Monday, April 29, 2019

Very pleasant thing to read in AMERICAN AUDACITY by William Giraldi

I read the supercilious review of this new Giraldi book in TLS today and ordered it on Amazon Prime, even though I had to buy a kitchen knife to bring the free-shipping total up to the new requirement, $25. This was not in the  "Look Inside" feature but I found it on the Internet:


Wednesday, April 24, 2019

HOW CAN MARY BERRY BE ALIVE STILL?

SHE IS 8 MONTHS OLDER THAN ME! actually, she is a week older than my dear late cousin Lottie Cain.
Just checking her out because the season we are watching now, the one without her, has a terrible lout wandering around annoying everyone. We miss Mel and Sue but are toughing it out without them and without Mary.

WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME? ME AND MY COUSIN VALENTINE!



Cousin Meriwether McGehee and
Me.

In 1876 my cousin Colonel
Valentine Meriwether McGehee, a lawyer in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, died suddenly,
only 35.

He was interred in a metallic
case after the usual time. His funeral was about to take place on the second
night of his supposed death. After near thirty hours the watchers over his
remains were surprised and horrified by seeing the glass casing of the coffin
broken open and the appearance of the corpse's head thrust through the
aperture. The colonel spoke to ask, "What the Devil are you trying to do to me?" It is unnecessary to state that he was soon relieved from his
uncomfortable situation, and at last accounts he was in a fair way of recovery,
and is no doubt worth many dead men yet.


Final Death 14 November 1876. 

I don't know about genes but
I do believe in family traits being passed down. Many is the time I have asked,
"WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME?"

One time, in 1994, cost me a
broken wrist when I tried to run off the pain in the last snow and ice of the
year. The “flagship” journal AMERICAN LITERATURE arrived with a whole issue (March)
devoted to demolishing Melville as a writer to be studied.
 

       Paul Lauter laid the groundwork by a selection of
quotations supposedly from students:
 

“You really feel belittled when you are
reading Melville.” “I know this is art, and I can’t understand it.” “You feel
something’s wrong with you; that you’re missing something.”
 

My students seemed actively to dislike
Melville, to feel humiliated by the prose and ignorant before the dense web of
Melville’s allusive, syntactically intricte style and his convoluted plotting.

      That was the preface to the issue. But it was known
that I was writing a new biography of Melville, and in the 1988
Northwestern-Newberry MOBY-DICK I had written a wholly new account of
Melville’s meeting of Hawthorne in 1850 while the great book was in progress.
It was clear from that account that my biography would be based on hundreds of
new letters and many other new documents. It was clear, in particular, that I
was re-dating previous poorly understood or misunderstood accounts, such as the
assumption that Melville wrote the essay on Hawthorne before meeting him.

     So what did Julian Markels say? Page 115: “We can easily suppose
that Melville’s entire life to that point went into writing Moby-Dick and that everything known
about his life is relevant background. But we already have full-scale
biographies of Melville, and Hayford tells us here that Parker is writing a new
biography.”
 

Perhaps the cruelest and most
ignorant thing ever said about me, although there are many other candidates,
was the truly idiotic comment
BUT
WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE.”
 

          What the Devil were they trying to do to me? The intention of the powers at AMERICAN LITERATURE was clear: I was to be
shut down, and Melville was to be removed from the canon of American
Literature. Cousin Valentine Meriwether McGehee said it for me. I was hurt but not shut down. And if you look around you see that in the 21st century Melville has become a genuinely popular writer, as I describe in the 2017 3rd NORTON CRITICAL EDITION of Moby-Dick. And Goodness Gracious, the French for the last 2 years have had the Norton THE CONFIDENCE-MAN on their nation-wide agregation [one g but acute accent on the e] exam. Those involved are mostly still alive, doing other damage.



       

ALWAYS BEING RIGHT IS A TERRIBLE BURDEN. I TOLD YOU A SMOKER ON THE ROOF STARTED THE FIRE AT NOTRE DAME

Workers renovating Notre-Dame flouted a ban on smoking at the monument, a contractor admitted on Wednesday, while denying any link with last week's devastating blaze that ripped through the cathedral.


"There were colleagues who from time to time broke the rules and we regret it," a spokesman for scaffolding company Le Bras Freres told AFP, before adding: "in no way could a cigarette butt be the cause of the fire at Notre-Dame".



DID I TELL YOU? I TOLD YOU THE MOMENT THE NEWS OF THE FIRE CAME. TANYONE WHO KNOWS THE FRENCH KNEW THAT IT WAS ONE OR TWO OR MORE GAULOISES (FLICKED OH SO ELEGANTLY AWAY TO THAT 900 YEAR OLD PILE OF KINDLING). A FRENCHMAN NOT SMOKING ON TOP OF NOTRE DAME? IMPOSSIBLE.

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Who reads Catherine Coulter? Well, in Morro Bay the Homeless Do

December 11, 2018
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Into the Trees for the first time in a couple of years. Cleaner, on the school side.

I went over the dunes because the east wind was blowing so much sand on the beach. It was astounding. The Trees had been full of trash. Has a new school administration come in?

Like out Percy the Peacock in 3 mid Atlantic states, this Turkey admires himself in shiny tire rims

It's lonely for him. Are the hens nesting?

No one that we know 60 or over, surely


Friday, April 12, 2019

Thursday, April 11, 2019

This is what you have to do when you get very old and feeble

You have to label everything. Sure, a strong wave can suck your shoes off, but I have kiddy labels on socks and the other garments for identification.

Thursday, April 4, 2019

4 days we wait for the tides to marinate the big guy


Establishing my Texas Credentials with a Denton Librarian--an A in Medieval French Poetry from the U of Texas

I did not tell her--but is there anyone else who got an A in the 1950s from the University of Texas in a correspondence course in Medieval French Poetry? What a world!

Research in the days of genealogical sites and newspaper databases. Someone who knew Poe!

What you can find on the Internet is sometimes astounding. I have been looking for the writer of a dozen or so letters from Texas in the late 1850s which are signed only by initials but are located with a county name. I mean looking hard, checking several databases to see if I could find one more or two more letters from this man. Well, last night I went to Ancestry.com and tried the initials with the county and got nowhere. Frustrated, I took the first initial, G, and said, dang it, it is most likely George, though the middle initial is not W. So I put George as the first name with the last name only an initial and WHOOPEE! I nailed the man. Who would have thought that much earlier in Baltimore he had known Edgar Allan Poe? And was writing letters from Texas! But I have not found the particular letter I want, the one he says he wrote about the Runaway Scrape. Onward, and maybe failure, except for rounding up a dozen great letters by a quite brilliant man. I think historians have not used them. I would bet anything no one else would have rounded up a dozen. But is there a place for Texas history online where you can check things like this out?


Monday, April 1, 2019

COUSIN WALTER DELLINGER WARNS AGAINST THINKING THE MUELLER REPORT EXONERATES ANYONE



How the Mueller report can still threaten Trump’s legitimacy

The special counsel likely wrote it as a facts-only road map for congressional investigators.

BY WALTER DELLINGER



The most damaging aspect of the report would be a thorough account of Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice. The known facts (firing an FBI director who refused to pledge loyalty and cease an investigation; the demand that an attorney general “unrecuse” himself to protect the president; the call for an investigation of the father-in-law of a witness against Trump; the dangling of pardons before witnesses) are all bad enough. The report probably contains others. Don’t forget the allegation that Trump asked the CIA director and the director of national intelligence to push the FBI director to end his investigation of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. Don’t forget: The famous “smoking gun” Oval Office tape that forced Nixon’s resignation had him ordering the CIA to persuade the FBI to end its investigation of the Watergate break-in.