben Carson Suggests He Might Withdraw, Sees No ‘Path Forward’ for Candidacy"

Oh, it does take a long time to see no path forward. Look at Marco ("Little Hands") Rubio.

Is that mud on Elizabeth Warren's Face This Morning?

I put Jim Webb in the Senate by a perfectly timed $100.00. I also put Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, you know, by articles which still flourish on the Internet. Only I was qualified to put her Indian claims into perspective, and I did so repeatedly. She is about the best thing in the Senate. Maybe the best person in the Senate.

But if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination and the Presidency the likelihood of Elizabeth Warren's becoming President is reduced almost to zero.

Being neutral is safe, but I will remember her avoiding endorsing another woman.

When Chuck Todd Tells Brokaw what an Honor it is "For Steve and I"--Well, I give up.

Is it the fault of Hollywood that no one says "me" ever anymore?
It hurts I, terribly.
Maybe if he did not have the orange goatee he could say "me."