930 a.m. Morro Rock

Everyday courage in Morro Bay--Paddleboarder in the Surf and Fog

Sabrina sent me something I needed. Thank you.

If you can find Duck Creek you can locate the path by counting your steps

farther, closer, right up to Rock

Warmer

A little color--but the fog came back

What the fog does

Phantoms

Alligator and fog phantoms

Woman sunbathing

Trash but very little plastic left

P. P. S. And an old writer knows he is still alive when he has a new contract

Someone upstairs reminded me that a new contract for a Library of America volume is evidence that someone thinks I am still alive. And there was something else she said but I have forgotten it now . . . .

P.S. on how an old writer knows he is alive

He not only receives page proofs, he also receives a check (however small).

How an old writer knows he is alive--He receives page proofs

for the piece on North Carolina women who talked back to the Tories, for the annual hardback volume of THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

What good evidence.

Trust

With Scalini, who is older than I am; also holding CLAREL

litter

Scofflaw in No Dogs area with world's longest invisible leash

Leonard Pitts on "GOP lawmakers" who excuse anything and "white evangelicals" who barter "moral authority for personal and political gain"

Today would be a good Sunday to read Leonard Pitts.
And my Cousin Franklin Graham might spend even more time than usual looking in his full length mirror.

Saturday on the beach with trash from the storm

What the great guys bagged yesterday. At least no vandal has split the bags yet. And for a mile the beach is still strewn.

Garbage twice the size of Texas--and garbage here in Morro Bay today

Duck Creek but No Ducks

Bestrewn Beach & Two Heroes

Does anyone in Morro Bay or SLO County recognize these Heroes of the Beach?

2nd of 2 Heroes of the Storm pulling up trash, mainly plastic

First of 2 Morro Bay Heroes of the Storm--Imitators Needed to Pull Plastic from the Beach

A better picture of the Pink Lady

No one at all on the rainy beach till here at the Rock a Pink Lady

Waiting for one of us to fall

Low tide, rain coming

No mudslides, please

One of 10 or 12 happy men

Drenched yesterday, sprinkled on today

Absolutely no one on the beach in the cold rain except one octogenarian Okie

Note the t-shirt over the head--the wind kept it plastered over the neck and face, so I did not have to hold it up.

Heavily dressed riders

RISING REPUBLICAN BUYS $750,000 BEACH HOUSE WITH MONEY MEANT TO FEED PRISONERS

Todd Entrekin, WAY TO GO, rising Republican star!

Todd EntrekinSheriff who pocketed $750G from inmate food fund bought beach ...
www.foxnews.com/.../sheriff-who-pocketed-750g-from-inmate-food-fund-bought-beac...
13 hours ago - Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin has come under scrutiny for pocketing funds intended for food for inmates. (Etowah County Sheriff's Office). An Alabama sheriff who pocketed $750,000 from funds meant to feed inmates is coming under fresh scrutiny for the purchase of a beach house that cost nearly ...
Etowah sheriff pockets $750k in jail food funds, buys $740k beach ...
www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/.../etowah_sheriff_pocketed_over_7.html

2 days ago - In September, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin and his wife Karen purchased an orange four-bedroom house with an in-ground pool and canal .... Republican Party that described the sheriff as a "rising Republican star" - own several properties in Etowah County and two others in Orange Beach.
Rising Republican Star: Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin ...
https://algop.org/rising-republican-star-etowah-county-sheriff-todd-entrekin/

Jun 30, 2013 - Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin is this week's Rising Republican Star. Sheriff Entrekin has brought a wealth of experience and a vision to the Sheriff's office of Etowah County. He became Sheriff of Etowah in 2007, when Governor Bob Riley appointed him after the passing of

Just before the rain--no one else did not know not to play in the rain

Morro Rock from a Mile North

Kin to McCain and Geo Washington but not Julianne Moore or Patricia Arquette; I thought the Moore might be my way in with Julianne.

Watched Finding Your Roots while doing sciatica prevention exercises on the floor.
McCain was astonished to find he is kin to Washington. He has deteriorated badly, but he's my cousin, John is. Not close.
When I run the hunt through my mother I get kin to Washington but when I hunt starting with my father I get closer kin, another way. Let me run her way again. Yes, I am much less kin on my mother's side, I see, but in the list are Butlers; I saw Butler in what they showed on TV today, so that's the way McCain is kin to Washington.
When a bunch of ancestors arrive in Virginia in the 1600s, what do you expect? You are kin to half of the South. When you have Scots who get down fast to North Carolina, you end up going roundabout, the Butler way. But is there a way of toting up 2 different cousinships to arrive at a single digit, so you can say George and I are fifth cousins three times removed, or something like that, and not say one way we are so much kin and another way we are so much kin?

Because of how he treated Anita Hill we moved to PA in time to vote against Arlin Specter; however, the State turned Medieval

Pennsylvania demanded to know about every piece of jewelry we owned, every radio or television we owned, every item of a value of (what was it?) 85 dollars. We paid for two years then I wrote this:

Leonard Pitts and me on Robert Ussery, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, Donald Trump, and Michael Shelden: "The Stupidification of America."

In today's San Luis Obispo TRIBUNE Leonard Pitts tells of a new episode of "breathtaking emotional cruelty." Pastor Frank Pomeroy, whose daughter Annabelle was killed in the massacre at the First Baptist Church in November, was accosted by Robert Ussery, who yelled at him: "Your daughter never even existed. Show me her birth certificate." It turns out that Ussery denies many other mass shootings. "Show me her birth certificate" instantly reminds us of the Birther who was elected to the Presidency. If the highest elected official in the country can be an unapologetic Birther for years, why can't Ussery? Pitts deplores "America's vanishing ability—and willingness—to reason." What Pitts calls "the stupidification of America," he says, has "crept upon us over the course of a generation."
It appeared in American universities even before it "crept" into public discourse. In December 1990 the Melville Society meeting was packed with New Historicists, second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics who had never done archival research and had certainly not been taught to do responsible research. I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the audience was hostile from the start. When Wai-chee Dimock resurrected Lewis Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville (before he met him or read anything but Typee), Harrison Hayford mildly reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean murmur of anger in the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of biographical evidence. My diary for the day described my having gone unknowingly into the Lions' Den.
In the new post-scholarly climate, to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should always enhance one’s playmate’s self-esteem. The audience at the 1990 MLA was further incited when an onlooker described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and Turner as “the petulant stranger in the doorway” kept crying out, with regard to Melville and history, ‘the facts don’t matter.’” Accepting what the satanic red-bearded prophet meant, I never attended another Melville Society meeting in the United States, although I went in 1997 to Cancun so we could climb the pyramids at Chichen Itza. Partly because of the hostile takeover of the Melville Society, I decided, as I said from the platform of a program on F. Scott Fitzgerald in Toronto in 1993, that attending the annual Modern Language Association convention had become a moral issue. The issue was settled right after that meeting when a Melvillean some years my senior proposed that we adjourn to his hotel room where we could “strip" and go at each other "one to one” over differing interpretations.
The facts did not matter in 1990, and have not mattered since then. A dean at Yale and later President of Duke University, Richard Brodhead, in the June 23, 2002, New York Times announced that I had invented two lost Melville books, The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air. Only I in my "black hole" had heard of Poems, Brodhead said, although everyone had known about Poems since 1922. As for The Isle of the Cross, everyone had known since 1960 that Melville had completed a book in 1853, but I did not announce my discovery of the title until 1990, in the lead article of American Literature. In the New Republic (September 30, 2002) the biographer-to-be Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco said I couldn’t be trusted at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of those lost books (34). He had, of course, not read all of the book he was reviewing, for the evidence about the books is on the pages. And the Kansas professor Elizabeth Schultz in Common Review Winter 2002) echoed those two critics, decrying the merely “putative” existence of those books I claimed Melville had written.
Even if they have admitted that these two lost books once existed, recent academic critics have continued to ignore the reality that months of Melville's working life went into The Isle of the Cross (December 1852-May or June 1853) and parts of three years (1857-1860) went into the composition of Poems. My point is that when you think of the trajectory of Melville's writing life, you need to take account of months or years spent on something that a writer remembers keenly even if no one else can perceive it. I know something from personal experience about this, having written in the early 1970s a thorough account of Fredson Bowers's astonishingly incompetent edition of Stephen Crane's Maggie, a temperate but relentless exposé which no textual journal would publish and which led Bowers to blackball me from the Center for Scholarly Editions (although he later falsely denied doing so). For two decades I lived with one of my most important studies unpublished, while many people in the textual community knew of it but no one would dare to mention it because of Bowers's threats to sue. At last it was published by a brave editor in the Antipodes, when it was too late to do any good to the editing of American classics. I could imagine how Melville remembered the months he labored on The Isle of the Cross and in the process grew or at least changed from Pierre to his first work on short stories. You do not forget a long important part of your writing life.
In 2016 Michael Shelden published Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of "Moby-Dick," described as a new account of Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick. It was, the ads said, "based on fresh archival research, which reveals that the anarchic spirit animating Melville’s canonical work was inspired by his great love affair with a shockingly unconventional married woman." The book was in fact not based on new archival documents and in fact wilfully ignored many known documents which flatly contradicted the premise of the book. In fact, Sarah Morewood was an unstable woman who had notoriously pursued a dashing brother-in-law of President Tyler in 1849 and in 1851 and afterwards was pursuing the strikingly demure religious brother of Evert Duyckinck. She was not pursuing Melville in 1850. Melville did not need a living muse for Moby-Dick, for he had the Bible, Shakespeare, and other great writers down to De Quincey. Now we are promised for the Summer 2018 a Newton's Law Productions documentary on Shelden's documentary account of Melville's love affair with Sarah Morewood. What meaning does the word "documentary" have any more? The stupidification of America, Pitts says. Yet some of us try to establish the truth and tell the truth.

Today at 11 am. Black dots on shore: sandpipers. Dots in water: surfers' heads.

Noel Earl Polk--among those who died far too early

Testing iPhone and now deleting after every day's pictures--ORNERY PEOPLE books

The outsized ones are elsewhere, and some more regular sized books. They grow. Oddly, my books on biography (practice of, theory of) grew more slowly when I was doing MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE.
How I wish Fletcher Hill's newspaper series on his escape from the Danville VA prison was available, even in a mouse-gnawed pamphlet dug out of the wall of an Ohio tavern. At least I have cousin Tom Bell's captivity narrative, his story of the Mier disaster. Will Bagley, look at the picture.

Hurray hurray huzza how I deleted 3000 pictures from my iphone

You have suffered, I know, from not having daily pictures of Morro Rock. I received 83 emails asking if it was still there. I tried 20 different directions on Google to delete my photographs so I could take more. Finally I got to this one:


You click on the first two, open the DCIM, open the 100Apple--well, I did not have that but opened 101Apple and tried deleting one at a time then hit control A and deleted several hundred then went through 102 103Apple and got rid of them all, I think. And if this goes up you lucky people can see Morro Rock again, unless tomorrow is like today, when the fog was too thick to see it even from Highway 41's end.
Now, I learned about people on Google. The first joker gave good instructions right down to delete everything on your iPhone including passwords.

One politician pecking at another's eye while prone dark one is still alive

Finally, a few folks at the beach

Met no one, Saw no one, Either Going or Coming Back

So it was 8 o'clock on a day when rain was predicted and a few drops had fallen and were falling. The wind, unusually, was from the South.
The only sign of human life was, far away by the Rock, a floating white coffin, waist high, heading for the water, which I at last interpreted as a white surf board being carried to the ocean. Not a single person there but an 82 year old guy whose purple LLBean anorak kept him snug.

House Fire near Yerba Buena