Such a beautiful day yesterday

 

On windy Moonstone Beach today

 43 years together.

Three days early: 71 years ago, 29 June 1952

 

29 June 2023

71 Years Ago

 In 1952, 71 years ago today, at 16, after the 11th grade, I was driven by a man who is long dead to a cavernous depot, now long demolished, in a town, Howe, Oklahoma, which no longer exists, where I bought a one-way ticket on a railroad that no longer exists, the Rock Island, to go to Oklahoma City, where I would spend the night with a man long dead before going on to Coffeyville, Kansas for a physical examination then going back to Red Rock, Oklahoma, to a depot that no longer exists, to take a job that no longer exists, that of railroad telegrapher, my job until the end of August 1959, when the Beaumont Journal, a paper that no longer exists, printed a picture of me as having graduated from Lamar State College of Technology with the highest honors in English, upon which I resigned as night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad at Port Arthur, Texas, and drove to Evanston, Illinois, to enroll at Northwestern University, which still exists.

 

The bread I made this morning

 

One Damn Thing After Another--Stye from Iron Man's woman and now a little Skin Cancer

 

Roger Payne and Lisa Harrow with me at Montana de Oro 2004

 

A Better Picture of the Historical Books I have Bought for the new Book

 

Any ideas about self-publishing my AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS? I am going to look at IngramSpark

 

    Has anyone ever self-published a book? I have published many books and have won awards. I am on the Pulitzer list and two times I won the top PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers. The book I have recently finished is a product of genealogical and historical research. This means research into episodes of American history in which cousins or sometimes direct ancestors of mine took part, often in unexpectedly significant ways. The chapters all deal with kinfolks of mine from the 1600s onward but mainly in 1700s and 1800s and into the 1900s and a little in the 2000s. They all deal with significant historical events such as the thrust westward, the Civil War, Reconstruction, mistreatment of Indians, the corruption of the Choctaw governors in Indian Territory, the bravery of a slave family (Black Costners), the ignorant racism of a cousin who caused the great Houston riot of 1917 and the killing and imprisonment of Buffalo Soldiers. Two chapters deal with the massacre of an Arkansas wagon train in which several of my cousins were bound for California. 

    I am a real scholar. Harrison Hayford, the treat Melvillean, in 1996 for the first volume of my biography of Melville called me (on the dust jacket) "quite simply the most important Melville scholar of all time." Most of my early research was in the great libraries. In my work on AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS I have sat in my chair here in Morro Bay writing a lot on Melville still, as I did in the east, up through 2019 when the Library of America volume was published. Since 2002 in stolen time I have become a genealogist just for my family, whom were almost totally unknown to me.

I joined all the newspaper archive sites, one by one, as I saw I needed more. I found ways of reading political and genealogical articles I needed. I wrote to state archives when I had to. But I did not go to archives as I had done in the 1900s. Yet I have an archive of over ten thousand documents in one computer file. The world has changed. 

    I have also been reading books on American history. I am trying to put a jpg photograph here. It will not include many TALL BOOKS such as county histories. FRUSTRATING--My jpg is being rejected. Here, the wall of shorter books.

 

    University presses these days all seem to be overstaffed to begin with. Why, at a cocktail party in LA Jerry Graff asked what I was writing and I told him and he said he wanted it for Northwestern University Press and a couple of years later I gave it to him, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (1984). Now you are asked to send multiple copies to chiefs and underlings so they can send them to the crew who looks for typos and then with all the original, carefully preserved spellings removed the work goes to massively enlarged WOKE committee and by that time the elderly author it totally senile or dead and the press has to hire additional staff.

     I'll be 88 this fall. It's astonishing that I finished the book, given the assaults on my health since 200, but here it is. A dear friend died last week at 88, ten months older than me. I will not be able to "submit" the book to anyone who will welcome it, I guess.

    And I am reminded that the editor of Melville journal in this century devised a fiendish application process invented in a Bondage and Discipline coven. You had to submit, and submit, and submit.

Where is Jerry Graff when I need him? Surprise surprise, Google says he is still alive! Born in 1937 and still alive! Well, I guess he can't help.

Now who has self-published who can tell me what he or she went through. Did they submit even more insultingly as they would have to do to abase themselves before the Woke tyrants? Have you ever tried to dictate on Microsoft 11, copying a historical text, then see that words have been replaced with ***** ***** etc.? I have a step great grandfather who comes out as William *****. Trained at Microsoft 11, they are hired at university presses?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the best talks I ever gave and Roger had driven down to hear it. I did not expect him to be there.

 

28 April 2007: "Joy of seeing Roger Payne 1/2 across the room"

"Signaled Peter W to come & talk to him." Peter, one of Melville's great great grandsons.
How many people give you joy when you see them half way across the room?

This was at the Aster Restaurant in Lenox MA. Splendid people were there. Ruth and Dick Degenhardt, Dick looking and feeling fit. Lion G. Miles. David Greetham and Robin. Others.

Roger Payne in 2016 is reading a new unpublished piece by Jonathan Lethem written for the Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK

 

Roger outside the study here in March 2016

 

Roger in my messy study in Morro Bay

 

In Clapham Common in 1997 --Roger Payne and Hershel Parker

 

New York Times on the Horror that is Fresno--where the rich flee to Carmel, Pebble Beach, and Morro Bay

 

The one thing Northside and Southside [of Fresno] share, and it is no trivial feature, is air that is often ranked as the most polluted in the nation. But there’s a difference in this too. The lawyers, doctors, developers, nut growers and pesticide dealers have second homes along the coast, in Carmel and Pebble Beach and Morro Bay, to restore their sinuses and lungs. The farmworkers sit on their lawn chairs after picking the valley’s endless harvest and watch the poison-specked sunset turn the most glorious pink, orange and purple.

 

Biden and aging

 Aging, aging. A picture of Biden today and the news that if he wins in 2024 and survives he will be 86 when he leaves office. In 1988, after his aneurysm surgeries, I went up to him at (where else) the Amtrak depot to say it was good seeing him look so strong. Beau was with him looking immortal. I am nearer 88 now than 87. I have finished the book I started the day George Floyd killed. I started it then because only then did I see a way to make something coherent from ten thousand (and more) documents on my American family. I pulled out the ones obviously about race. I finished it despite (starting earlier in 2020), prostate work, near blindness misdiagnosed as lymphoma but really Valley Fever. Blood clot, hallucinatory vertigo, many falls (some severe), fainting on the beach that ended with a heart procedure last Fall. I still don't know if I can make use of the thousands of documents in my "Ornery People" file which are not so obviously about race. It's 9 and I will be at the beach soon, but only going a mile and a quarter, not 2. Now, I could not have an office job any more. I have beautiful long London Majesty neckties in Ancient Madder but I don't wear them. I wish the Democratic Party had a dozen men or women as good as Beto. Failing that, I wish Biden strength. I will never see him looking as I did in the depot in 1988.