A Crisp Cold Day with North Wind

 

Beach ritual on New Year's Eve--even on a cold windy day. Anything for art.

 

After 2 years of weakness, Brother Rick's Rolls--just what the recipe says but not just what I remember. 2 pictures

 

Maybe I had changed the recipe to cook at 350 or 375 rather than 415. Recipe says 415.

The marble slab in 3 pieces came from a junk store north of the Brandywine River 3 or so blocks, on Market Street, in Wilmington. I have not had the feeling of kneading on marble in 2 years and had forgotten the pleasure of making circles of dough on the marble with the palms. Back to life in 2022, new clot or not.

The rolls are good but they are not what I remember. Next time, lower temperature.

Memory of Uncle James Alexander Bell, who walked home to Mississippi from Rock Island Prison

 Grandpa said he run away from home at 16 years of age & went to War. He said he was so young they made him feed the Horses 2 years. He was gone 5 years when he got back his daddy was chopping wood out in front of the house & he asked if he could spend the night and he said you will have to see my wife & she knew him. He didn't have a beard. When he got back his face was covered with beard.

[He also would not leave the house in his wagon or on a horse without dried fruit or something else to munch on: he had been starved in prison.]

Virginia teachers fire back after school district mulls implementing more 'equitable' grading system

 You know what this means? Suzie can never be said to do anything better than Tom. And Tom would be hurt if you gave a higher grade to Adam.

After Kent State many professors adopted a plan of over-grading everyone and failing no one. Well, here we are. Time for a more equitable grading system.

Feats you could achieve in the old days--Making Brother Rick's Rolls while making Regular Loaves

 I took out a gift from Mike Moughan, THE SECRETS OF JESUIT BREADMAKING, because some stamina is returning and I want a change from cornbread or skillet bread, good as they are. 

This is in ballpoint pen at the top:

"Memo 4 October 2002. I can start Bro Rick's rolls--get them in refrigerator. Then at once start other regular bread & get it cooking while Bro Rick is rising 1 1/2 hours and then reset oven fast from 350 to 425 & put first pan in--it works-- other bread rises 2nd time and cooks while Bro Rick is in pans on the counter rising."

The thing about Brother Rick's rolls is that they go in the refrigerator at least 2 hours after mixing and also after kneading right after mixing. I want to make them but am afraid my shoulders won't take the kneading. Maybe I can add 5 minutes to the mixing? And knead for 5 more?

If I try this tomorrow I won't make loaves of regular bread at the same time. 

WHAT 2 CHAIRED PROFESSORS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE REALLY LOOK LIKE

 

Attack of Beach Snark Karen. K. Karen and her two loose Vicious Dogs at a No-Dogs part of the Beach

 SHE DID HAVE A LEASH, AFTER ALL.

She was using a short lacrosse stick to throw or pretend to throw a ball to the dogs and had them running into the water and all the way back to the beach. I tried to angle away to get out of her way but she was having no escape. She threw or pretended to throw something right at me, and both dogs charged me. They barked and snarled and jumped at me but did not bite me or knock me down. 

I am waiting 3 more weeks to see a new hematologist (the good one went to Colorado) about the ugly new ultrasound shows new clotting after 18 months on blood thinner. I did not want to be knocked down and did not want to be bitten. I called to her to please hold her dogs. When she came up she yelled, "You old fool, what the fuck are you down here for?" Then she loosed several FUs, but she did hold the dogs and head south, stopping to throw the stick at me (she missed).  Up to now the best thing a dog-owner said after an attack was, "It's your fault. You let him smell your fear." Well, that does beat "You old fool, what the fuck are you down here for?" Well, at 86 I can't argue with the characterization.

This was the no-dog part of the beach. There's a 4 mile off-leash beach and a short dogs-on-lease beach near the Rock. Truth is, with the pandemic everyone has to be more tolerant, and as long as dogs are on leashes I'm cool.

San Luis Obispo Tribune ‘A new white shark frontier’: Morro Bay attack focuses attention on Central Coast population

 So we have more sharks swimming in the water. Surfers are talking about going in teams. That makes sense. At times when I was running, and running very early, I have seen single surfers going into the water while it was still dark, too dark to see them a hundred feet out. 

Yesterday the rain was supposed to slack off in midmorning so out I went and very quickly saw that I was getting so wet that I might as well slog through Duck Creek and the Cloister's stream, smaller. I wondered about one middle aged woman and then another. Did no one tell them not to go out and play in the cold rain? It was a glorious 43 minutes and at the garage I hosed out the shoes and put them in a narrow bucket to drain. Then back to the Mountain Meadows massacre, which breaks your heart the more you read about the condition of the few children who survived. I try not to learn about the details of the entrapment and slaughter. My poor cousins . . . . Land sharks.

2 days after Shark Killing. No Surfers Today. 2 Little Bands of People shouting something Strange-- "HAST SEEN THE WHITE SHARK?"

 What an 

odd thing to call out.

Turmoil in the Waters down the Hill--Success in the Kitchen before 9 am--And some revisions on the Mountain Meadows Massacre

 

It looks as if David Middlecamp has a photo and photo credit in the New York TIMES

 

Behind the sign, the Rock--FATAL SHARK ATTACK

 

Shark, maybe a Great White Shark, Killed a Man here Today

 Shortly before 11 a 31 year old man boogie boarding (news says) was killed by a shark, presumably not while on the boogie board. The scene is precisely the one I usually post, the view from the Rock from the end of Highway 41, where I turn around and start back north. Today I did not cross the rapid water at  Duck Creek but turned back through the dunes, shortly before 11.

For hours, Texas man assaulted woman in her Parker County home, sheriff says

 This has to be a fake story. Greg Abbott has eliminated rape in Texas, don't you know?

Playing in the Rain--but with no Jolly Playmates

 I went to the beach in long-sleeved shirt and an anorak with knit hat under the cap of the anorea. The rain was driving from the South. I waded across Duck Creek and the flood at the Cloisters Creek, a little afraid of losing my footing. Then I gave up after a while and went back onto the Cloisters and the trail back to the parking lot. The low places were submerged, as they have always been. But I got to pass the Norman Roberts bench quoting RWE: THE HAPPIEST MAN IS HE WHO FROM NATURE LEARNS THE LESSONS OF WISDOM.

Now, that is one of the worst samples of prose I know, but the southbound part of my outing was in Nature, and exhilarating. So the blood clot is worse, still the leg is not swollen, and I am 86 and happy to cross the raging waters--and get home and wash my shoes out and put them to drain dry. Happy to be active, after the shutdown of 2020.

U S Representative Scanlon's is carjacked in Philadelphia--AMTRAK did not stop in Newark, DE in my time. What's a Univ of DE student to do?

 Two armed men approached Scanlon and demanded the keys to her vehicle — a blue 2017 Acura MDX. Scanlon surrendered the keys, and one of the two men drove off with her car. The second man entered a separate vehicle and followed the first man, Philadelphia police said.

Scanlon's Acura was found at a shopping center in Newark, Delaware, around 9 p.m., and five people inside it were taken into custody, Delaware State Police said.

ONLY 4 WERE ENGLISH MAJORS?

Hematologist gone to Colorado, New one on hold for January, Blood Clot worse, not better, 2 miles a day on Beach

 Really unpleasant report from ultrasound. Common Femoral Vein completely blocked. Popliteal Vein blocked. Ho, I was counting on the poplital vein.

But the leg has not swollen back up and I am going fast on the beach (for an 86 year old) to stir blood up. All I see new are puffy tracks near the blocked off femoral vein. 

It's hard not to worry but there is no point worrying. New doctor in mid January.

Today on the Beach I saw a once-familiar red orange wind breaker--Doctor Dick, 80 now, who still drives down to LA every week to treat very poor patients. He was overjoyed to see me after 2 years and I was overjoyed to see him. Told him briefly about Stanford saying aggressive cancer and suggesting enucleation for the eye. Doctors. We did fist bumps. I'm really glad he is alive and well. I did not tell him about the DVT.

I still have not seen Tom from Los Osos in all these months--that is, have not seen him in 2 years, 2020 being a blank. I've seen Jan and Craig, so they are fine.

Caretaker's iPhone last night--Henry James's LAND OF THE PINK SKY

 

Sunday Morning Skillet Bread--Ready at 8:30. At night I dream of shoulder strength for kneading but come daytime I settle for Skillet Bread

 

Cooking 2 pounds of Pinto Beans today. These have been on 6 hours and have another hour to do.

 

Now that I can't give the last name of any Chris in Hollywood, I am thankful that I am retired.

 Noah A. McGee

Mon, December 13, 2021, 12:00 PM

Christopher Trogan, a professor in the English department at the University of Fordham, was fired after confusing the names of two Black students in his class, in what he called an “innocent mistake,” according to The Observer.

Can't get anyone to play in the rain with me.

 

Hate greasing 2 pans--decided to use the Skillet which water never touches, only papertowel

 

After a little storm--Everyone was taught not to go out and play after a storm

 The wind off the Pacific was very cold.

Yahoo Sports Bayern Munich's Joshua Kimmich out until 2022 with lung issues from contracting COVID-19

 So his future financial security may be shot and his future health may be compromised. But at least he did not take a risky vaccination.

If you have not read Stephen Kiernan's THE BAKER'S SECRET you ought to read the reviews you get when you type author & title on Google

 I liked it very much when I first read it a few years ago. I read it more slowly this week, savoring the sentences, and liked it even more. The stroke of genius was to make the heroine a young woman who does not hope for an allied invasion which will end the years of occupation. Not recognizing that some of her friends are in the Resistance, she resists in her own way. This is a beautifully written book.

Delta Passenger Reportedly Caught Breastfeeding Cat Mid-Flight

 Why do I look at Yahoo items when I try to get my email?

Skillet Bread and a very good book about baking

 

Birdies from inside the front door.

 

Like yesterday--again, private beach at noon. No complaints.

 

PRIVATE BEACH AT NOON

 

You get too old to use nice things--except maybe on a holiday

 

Minneapolis--this morning's evidence of the Rage that Trump released.

 Why could the male brawlers not have just hurried to the men's room where the stalls have been widened to accommodate anyone with a wide stance? This is all the RAGE that Trump released by lying and lying.

Brawl breaks out between passengers at airport after flight lands

SOMEONE JUST TRIED TO KILL ME AT SAN JACINTO AVENUE AND HIGHWAY ONE

 Well, I did not want to die a few days shy of 86, so that's a relief that it is after my birthday. At the Intersection I was nearly killed a few years ago coming back from the beach. Back then I waited at the light on San Jacinto until it turned green and started across only to have a southbound car go by at about 75 MPH. Here 65 is actually legal, between the 2 stop lights in town. Today I waited there after a trip to the beach again, but this time after the light turned green I LOOKED to my left. OK. 2 cars ahead of me, one going right through, the other signaling left and then turning left. I hung back a little to let him turn, but when I moved on across the assassin who had been waiting across the highway for the light to turn green, which it would have done a little after I got across, decided that he NEEDED to go South and ran the red light, making a left turn against the light, just in front of me. I was able to brake, but Good Lord why did he want to kill me? I intend to be 87 my next birthday, and it is a long time away. We are so very cautious, but after the great Jim Maguire dying in Pozo a few days ago my sacrifice is not needed. Very upsetting.

The Excitement of Discovery! In the last few days I have found remarkable documents about the MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

 How I wish Will Bagley had not died, as he did at the end of September. I could have brightened more than a couple of different days of his life. The more I find the longer my chapter will be, but the greater the need to narrow my focus. I can't tell the story of the massacre, which after all has been well told by Will and by Walker, Turley, and Leonard. But I can tell about the grief of the families.

It's not quite up there with finding the title THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. Then I could telephone Hayford and Sealts and go up to tell Jay Leyda. And now I can't run in White Clay Creek by the Arc Corner and on a stretch of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I can run oh so fast on the beach at Morro Bay. And when someone comes up behind and passes me I can say, "How can you do that? I am going as fast as I can."

LIES THAT LIVE ON: Richard Brodhead in the New York TIMES & Andrew Delbanco in the New Republic

         So many people are dying around me that I begin to worry about what people might say about me when I die. What if someone looked in the New York TIMES for a good quotation and found that Richard Brodhead said I simply made up POEMS (1860), something no one else had heard of. Well, Raymond Weaver did not know about it in 1921 but the next year Meade Minnigerode told us almost all that is now known about POEMS, which was quite real. Brodhead's ignorance (if it was not malice) goes uncorrected in the New York TIMES. Andrew Delbanco's critical biography 2005 mentions both THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860) which he said in the NEW REPUBLIC that I had invented. Curiously, his uncorrected proofs did not mention that I had written a two-volume biography. How had he learned that I had not invented these two lost books and where did he rush to apologize?

        No, if there is an obit for me someone who knows only Brodhead and Delbanco may repeat the slander.

        I am working on the MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE right now and thinking about the impossibility of killing a lie.

Ken Burns calls for what I have about ready to publish. Does anyone want to publish it?

 

Ken Burns on "Reckoning with A History Fraught with Violence and Injustice" and the Table of Contents of "An Okie's Racial Reckonings"

 In the Washington Post 22 November 2021 Ken Burns says: "Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.

What I have been doing in 2021 is reckoning with that history. Here is the table of contents of a book I have nearly finished (one and a half chapters to go). I hope it can be published. All the chapters are about kinfolks in the colonies or the United States. Not one of my ancestors came to the United States.  A riddle: Neither of my parents was born in one of the states of the United States.

26 November 2021--TITLES IN ITALICS AND BOLD ARE NOT WRITTEN

                           ONE OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 #01 “GODDAMN OKIES”

#02 WHO THE OKIES WERE

#03 FAMILY STORIES--BEFORE I SAW I HAD TO DO RACE--good happy oblivious stories

#04 COUSINS AT WAR ON THE CHEROKEES What the Carolinians were doing at first instead of going off to fight the British

#05 JEFFERSON, COCKE, SIMS (The burning of the Sims Settlement 2 times. TJ as one of the cousins, an inconsistent one)

#06 RACIAL OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL (the Siamese Twins in NC--and 2 NC men who held Union meetings in 1863)

#07 Dropped this chapter

#08 MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE (kin in the Arkansas wagon train were slaughtered in 1857) This is what I am working on right now.

#09 SIMS & SPARKS & THE “ATROCITY” AT MILLIKEN’S BEND (great cast of characters including Grant and the Empress Carlota & the handsomest hero--2 cousins of mine not kin to each other)

#10 FLETCHER HILL & FRATERNITY (1864 escape from Rebel Prison and journey to Union lines)

#11 CAPT. MATTHEWS--LIAR & MURDERER 1866 (Freedmen's Bureau lies are history now, still repeated)

#12 TOURGEE vs MCGEHEE--KKK 1860s & 1870s (awful details about KKK and end of Reconstruction)

#13 WILLY SIMS & THE DANVILLE “MASSACRE” or “STREET-FIGHT” (a reckless cousin who all by himself ended Reconstruction in Virginia)

#14 GLENN-TUCKER JARNDYCE vs JARNDYCE OF I. T. (My family story ending with 3 corrupt judges who ruled against us--one died in alcoholic binge, another slit his throat (but lived), and third had a leg cut off and died.)

#15 DICK COSTNER’S GALLANTRY AT WOUNDED KNEE (provocative--Sen. Warren is right to want to rescind medals--but Dick really was gallant and deserves to keep his medal.)

#16 LEE SPARKS--ONE BAD COP (Houston thug who doomed the Buffalo Soldiers in 1917)

#18 DOVEY--BLACK COSTNERS (horror story of black family driven from place to place)

         Appendix--RACIAL DOCUMENTS (grim items about kinfolks--disposition of slaves in wills, ads for runaways, auction ads for slaves &c)

 

Thanksgiving Morning Throngs

 

How can you jump in and profit from the death of Jim Maguire, a wonderful public man? Well, I just found out how.

 Maguire, who had been a public defender and active in many other local areas including the Botanical Garden, was killed in a car crash this week. A lot of people are grieving. We knew him only slightly, but we once went out to the north county and bought from him half a lamb, neatly packed. He was a man of many interests.

So I look on Google to see if there is more recent news of the accident and find several links that look like stories but soon ask you to chat and what you realize is that these are lawyers wanting to talk about suing someone the grounds of bereavement.

This is so very vile.

Man threatens Little Caesars workers with AK-47 during 10-minute wait, TN police say

 He did not know that good pepperoni takes a little longer than mushrooms.

Ken Burns on "Reckoning with A History Fraught with Violence and Injustice" and the Table of Contents of "An Okie's Racial Reckonings"

 In the Washington Post 22 November 2021 Ken Burns says: "Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.

What I have been doing in 2021 is reckoning with that history. Here is the table of contents of a book I have nearly finished (one and a half chapters to go). I hope it can be published. All the chapters are about kinfolks in the colonies or the United States. Not one of my ancestors came to the United States. Neither of my parents was born in one of the states of the United States.

24 November 2021--TITLES IN ITALICS AND BOLD ARE NOT WRITTEN

 

                           ONE OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 

#01 “GODDAMN OKIES”

#02 WHO THE OKIES WERE

#03 FAMILY STORIES--BEFORE I SAW I HAD TO DO RACE--good happy oblivious stories

#04 COUSINS AT WAR ON THE CHEROKEES What the Carolinians were doing at first instead of going off to fight the British

#05 JEFFERSON, COCKE, SIMS (The burning of the Sims Settlement 2 times. TJ as one of the cousins, an inconsistent one)

#06 RACIAL OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL (the Siamese Twins in NC--and 2 NC men who held Union meetings in 1863)

#07 Dropped this chapter

#08 MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE (kin in the Arkansas wagon train were slaughtered in 1857) This is what I am working on right now.

#09 SIMS & SPARKS & THE “ATROCITY” AT MILLIKEN’S BEND (great cast of characters including Grant and the Empress Carlota & the handsomest hero--2 cousins of mine not kin to each other)

#10 FLETCHER HILL & FRATERNITY (1864 escape from Rebel Prison and journey to Union lines)

#11 CAPT. MATTHEWS--LIAR & MURDERER 1866 (Freedmen's Bureau lies are history now, still repeated)

#12 TOURGEE vs MCGEHEE--KKK 1860s & 1870s (awful details about KKK and end of Reconstruction)

#13 WILLY SIMS & THE DANVILLE “MASSACRE" or "STREET-FIGHT” (a reckless cousin who all by himself ended Reconstruction in Virginia)

#14 GLENN-TUCKER JARNDYCE vs JARNDYCE OF I. T. (My family story ending with 3 corrupt judges who ruled against us--one died in alcoholic binge, another slit his throat (but lived), and third had a leg cut off and died.)

#15 DICK COSTNER’S GALLANTRY AT WOUNDED KNEE (provocative--Sen. Warren is right to want to rescind medals--but Dick really was gallant and deserves to keep his medal.)

#16 LEE SPARKS--ONE BAD COP (Houston thug who doomed the Buffalo Soldiers in 1917)

#18 DOVEY--BLACK COSTNERS (horror story of black family driven from place to place)

         Appendix--RACIAL DOCUMENTS (grim items about kinfolks--disposition of slaves in wills, ads for runaways, auction ads for slaves &c)

 

This man is striving toward positive emotions and responsible parental involvement. Give him a little time? And give him a dog?

 Emma Colton

Wed, November 17, 2021, 7:04 AM

A Purdue University professor of psychology who specializes in "positive emotions" and "parental involvement" was arrested for allegedly beating his wife in front of his 10-year-old son, who was locked in a dog cage.

I wanted to know when Utah got a telegraph line--It was late 1861, 4 years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre

What I found ended with a tribute to the early telegraphers. I was a railroad telegrapher 1952-1959, ending in a night job at Port Arthur. Imagine quitting an 8 at night till 4 in the morning job on the Gulf and driving up to Evanston, Illinois, to start classes at Northwestern. Consulting Google: I may have quit just in time. A lot of the remaining telegraphers were fired 1962-1965. When was the last one fired? Was it somewhere remote, like Alaska?

 "Many of those who were connected with telegraphy in the early days of Utah have attained much prominence in the State. I am convinced now more thoroughly, than ever, that this is the result of loyalty to their labors and their employers and a strong ambition to perform well the duties that were assigned them. In the early days, the compensation of the telegraph operators was very small, and many of the operators whose names have been given, associated themselves with the work very much as some men devote their time and energy to religious duties; in fact, to many operators, it was part of their religion. This was particularly the case in southern Utah, where the telegraph played such a useful part during Indian depredations, when there was such a great need of rapid and direct communication. For many years a telegraph office was maintained at the headquarters of President Young, in this city; who was in direct and immediate communication with every important locality in the State."

HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET THAT WE ARE DYING. An Episode from early 2020 and the situation now

 Having been told by the great ocular oncologists up north that enucleation of the eye gone black was a possibility but why bother when the lymphoma was so aggressive, we got home and made haste--new wills, final attempt to salvage something of my hobby turned obsession, my American ancestry, narrowed way down to racial reckonings. I could at least pull out a few hundred documents that I or someone could use to write about or at least talk about the family and race.

But the word was disposal. Miraculously, my Melville library was already on its way off, the bulk of it, to the Berkshire Athenaeum. More boxes are following. But other papers?

Then a flattering note came in the U S mail and I said, happily, "I WANT TO KEEP THIS." Then I laughed and laughed at myself because I was not going to be around to "keep" anything. That was a revelation.

That was a year and a half ago. In 2021 I have written about 15/17th of a book called AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS. I am walking 2 miles a day--well, not everyday (not on Costco day, not on trip to Templeton to doctor day), and walking faster than a few months ago. And I must not forget the new REAL ID, good for 5 years and almost 2 weeks from now. The future is indefinite.

So I am still taking blood thinner and an anti-fungal drug and I could fall again any time and a Mother of Mayhem could get me on the way to the beach or coming back (I mention this hoping to get patrolmen out to watch), and when I do die, what a mess of things to get rid of!

But now I can laugh at my saying "I WANT TO KEEP THIS!" I don't want to keep that much, now that I think about it. But I do want to finish the last chapter and this next-to-last chapter. If I can't, if have left good outlines.

The basic insight: OH, HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET THAT WE ARE DYING.

TERRIFYING: Look now at Hawley, Cruz, Kevin McCarthy & all the masses who say they believe the election of 2020 was stolen.

 Now, John Brown on 24 May 1856 led his sons and others on a raid in Pottawatomie, Kansas, in which he and the others hacked several men and a boy to death. Everyone knew this, but the New York Tribune and the Boston Liberator denied it and suppressed it. The truth did no come out in absolutely irrefutable form for two decades. But there were still people to believed that John Brown could not have been a murderer who hacking people to death with is own hands. The Liberator printed a letter on 16 December 1859 from R. J. Hinton: "John Brown told me he was not a participator in the Pottawatomie homicides. John Brown was incapable of uttering a falsehood."

         This is the Louisville Courier 19 November 1859, after quoting Emerson’s claim that John Brown (to be hanged, on 2 December) “will make the gallows glorious like a cross.”

         "In addition to these oracles of Northern sentiments, observe also the language of the New York Tribune, the leading organ of one of the great parties of the country. ‘Let their epitaphs (of the insurgents) remain unwritten until the not distant day, when no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello or by the graves of Mount Vernon.’ It is a fact tat cannot be concealed, though though some of the Republican press (such as the New York TImes, of strong Douglas proclivities by the way) may through policy tenderly condemn the Harper’s Ferry ‘insurrection.’ as they are fond of terming it, yet the mass of the party give their silent approbation. The only thing of regret was its failure. Another significant fact is that though William H. Seward was clearly apprised of the treasonable conspiracy, and said not a word in disapprobation of it, yet not a voice in the party is raised in his condemnation. Think, Kentuckians, of a people upholding their leading statesman in connivance at an iniquitous plot to butcher the innocent families of a sister State! From the signs of the times let us profit, and no longer stultify ourselves under the garb of conservatism."

For many ICU survivors and their families, life is never the same

 So, how about getting vaccinated? You can still get sick but you don't die as often when you do.

People kept coming up behind me and passing me. See the footsteps. See in the far distance, runners.

 It was a wonder. How could they all pass me when I was going as fast as I could?

Started at 5, Served at 8

 

Making broth with carcasses of Costco roasted chickens. Does every Frugal Cook do this?

 As a Depression Okie I used to pick all the arguably edible meat off the bones before discarding the carcasses of 2 Costco chickens.  This year I have been starting a big pot of water while I am still working on the first of two chickens. I put in a couple of onions, several garlic cloves, a little salt, and one carcass and then the other, and simmer them 3 hours or so and let them cool a few hours. Then I WASTE the bits of flesh and onion. Any wasting is hard to do if you are a Depression Okie. I strain the mass using a cullender (or colander) then do a second catching with a large strainer then let the liquid cool a couple of more hours and skim it and decant it into pint jars. Product: 8 or 9 pints of good strong broth. Much better than store-bought broth. 

Clapton at near his worst. The worse was making money from his not having the brains to close a window.

  Clapton released two more lockdown songs, conducted a lengthy interview with vaccine skeptics, and pledged to perform only where fans would not be required to be vaccinated, or, as Clapton said in a statement, not “where there is a discriminated audience present.”

After a September show in Austin, Clapton posed backstage with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott had recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state. Like that, a 35-year friendship was over.

What happened to Eric Clapton? The guitar legend has long been inscrutable, but his covid turn has friends and fans puzzled like never before.

 Well, he is not smart enough to close a window.

My new book will be controversial. I want to get Greg Abbott as outside reader. Will he have the time? Can he read hard words?

 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content.” Abbott indicated before the order that such content needed to be examined and removed if it was found. He reportedly did not specify what the “obscene content” standard for books should be.

BUT WILL HE KNOW PORNOGRAPHY WHEN HE SEES IT?

10 November 2021--TITLES IN ITALICS AND BOLD ARE NOT WRITTEN 

                          AN OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 

#01 GODDAMN OKIES

#02 WHO THE OKIES WERE

#03 FAMILY STORIES--BEFORE I SAW I HAD TO DO RACE--good happy oblivious stories

#04 COUSINS AT WAR ON THE CHEROKEES What the Carolinians were doing at first instead of going off to fight the British

#05 JEFFERSON, COCKE, SIMS (The burning of the Sims Settlement 2 times. TJ as one of the cousins, an inconsistent one)

#06 RACIAL OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL (Siamese Twins in NC--and 2 NC men who held Union meetings in 1863)

#07 Dropped

#08 MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE (kin in the Arkansas wagon train were slaughtered in 1857)

#09 SIMS & SPARKS & THE “ATROCITY” AT MILLIKEN’S BEND (great cast of characters including Grant and the Empress Carlota & the handsomest hero--2 cousins of mine not kin to each other)

#10 FLETCHER HILL & FRATERNITY (1864 escape from Rebel Prison and journey to Union lines)

#11 CAPT. MATTHEWS--LIAR & MURDERER 1866 (Freedmen's Bureau lies are history now, still repeated)

#12 TOURGEE vs MCGEHEE--KKK 1860s & 1870s (awful details about KKK and end of Reconstruction with scary parallels to 2021)

#13 WILLY SIMS & THE DANVILLE “STREET-FIGHT” (a reckless cousin who all by himself (they said) ended Reconstruction in Virginia)

#14 GLENN-TUCKER JARNDYCE vs JARNDYCE OF I. T. (My family story ending with 3 corrupt judges who ruled against us--one died in alcoholic binge, another slit his throat (but lived), and third had a leg cut off and died.)

#15 DICK COSTNER’S GALLANTRY AT WOUNDED KNEE (provocative--Sen. Warren is right--but Dick really was gallant and deserves to keep his medal.)

#16 LEE SPARKS--ONE BAD COP (who doomed the Buffalo Soldiers)

#18 DOVEY--BLACK COSTNERS

         Appendix--RACIAL DOCUMENTS (wills, ads for runaways, sale ads &c)

Kansas City Star Questioning Josh Hawley’s sexuality is not OK, even if it is Josh Hawley

 Oh, I am so ashamed of myself. I did not understand what the fist pump meant. I thought Hawley was just encouraging the insurrectionists.

But I am not quite sure I understand now.

Why am I laughing?

We know that Hitler studied Race Laws in USA. Did he get the idea of stuffing Jews into cattle cars from Sherman?

 

Leon Howard's birthday

 After he retired to Albuquerque he used to come to LA and give me and give Leo Lemay guest lists for all over the basin and the valley because we had party-houses. A good many people got invited to both parties. Leo and Ann are long dead and almost all of the guests. Some of his students in New Mexico must remember him.

I copied Cleanth Brooks's letters years ago and can't find them now in packing boxes to send away. I found one today in a book.

 I noticed the book when I got down here, Arthur F. Kinney's G. K. Hall 1996 CRITICAL ESSAYS ON WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE SUTPEN FAMILY.  I saw Cleanth's letter first then checked the contents and saw that the last essay was my 1974 piece in Mississippi Quarterly, "What Quentin Saw 'Out There'"--the point being that he had learned the solution by seeing, not hearing.

Copying was so slow that I will do the second page later.

‘Violent attack’ by teen student knocks principal out at school, MA officials say. TRUMP HAS MADE IS OK TO EXPRESS RAGE.

 ANY RAGE AT ALL.

This is all a result of Trump's endless slurs and lies.

Late--One O'Clock

 

From the back patio this morning, after making Skillet Bread

 

Up at 5:30 to make Skillet Bread--2 photos

 

Today at 11

 

Cooler today, and a bit of white on the top of the Rock

 

The Glenn-Tuckers--Jarndyce vs Jarndyce in Indian Territory--progress on ONE OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 I started this October 4 and finished a good draft late today. It's long. This was one of the harder chapters because I knew the family beginning from my own memories then knew nothing except we were kept off the Choctaw tribal rolls. I had no idea how the Choctaw leaders had managed to exclude us and what I discovered, just doing basic research, was horrific each phase at a time, first one shocker, then the next, right through to the punishment of the 3 judges--one dying in late stages of alcoholism, one slitting his throat after a long alcoholic binge, another ignoring a sore on the toe that gangrene attacked to the point that the good doctors cut off his leg and the thigh and he died the next morning. 

Since a young fellow at Stanford last year had talked about enucleation (taking out my good right eye) and a young woman her had talked about amputation of part of my left leg last year, I was more sympathetic to the losers than you might think. What I concluded is that young doctors have a checklist of operations they have performed and if they have not done an amputation, like the young woman here, they are apt to do one without exhausting other options. It goes on their CVSs.

I have 2 more hard chapters to do. One of them is about two of my cousins, not kin to each other, who were falsely accused of atrocities, together then led remarkable lives, separately. Here I think I know all the episodes already--but, who knows? One is about my kinfolks killed at the Mountain Meadows Massacre and partly about the strange half-life one of the children who was not killed but returned to Arkansas in a couple of years. This will be controversial.

Ring the doorbell as much as you like, I will not open the door for an Unvaccinated Vagrant

 

We are at the divesting stage, not accumulating, but Mark brought us pillows from France many years ago and we felt we had to buy the footstool.

 

High tides. Today, a lagoon more than a mile long. This was 2 days ago--no beach.

 

I forgot all about the Mothers of Mayhem because I did not drive for a year and now rarely drive at school drop off or pick up time.

 But the Mothers of Mayhem are back. (You know the lyrics: "The Mothers of Mayhem have dropped off their Darlings at School" . . . .) This one was afraid of not being there at 3:30 to pick up the child.

So today I was almost knocked off the road by the Cut-off Queen. I think she allowed an inch as she pulled in front of me. Would not want to be late for the pickup.

Should I send her license number to the police?

Beach was perfect except for terrorist with bulldog and no leash in her possession--

She had it under voice command which means it was under no control at all. It charged at me and circled my feet but did not bite and (just as important) did not knock me down. When you don't have good balance, a little mean dog or a little friendly dog can do serious injury. No more falls! She really came to the beach with no leash. It was a NO DOG beach, but really under Covid you can't blame people who come out with dogs on a leash.

I was reading Parsons' THE HANGING CLUB today.

Depressing--Colin Powell, fully vaccinated, dead of Covid at 84. It's not good to get Covid when you are over 60.

 

He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.

In my extreme old age I am thinking about my years with TB, 1955-1957 (and part of 1954, before I knew).

 Washington Post News

Before the coronavirus, tuberculosis was the world’s leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, taking more lives each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined. But tuberculosis is also curable and preventable, caused by a bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and spread when people who are sick expel bacteria into the air, usually by coughing.

BUT TB IS NOT "CURABLE"; IT IS JUST CONTROLLABLE.

Tourists have all gone away

 

So dry, you never know what comes to the kitchen window

 

More detail about Fredson Bowers

 

In the suppressed article on: Maggie, finally published in Australia in 1995:

However purely he began, Bowers became the Mad Scientist of Textual Editing - a Mad Scientist who ran what may have been the world's sloppiest textual lab and promulgated varying self-serving high-sounding textual theories to cover the slovenliness.

 

 

Amanda Gailey in Proofs of Genius (University of Michigan 2015):

         Some editors began to fear that the CEAA had become too fundamentalist in its adherence to the Greg-Bowers method and too dominated by Bowers himself, who was becoming increasingly intransigent. Even Bruccoli referred to Bowers as the CEAA’s “czar,” and Hershel Parker, who was involved with the Center for many years but has since become one of its most vocal critics, in one of his more measured moments described Bowers as a man who “attacked in public those who were in his way and in one of his less measured moments described him as “a peculiarly inattentive mad scientist of a 1930s B movie.” In 1974, Parker uncovered problems with Bowers’s editing of Maggie for the multivolume edition of Stephen Crane’s work, and petitioned the CEAA to rescind the seal of approval granted to the text.

 

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

FREDSON BOWERS'S ABUSE OF POWER IN THE 1970S

 

     Fredson Bowers and the Abuse of Power in the 1970s: 

    An Episode from an Abortive Academic Autobiography. 

But trouble had begun well before, in 1974. . . . That March I arranged to write an article on the Virginia Maggie: A Girl of the Streets for Katz's Proof 5 and by August 1974, during Nixon's last days, I had drawn Brian Higgins in.  I found the textual work not "scientific" but the work of a peculiarly inattentive egomaniacal mad scientist of a 1930s B movie.  Bowers had leaned over backwards in order to justify his preference for the expurgated 1896 edition over Crane's honest 1893 book.  The evidence would have supported only the most conservative Gregian text, but Bowers had talked himself into justifying the 1896 text so that the product was a titivated version of the 1896 expurgation: the mad scientist was reaching for 1893 and seizing on 1896.  Fantastic editorial decisions (such as the deletion of the fat man in Ch. 17) were justified by grotesque literary arguments.  The textual lists were a horror.  Even aside from the fact that they contained far too many unjustifiable emendations and were illogically and inhumanely designed, they were so weakened by omissions and errors as to be totally useless.  The CEAA had tied itself to the great bibliographer who had descended into fantasy, no more capable of riding herd on the expenditure of vast sums of money from the federal government than he was of rounding up and riding herd on a list of variant words.  Idealistic in those days, I wrote up my evidence with the help of Brian Higgins and submitted it to the CEAA in January 1975, asking that the seal given to Maggie be rescinded.  On 4 June 1975 the CEAA Advisory Committee refused to rescind the seal, and I was told in a letter dated 26 June that the Committee felt "that it would be inappropriate for the CEAA to explain for publications its reasons for refusing to withdraw a seal already awarded to a volume." The CEAA closed ranks around Fredson Bowers.  Worse, Katz abruptly dropped the Maggie article from the 1975 Proof then in September 1976 declined to publish it in the next Proof either.  By then, on 11 February 1975, Bowers had written to the director of the CEAA making an only slightly veiled threat: "I am not at all sure of the legal position in desealing a volume . . . .  It is a purely hypothetical situation, but a publisher of a desealed volume might question the legal basis as causing him financial harm and bring suit with punitive damages, which I suppose would be collected, if successful, from the individual members of the Committee, or possibly MLA."  He added: "It should be thoroughly understood that under the copyright laws, this communication is my private property, and that verbal dissemination as well as printed is covered by my rights--indeed any form of reference in anything that could be construed as public."  The foot of a page contained this warning, all in capitals: "CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION.  NO PART MAY BE PRINTED OR REFERRED TO IN PRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE WRITER ON PENALTY OF A PROMPT LAWSUIT." On 3 April 1975, Bowers wrote to John Gerber, who was heading the committee that established the successor organization, the Center for Scholarly Editions:  "In my private and confidential view, the only person I think ought never to be considered for the committee or chairman is Hershel Parker."  The blackballing worked.  I lost opportunities to evaluate textual situations for the CSE as I had been doing for the CEAA. No one would touch the Maggie article.  I thought for months that it would be published in Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography.  The editors promised not to ask [ . . . .] to review it, but they did, before they rejected it.  Fredson had to be protected.

 A lot of federal money for projects all around the country was involved--not a lot in relation to one helicopter for Viet Nam, but a lot by academic standards.  Deprived of my chance to work through textual histories of CEAA volumes, I seized other opportunities to focus in great detail on a handful of American masterpieces.  It happened that one of them had been edited by Bowers.  On 10 November 1974 I took on the chore of reviewing Bowers's Virginia edition of The Red Badge of Courage for Nineteenth-Century Fiction along with his 1972 NCR / Microcard Editions The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript.  I had made one of my casual notes in 1972 that I should reconstruct the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage (as far as possible) and read the book that way.  I had not gotten round to it.  Now, after a time, I focused on what was wrong with Bowers's facsimile edition of the manuscript.  This elaborate, enormously expensive book, I soon realized, was not a facsimile of "The Final Manuscript."  It contained in sequential pages a facsimile (some edges carelessly cut off in the photographing) of the pages of the manuscript which Crane had given to a friend and which had ended up at Charlottesville.  It was a facsimile of the portion of the manuscript which was at Virginia--the greater part of the whole manuscript, some of which survived elsewhere and some of which was lost.  Not in sequence at all but relegated to the back by Bowers were the surviving pages of Chapter 12, the longest and by all odds the most crucial chapter in the book.  These pages were mislabeled "Discarded Chapter XII," instead of something like "Surviving Portions of Chapter 12." When the book had been the manuscript Crane was trying to sell, Ch. 12 had followed Ch. 11 and preceded Ch. 13.  It had been an integral part of the manuscript.  It was typical of Bowers, who tended to fixate on later texts and work backward from them, not to realize that the value of a facsimile edition of the manuscript would lie in presenting all the known leaves of the final manuscript in sequence, whatever institutional or private library they happened to come to rest in.  In terms of textual theory, he was more or less systematically abandoning the wise council of W. W. Greg and reverting to the advice of Ronald S. McKerrow, taking any excuse to adopt readings from a late text.  What this showed, ultimately, was a predisposition to ignore the creative process.

 In November 1975, for one of the most ecstatic two hour stretches of my life, I read the first 11 chapters, then read the surviving parts of Ch. 12 and whenever possible fill out gaps with portions of the fortuitously surviving rough draft, so as to get an idea of the lost content, then read what had originally been numbered 13, and so on to the end reading the original words whenever they survived.  Fleming's self-delusion and vainglory was consistent throughout the book.  If what Crane wrote had been printed, there would have been no controversy over the young man's courage or cowardice: the text was so mangled as to be uninterpretable in any final way.  I said in the review: "This rather motley and slightly incomplete reconstruction, I wager, would be the best possible basis for New Critical demonstrations of the unity of the novel--the sort of essays which have been lavished upon mere reprints (or reprints of reprints) of the Appleton text, a text which reached its final form as the result of omissions so hasty and ill-conceived that several passages still depend for their meaning upon passages which were excised."  After I had read Red Badge almost as Crane wrote it I went back into an undergraduate class at USC and confessed that I had taught it wrong in the last class.  Sitting on the corner of the desk, a triangular tear in what a librarian called my Viet Cong pants, I passionately explained how Crane meant the title to be understood.  It was a remarkable fifty minutes, the first time anyone in the world had taught The Red Badge of Courage from the text Crane had tried so long and hard to get into print.  In the evaluations two students said I was incompetent because I had admitted not knowing how to teach a book and had taught it again.  Well, after Kent State all standards had been thrown out the window, but I would continue to teach passionately.

 When published in the March 1976 Nineteenth-Century Fiction, my article contained as a final zinger my new student Henry Binder's discovery that, on the most mundane level, Bowers had faked an essential CEAA requirement, a Hinman Machine collation of first and last texts of the Appleton edition.  On 8 April 1976 Bowers wrote "Dear Parker": "if I hear of any further innuendoes about my expenditure of NEH funds, and the ethics of my work, you will be hearing from my lawyer in the matter of libel, and so will any journal that prints such remarks.  I am in fact reserving action on some statements made in this review."  He sent a copy to the editor, who scoffed at the threat.  Fredson Bowers, the most famous American bibliography of the time and at his best a brilliant expositor of copy-text theory, had become a slovenly researcher willing to fake research, a pompous, idiosyncratic literary critic, and a vehement bully who silenced critics by threats of lawsuits and who intimidated colleagues into acquiescing while he silenced genuine literary criticism.