Tuesday, November 29, 2016

All my life I have wondered but now it is all clear


Hershel Parker Explained - Everything Explained Today

everything.explained.today/Hershel_Parker/
Parker's 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction was the first book systematically to bring biographical evidence to bear on ...

Saturday, November 19, 2016

I was only going to avoid Kellyanne Conway's voice until the 8th

So after 8 p.m. on the 8th I have watched no news at all.
How long can I live in denial?
As long as I am overwhelmed by two last Melville projects, at least.
The idea of never living at a time when the Democrats control Congress!

Monday, November 14, 2016

When you can't read a newspaper or turn on news on television--fantasize a new career

  • Do you ever get too old to start a career playing King Lear? Don't tell me about denial.




So now there are no restrictions on me till I am 86

Went down to the DMV with a good thriller by Joseph Finder and showed them my toric interocular implants and took the driver's exam on a touch screen that required several minutes to OK every answer and in due course got my temporary license and was assured that I can drive without any restrictions at all until I am 86.

It did require my getting out of my comfort zone, the distance between there and the beach (which involves crossing Highway 1).

It's time to go back to what should have been my career.



Taking Refuge in Wise County Virginia with Ashley Judd and stalwart Mountain Man Patrick Wilson

We are serious Documentary types but for some incomprehensible reason we wanted to escape for an hour and a half and watched a Stone Gap movie with Ashley Judd and Patrick Wilson, a man I always knew would be believable as a Virginia coal miner. Never mind.
Goodness, it starts with a pageant of TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE based on the book which was written by Johnny Fox, a law partner of a Schlemp cousin of mine. I still have a Slimp cousin in county office in Wise. He's black haired! How odd. And they used Dougherty as a local name, where my Dougherty families there go back to Lord Dunmore's War before there was a Schlemp and Dougherty marriage. And then there were Melungeons. Who? said my friend. Oh, I said, stopping the movie, I told you about that stories about the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the  book CHILDREN OF PERDITION by Tim Hashaw which I got because the Goings family were Melungeons, and I used one of them in a David Fanning article and besides one of the Tindall uncles may have married a Melungeon. And they say that the Redbones I knew in Calcasieu Parish in 1953 were Melungeons kin to the Goings. And there is a Slimp connection in Morro Bay because my brutal Schlemp cousin George Scott who slugged Ava Gardner and messed up her jaw permanently (and she liked to say she was a Melungeon) was shipwrecked right here, but not right on the Rock. And of course Cousin Bascom Slimp (or did he use Slemp?) was in Coolidge's cabinet and got to meet my hero, John Buchan.
So wonderful to be distracted for an hour and a half and totally forget what I would emerge to suppress for as long as it takes. I am going to get a 24 inch television for my office wall and go on an orgy of watching all the Shakespeare I can get on Netflix again. It's been four or five years since I saw the older better CORIOLANUS. That should take some hours when I don't have to be in conscious denial.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Trying

First of each month in 2016
January                            210.0
February                          206.8
March                              207.6
April                                203.8
May                                 204.8   
June                                 203
July                                  200.4
September                       199.8
October                           198.2
November                       196.4
December
12 November 2016  
Harder to do over 80

Friday, November 11, 2016

Why go into denial when you can go deep into the past? WHAT WAS WRONG WITH HANGING TORIES?

The skeleton crew of surviving students of Hayford is finishing the 15th of 15 volumes of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. So that's about over, and should be out in 1917. I am working on the copy-edited manuscript of the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK. So that will be out in 2017. I did a little thing on Melville's reputation for a Cambridge U P book that should be out in 2017. I have a piece on North Carolina Women Who Talked Back to the Tories which should come out this month, maybe before I turn 81, in the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Yesterday I submitted another piece to the JAR on the Tory troops as sexual predators. I have other pieces in mind including one with a title "What Was Wrong With Hanging Tories?"--because Benjamin Cleveland got in trouble for that, as did others over in Virginia. Do you begin to see how deeply in denial I intend to be for an indefinite period? It feels like home back here in the 1770s. Sometimes searching a given topic (not chosen to give this result) I get 25 hits which include 5 or 6 cousins or uncles. We belong in this country and maybe I understand why 85% of the descendants of these men voted the way they did. But why could you shoot a Tory and not hang his brother? That will take some more research.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

The San Salvador in Morro Bay


Shocked again today by this photograph

The computer man came yesterday and got my Picasa photographs rescued and the one of Aunt Ida and Aunt Alice by the car happened to be up this morning. Once again, I stared at it and wondered where I was when this was taken and who took the picture. So I am a Costner and Stewart in appearance and that's it.

Thank you, Bernie Sanders. Not a Democrat, but a Great Spoiler.

I knew it on April 7 when Sanders (mishearing a news headline) said in Philadelphia that Hillary Clinton had declared that he was unqualified to be President. He made the crowd frenzied with his declarations that SHE was unqualified. Look how Pennsylvania went.
Look at how he savaged her in Michigan and Wisconsin.
He made it easy for Trump.