Kites for the end of April. It's always beautiful in Morro Bay.

 

What you want to hear when you are 86 and have received the second booster shot.

 Nearly two-thirds of the people who died during the omicron surge were 75 and older, according to a Post analysis, compared with a third during the delta wave. Seniors are overwhelmingly immunized, but vaccines are less effective and their potency wanes over time in older age groups.

Experts say they are not surprised that vaccinated seniors are making up a greater share of the dead, even as vaccine holdouts died far more often than the vaccinated during the omicron surge, according to the CDC. As more people are infected with the virus, the more people it will kill, including a greater number who are vaccinated but among the most vulnerable.

And now Mike Tyson and Will Smith are flying the hostile skies. Crazies are flying all the time. I will stay home.

 'Homophobic' first-class passenger who was refused an alcoholic drink struck a flight attendant with a cabin phone, says criminal complaint

You think you don't love George F. Will? Oh yes, you do, or will after reading this on Hawley!

 The 328 senators of the previous 50 years have illustrated the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve: a few of them dreadful, a few excellent, most mediocre. Although Josh Hawley, Missouri’s freshman Republican, might not be worse than all the other 327, he exemplifies the worst about would-be presidents incubated in the Senate. Arriving there in January 2019, he hit the ground running — away from the Senate. Twenty-four months later, he was the principal catalyst of the attempted nullification of the presidential election preceding the one that he hopes will elevate him. Nimbly clambering aboard every passing bandwagon that can carry him to the Fox News greenroom, he treats the Senate as a mere steppingstone for his ascent to an office commensurate with his estimate of his talents.

JUST LIKE NOTRE DAME!! Pilot’s cockpit cigarette sparked fire that brought down Egyptair jet and killed 66

 I retired earlier than I wanted to because there was no way I could get into and out of Morris Library at Delaware without getting sick from smoke. The librarian even provided a smoking room which she claimed was for Middle Eastern students. It was not sealed off from the rest of the library and the users constantly opened the door to let out some of their smoke. I hope none of them became pilots.

Woman allegedly stabbed husband to death after arguing about how coffee tasted, Memphis police say

 I make the coffee early and hate to think what cries I would hear if the pot of coffee and a mug and a silver spoon and a pitcher with a little milk in it were not all waiting.

No violence, though.

wet horses

 

On the way to 12 blossoms

 

Starting early

 

A trial introduction in Ch. 3 of a collection of "glimpses" of kinfolks I discovered in the archives. It's very personal because the book is very personal as well as historical.

[This is the happy innocent discovery time, before I saw I had to do Racial Reckonings]

    Family genealogists, I found, had been swift to begin exchanging information online, and many self-trained volunteers turned semi-professional researchers were at work from the start of the 21^st century, if not earlier. Early in the 2000s there was riches running wild already on the Internet--too wild at times still, based on wishful thinking like much of the recent ThruLines on Ancestry.com, a dubious addition to a worthy site which frequently includes rare documents posted by generous amateur users but also highlights many hasty guesses. Ancestry.com also puts much information behind “Private” labels (the message is ‘email me and beg”) when the whole point of genealogical research ought to be showing and telling.

         Initially confused by wishful thinking that passed as genealogical fact (and even now having to ignore persistent confusion online, one Nabors merging with neighboring Nabors), I slowly learned to draw on my Melville skepticism and to winnow hundreds of documents, then as years passed thousands of documents, in order to identify some of my ancestors and other kinfolks on this continent, many who had come in the 1600s. At first, knowing I would be interrupted by work on Melville, I determined not to join any genealogical sites I had to pay for (how often would I use them in a year?) and to order copies of documents from archives only when I could get something promising no other way. Depression Okies are cheap; I still cut toothpaste tubes apart so as not to waste any. Gradually I had to pay for newspaper access which I could not get for free and to join sites such as Ancestry.com.

         What I found was in the first years was fragmentary, to be sure, even from the increasingly magnificent resources of the Internet. For every 10^th great grandfather I identified, there were 4,095 10^th great grandfathers very few of whom I could ever name. In fact, 4,095 was far too large: any 10^th great grandfather was likely a progenitor several times over. In recent generations, I discovered, I had the North Carolina Scot Robert Ewart as 4^th Great Grandfather twice. I delighted in fancying that I was empowered by that double infusion, for he had been, I learned, a Committee of Safety man in 1775, and father-in-law of a little band of King’s Mountain heroes. Another Scot, John Glenn, of Renfrewshire, was from the same clan as the astronaut, the DNA shows. My Glenn, I learned, fathered many half-Choctaw children as my 5^th Great Grandfather, but he was also my 4^th Great Grandfather, because a Mexican War soldier in southwestern Missouri, one story goes, would not take in a female cousin fleeing Civil War bushwhackers in Arkansas unless she married him. It’s possible I got my height (unusual in the 1950s) from old John Glenn, for his grandsons were exceptionally tall. My Jack Glenn was measured 6’ 5” in the Mexican War and his brother George at 6’ 4”. Did their cousin Sam in Kerrville, Texas, really shoot down hanging business signs he hit his head on? I remember from 1942 the extremely tall ancient Great Great Great Uncle Johnny Glenn who wore all black and a black top hat when he brought my stranded mother little baskets of new Spring vegetables. The more stories I learned after 2002, the more I loved these people as I rejoiced in their characters and tried to see their traits in their living descendants.

         What I wanted was American stories, but any Okie high-school dropout like me would have fantasized about kinship to Scottish and English royalty. When I learned about actual remote royal kinship I was an old man, so any such connection was more amusing than exalting.  Because I have loved Hotspur since 1953, I delighted in learning that Owen Glendower, pompous and long-winded in Shakespeare, was my 17^th Great Grandfather. I have more than one blood tie to Henry VIII, but the fun is in being from a family even more disreputable than the Tudors, the Boleyns, Sir William Boleyn, High Sheriff of Kent, being my 13^th Great Grandfather. (That sounds closer than it is, for there were 30-some thousands of 13^th Great Grandfathers.) Being a Boleyn means I am 2^nd cousin to the first Elizabeth, a few times removed, besides the kinship through her father. Even better for a scholar of literature, having read and loved Emma during the 1959 Christmas break at Northwestern (with no thought of studying the author or plagiarizing anything from her life or her plots or characters), it’s fun to be a blood cousin of Jane Austen, through Thomas Leigh, the mayor of London at Elizabeth’s coronation. (Her sister Cassandra rejoiced in that connection to Sir Thomas long before I did.) I was happy to learn that another direct ancestor might have been, really, the very man who stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum in the nursery rhyme, but I was old and did not want to dig back for shards of ancient glory to bedeck myself with. Still, who could resist learning of descent from the Bruce (something most Scots can do)? And I smile whenever I think of being 6^th cousin to Rob Roy. A suspicious amateur, I had hooted dismissively at the McGehees who claimed that the Mackayhee who arrived in Virginia in the 1600s was really a McGregor but unable to use his name because King James had set out to destroy all living members of the family and to obliterate the name. Ho, ho, I thought, a fantasy of Americans wanting British connections. The Maryland Magruders, I knew, had written at least one whole book proving that they were high and mighty McGregors. No, they weren’t, but we McGehees were, DNA shows.

         In fact, if any Southerner in a family got to Virginia in the 1600s any descendants are going to be kin to many millions of Americans. That will include many of the most notorious bootleggers, western outlaws, and a scary number of modern serial killers. In Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck dropped names of famous Kentucky-West Virginia feuding families, having Turnbull say he had Hatfield blood and threatening to shoot Tom Joad when he got out of prison, and Grampa Joad sending word to Turnbull, “‘Don’t mess around with no Joad. Maybe I got McCoy blood for all I know.’” In fact, I have McCoy blood myself, and Hatfield blood, not much of either. I can’t say that “it so happens that I am kin to both the Hatfields and McCoys.” This is not a matter of “so happening.” It’s a matter of white Southerners (those who have been on this continent since the 1600s) being kin, it seems, to almost everyone who has been around a while. As my double or triple cousin Lois Gore says, if you are Southern you are either kin or connected. And even if one brother went to Virginia another might have landed in Boston--a possibility I flee from rather than pursuing.

         By the late 2010s I had a massive folder called “Ornery People” and a shorter, 10,000 document folder called Glimpses--consisting of page or so captures of kinfolks during revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American history, usually in some of their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I had accumulated documents in random order and at odd intervals, without focusing sharply on them. Because I am (intermittently) persistent, I found genuinely remarkable documents. When you don’t know family history and family stories, you respond with joy, and even love, at new stories. Ancestors become real. Recently I could find only one 1759 newspaper story on Indian raid on the Catawba river area, but it featured my first cousin Martin Dellinger, who had the wit to lie down in his rye field, out of sight. (A modern cousin, the author of From Yale to Jail, knew nothing about Martin or his own heroic Revolutionary North Carolina ancestors: he took pride in his unremarkable Boston ancestors.) Since I wrote the previous sentence, Cousin David has come back to life in the splendid movie about the trial of the Chicago 7. In an 1844 newspaper I found three or four precious lines about double grandfather Robert Ewart who died in 1781. “During the war Maj. John Davidson and Robt. Ewart (a good Whig) very frequently came to my father’s, Jacob Forney, sen., to consult in favor of the Whig cause--Robert Ewart lived about one and a half miles from Maj. Davison and five and a half miles from my fathers.” Old Jacob Forney’s property was devastated when occupied by Lord Cornwallis and his army in 1781 during a pause on his way to Yorktown. This letter by his son Abraham, in 1844 in his 85^th year, struck me as a miraculous gift. You really have to be a hunter to find such nuggets! My cousin Frederick Slimp, a Union man, wrote much of the History of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry (which includes a photograph of him). Then (looking for other cousins) I found a letter from Boone, North Carolina, in the Lenoir Tropic for 21 October 1885, about a visit to Tennessee: “Fred Slimp I had not seen for 22 years; looked old and broken. We were school boys together. Fred could outrun us all at school in playing ball, base, &c.” [Sic: “base, ball”] You cherish such surprise revelations, even if they are disturbing.  

         Internet genealogical work now may be (as is casually reported) almost as popular as gardening or pornography. Many other Americans have done searches such as I did and have visited more graveyards and court-houses. I made only one cemetery tour, in 2007. I recognize that truly industrious researchers start earlier and go wider and deeper than I do. I have not belatedly dedicated my life to study of my ancestors the way I dedicated my life to Melville research. In fact I continued to write books and many articles on Melville until 2019, when my Library of America Complete Poems appeared, but I have persisted to look for my family at stolen moments for two decades.

         I found my stories about kinfolks in history books; exploration books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (the War of Jenkins’ ear, the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s War); many dozens of Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots; military records for all wars up through World War I; other governmental records; a few family letters in county libraries (one to a grandfather of mine about the Cousin Milton of my chapter 10, although I paid that librarian for several blank pages) and many in college or university collections; dozens of C. S. Turnbo stories about the Cokers lovingly and intelligently available online from Springfield-Greene Library, Missouri library--the magnificent Turnbo being the Studs Terkel of 19^th century Arkansas); the Mexican captivity book written by a Texas cousin; dozens of legal affidavits from relatives in the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; many hundreds, perhaps 3,000 or perhaps 5,000, of articles from newspapers in four centuries, starting before the Revolution; WPA interviews; hundreds of Fold3 items; and hundreds of Find-A-Grave photographs of tombstones and other information. My step-GGGG Grandfather William Cocke, who labored to create the State of Franklin, published speeches in newspapers and wrote extant letters to Jefferson and Jackson. Several of my cousins gave speeches which are preserved; several were interviewed in famous books (such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s account of an early Arkansas Coker in his London 1821 Journal of a Tour); several cousins contributed to books (notably Frederick Slimp); several wrote personal accounts such as John F. Hill description of his escape from a Confederate prison; Carrol Moore wrote powerfully about the North Carolina Bushwhacker murderers who got pensioned and protected as Union fighters; a Sims cousin (the Milton I mentioned) wrote eloquent paragraphs about his imprisonment in the Civil War in issues of Confederate Veteran. Men and some women (Aunt Margaret Adams, Grandma Abigail Rogers) performed feats of astonishing bravery; young Stephen F. Sparks and a friend bit down on ropes and swam across the Buffalo Bayou twenty-one times towing Sam Houston’s baggage just before the battle at San Jacinto. I bring to all this research what I have learned (on the fly) about historical research in a scholarly career spanning a decade more than half a century.

         This book may, after all, be a unique genealogical and historical product even though the idea behind it is not that my history is unique--it’s just it may be the first of its kind. Any Depression Okie, anyone whose family had been in Indian Territory since the mid to late 19^th century, could now (like my neighbors in the 1940s, such as the Heflins) create a comparable family archive. (Truly comparable: they had a multi-term Senator as well as a famous actor cousin and the Melvillean Wilson Heflin, whose posthumous Herman Melville’s Whaling Years I enriched with a unique lost typescript and then wrote my most eloquent blurb for.) With the Internet any Okie can retrieve lost family stories and establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of American history. I and others like me can understand just who the Joads would have been, the history they would have had, whether they knew it or not.

         The following stories are just samples of hundreds. When I found them, I was still focused on Melville but I was fascinated as I found stories of determination, daring, and endurance. I took private pleasure and derived strength from fancying that I had inherited traits from people I was learning about. I read about these cousins with delight and sometimes awe. What extraordinary people, and what lives they led!

 

The Rock with some sun on it.

 

Well, I need to revise all this manuscript but I have finally completed a first full draft: ONE OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 

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

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 and 2022 is just what Burns says, reckoning with Americant history. Here is the table of contents of a book.  Everything needs revision, but all the chapters are completed.  All the chapters are about kinfolks of mine in the colonies or in the United States.

 

                                   AN  OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 #01 “GODDAMN OKIES”--How Grapes of Wrath defined Oklahomans

#02 WHO THE OKIES WERE--(Eastern white and red Oklahomans who had been there in Choctaw and Cherokee Territories)

#03 FAMILY STORIES--BEFORE I SAW I HAD TO write A RACE BOOK--good happy oblivious stories

#04 COUSINS AT WAR ON THE CHEROKEES --What the Carolinians were doing after thr 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 Brigham Young’s Utah: Polygamy, Murders, and Massacres--and Blaming the Indians  (Many of my family were murdered)

#08 Slaughtering for Parley, Brigham, and Jesus, But Saving Some Babies for Ransom

#09 JESSE SPARKS--Falsely ACCUSED OF ATROCITY TO  BLACKS WHO  LIVED TO BEFRIEND INDIANS AND BLACKS--NEVER KNOWING OF THE ACCUSATION.  HE AND MILTON (SEE #10) ARE COUSINS OF MINE BUT NOT OF EACH OTHER

#10  MILTON SIMS--“SENTENCED TO BE HANGED” --THE GREATEST ADVENTURER; I MERELY MENTION HIS LIVING TO KISS THE GLOVE OF THE EMPRESS CARLOTA.

#11  FLETCHER HILL & FRATERNITY (1864 escape from Rebel Prison and journey to Union lines with help from Blacks and Red Stringers)

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

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

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

#15 GLENN-TUCKER JARNDYCE vs JARNDYCE OF I. T. (My family fight against Choctaw corruption--story ending with 3 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.)

#16 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.)

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

#18 DOVEY--BLACK COSTNERS (horrific  story of black family driven from place to place) [MY MOTHER WAS MARTHA COSTNER.]

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

 

How I pity any good teachers in any classroom today. I could not teach Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, anyone challenging.

 DeSantis has been leading the charge in Florida to restrict what teachers can say and discuss in class on topics including race, racism, gender and history. He recently signed legislation that bans classroom discussion on LGBTQ issues from kindergarten through third grade and, for all students, says any such discussion must be “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”

Russian warship sunken in Ukraine war may have been carrying a piece of the 'true cross,' a treasured Christian relic.

 You never know.

At roughly 600 feet long, the guided missile cruiser is a large target. It was armed with 16 anti-ship missiles and was originally built to destroy U.S. aircraft carriers. According to Russia’s Tass news agency, the Moskva entered service in 1983 and carried a revered Christian relic, a piece of the True Cross, upon which some believe Jesus was crucified. The wood-chip relic, several millimeters long, was embedded in a 19th-century metal cross and stored on the ship, an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church told Tass in 2020.

All anyone I know can think about is Johnny Depp and Amber.

 They are not even thinking about the Kardashians.

Four men arrested for ‘raping’ Bengal monitor lizard in western India

 I know just the punishment.

Banish them from the Oscars for 10 years.

Maga Texans Ride High: A dolphin died on a Texas beach after authorities say people harassed her and rode her in the ocean.

 Ride 'im, Cowboy! Ride her, Cowgirl! Vote for Abbott!

Frigid north wind--one other person on beach

 

David Mamet Comes Out as Right-Wing Culture Warrior, Claims Teachers Are Inclined to Pedophilia

Why I am glad I never could push my way through a Mamet play. But he is not only boring, he's a Republican loony right up there with Ginni. 

THANK YOU WILL SMITH!!! Tennis player strikes opponent after losing tournament Michael Kouame of France was supposed to meet Ghana’s Raphael Nii Ankrah at center court for a handshake, but instead he slapped him in the face. Brawl erupted »

    Nothing like a famous movie star being a thug at the Oscars to inspire sportsmen around the world 

The hardest walk I have had here in 22 years

 Hard wind driving sand--sandblasting me, I wore my sand goggles (cheap swimming goggles) and scarves but I was truly sandblasted and did not enjoy it. Never have I not enjoyed driving rain and cold--but this was brutal. And you look down at the beach and it seems benign and beautiful.

On the beach today

 

Got my Booster shot--2 to start with, then the Booster and now Booster #2.

 Spend 35 mins last night trying to take pharmacy's advice and sign up on line. Finally got someone live and was told to come in at 2 today. Waited past 1:30 thinking they might eat lunches. Bad mistake. No shots today after 130!

So I cried, cited advanced age and difficulty in getting around, waited cried a little more and finally was given a form and was told someone could give me the shot. Man came in wanting shot. I turned away. He had tried online and had asked on phone. He was mighty pissed. He used a somewhat vulgar word on the order of HELL. They sent him away. I looked resolutely away and kept my form hidden. 

Then I stood around some masked and some not masked pharmacy customers and kept space away from the sweet few who were wearing masks as chin-swabs, not over mouth and nose. Half an hour later got the shot. Home safely. Time for a nap.

Yahoo News Video Marjorie Taylor Greene attacks GOP senators backing Jackson's SCOTUS nomination Tue, April 5, 2022, 9:25 AM Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has launched an attack against three GOP senators who support Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Greene accused them of being “pro-pedophile.”

 Well, as far as Susan Collins is concerned, this is news to me, Marjorie.  Now, if you had said Cruz or Hawley I might not have been surprised and skeptical.

See how Andy Hines relates to Jerry W. Ward, Jr. I think you can get Ward if you Search here.

 

 

Andy Hines quoting the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS--AN OUTSIDER QUOTES AN OKIE

 

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University

A Hines - 2022

… As Hershel Parker put it in commenting on the New Criticism’s tendency toward
unity, the New Critics “define their role as bringing order out of a chaos which they
insist is only apparent, not real. The order must be there, awaiting the sufficiently …

Hines adds: .

Sunday, December 18, 2011

 

How Critics in Fields Other than American Literature Have Applied FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS

            In 2007 while inching along a friend’s bookshelves in Manhattan I realized that my Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons had not, after all, been totally destroyed and forgotten. The general trashing was still vivid in my memory. Most of the reviewers quite rabidly tried to kill it--either to protect the New Criticism (at that late date) or to defend the not-yet discredited Greg-Bowers editorial theory and practice. In the Sewanee Review the critic (Gary Davenport) pretty much said if I were right Western Civilization would crumble, since it is built on belief in the Word. I was going straight to Hell. Before and after 1984 several of my articles were suppressed after being accepted although all of them got into print eventually (one after 20 years, in which editor after editor cringed in fear of Fredson Bowers). I have bought an IRIS scanner and hope to post at least one suppressed article on this blog.
            After 1985 I had to make a new career as a biographer—not the worst of fates, it began to seem. Remembering the comments I had seen in my friend’s books, in mid-July 2008 I glanced at Amazon's new list of anyone's books that cite references by relevance or date, in my case mainly books where the authors cite an edition of Melville I have edited, that sort of casual thing. You could, at least for some months longer, see from the listings on Amazon if anything of substance had been said about the book. I ended up spending several hours on the Amazon list for Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, then I went down Google Books listings for it. I was astounded at what has been said in the years after the reviews were all in. Now, a quarter century later, the reputation of Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons is high, except with people who had committed themselves to praise of one seriously flawed text or another, and their loyal students.
            What's most interesting is that an astonishing range of scholars--editors of the Bible! Classicists! Medievalists! Shakespearians! Musicologists! "Conservationists"! Students of the Modern British Novel—have earnestly applied Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons to problems they were grappling with. And in 2010 my 1981 ground-breaking preview of FT&VI, “The ‘New Scholarship’: Textual Evidence and its Implications for Criticism, Literary Theory, and Aesthetics,” was reprinted as the lead article in Ecdotica 6, Anglo-American Scholarly Editing, 1980-2005. I prepared this list in the hope that Northwestern would use it in an advertisement, a “Quarterly Report”—FT&VI, a quarter century later. That did not happen, but never mind--I’m glad to have lived long enough to see the book being used! And I am particularly moved and honored by what Jerry W. Ward, Jr., said about it in the 2008 The Katrina Papers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple white buns with dried cranberries

 

Andy Hines quoting the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS--AN OUTSIDER QUOTES AN OKIE

 

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University

A Hines - 2022

… As Hershel Parker put it in commenting on the New Criticism’s tendency toward
unity, the New Critics “define their role as bringing order out of a chaos which they
insist is only apparent, not real. The order must be there, awaiting the sufficiently …

Hines adds: .

The problem as I recall it is that Jerry was afraid of Brodhead and Delbanco and their cohorts and undercut this extended gloss with one word, If.

"If Parker is right . . . ." Jerry of course knew I was right. After all at a cocktail party in LA at a convention he had accepted the book based on my conversation with him.

Hayford did not understand. In 1984 he recommended Don Cook as someone to write a blurb. I said no, I was thinking of Fred Crews or Stanley Fish. He said (without reading it) but it's textual and Don does textual. Well, I said no, that is not my kind of textual, and I got both Crews and Fish to comment. 

FROM AMAZON:

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.
 
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.

Herschel Walker, the Worst Candidate, Trump-Approved April 3, 2022---

 Long ago, a reviewer of FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS started off: "What possessed Herschel Walker to write FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS . . . ." I still wonder what possessed him.

Herschel Walker, the Worst Candidate, Trump-Approved

April 3, 2022

John Douglas Thompson on What Trump Made of America--

 “Listen, I saw the Oscars, and Will Smith walking up onstage and punching somebody,” the actor replied. “I couldn’t believe it. There is no place for that. It does seem to be some sort of thing that’s happening out there in America. As we become more tribalistic, certain behaviors are now normalized. Violence, revenge, vengeance, and there’s just got to be a better way to handle these things. We’re just going to kill each other.”

It is shocking, indeed appalling, when a writer for a VA paper does not know Southern English. This is about 3 firemen whose sons were born about the same time,

 The men thought they should perhaps burn off some nervous energy by setting up a cornhole game during their downtime at the hospital, the same way they pass time at the firehouse. They quickly decided their two wives and one fiancee wouldn't like that.