A Divertimento

The Velvet Underground Through the Lens of ’60s New York

Worth Reading

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety

Once fired and humiliated, the person is erased for a time from our revolutionary memories (we suddenly could not easily buy Garrison Keillor’s books, and Paula Deen seemed to vanish from television). Megyn Kelly will probably go into opulent seclusion and find herself disinvited from ceremonial appearances and speaking events, guillotined as a racist, with no more sympathy than a once privileged, beheaded Bourbon.

We now fear the lethal wrath of the Internet’s Committee of Public Safety. But beware of fickle revolutionary temperament. Soon our 21st-century Robespierres may become so promiscuous and obnoxious in their beheading that they wear out even the mob — and find themselves next in line on a counterrevolutionary chopping block.

Part-Time Job Opportunity

I'm not sure why I was sent this, but please don't share it on social media.  It might make people cynical about American politics.

He has a Valid Point [as Overheard While Accidentally Listening to PBS]

Comedian Dave Chappelle to Christiane Amanpour: Trump gets “too much credit” for defining the era. “He’s not making the wave. He’s surfing it.”

Also, as Dave apparently reads The Coracle, he seems to be keeping up to date on our loopy series of rules.

A Hunger for High-Fat Food Means Winter is Coming

Lancashire Butter Pie: The rich, potato-filled dish nourished Catholics on meatless Fridays.

It's Come to This, Has It?

Four Things You Can Do Right Now to Harden Your Place of Worship Against a Shooter

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

BBC: The young black Americans backing Trump

I'm not making a political point, just noting a sociological shift in process.

Sotto Voce, One Hears This from Professionals

The Unspoken Homophobia Propelling the Transgender Movement in Children

Actually, This is Kind of a Problem

Matthew Shepard Is the World's Most Famous Gay Hate Crime Victim. But Was He Really Killed for Being Gay?

A Pungent Observation

I've been trying to stay out of the political sphere as it is making me increasingly cynical, and that is not a good perspective on the world when one is plunging into one's senior years.  It turns one into a crank more concerned with the neighborhood simpletons is in his yard.  But this whole mail bomb deal is starting to crack me up.

I don't want to sound like most of my colleagues do whenever something happens in the news and they suddenly become experts on weather, climate, international relations, socialist ideology, or firearms.  My colleagues mean well, and certainly see themselves as laborers for salvation, but most of them don't carry a deep education in anything practical and are woefully inexperienced outside of what's now called "The Blue Bubble".

However, I'm not a whitey from the East, and I wasn't always a holy boy.  I once told a bishop that I had been a member of the NRA [the only real source of training and safety; the best insurance for one's firearms] and I watched her face freeze, then blanch, as she took on the general verbal hesitation of a GPS when it's "re-calculating".

You see, when you have an Ivy League education, appear East Coast white, wear Oliver Peoples eyeglass frames, and have passed through the ordination maw of The Episcopal Church, it is assumed that you are just another clergy NPC.  It literally renders colleagues speechless whenever I deviate from the narrative.

But, I digress.

The thing is, I know how to build a bomb; what's nowadays called an "improvised explosive device".  I was taught by the best people in world at this [not the Weather Underground; the Defense Department].  They taught me a lot of other things that I rarely use, such as firearms maintenance and repair, conversational Arabic, a surprising number of ways to kill someone with one's bare hands, and the manual of arms.

If the bomb shown on CNN that was received at their studio is representative of the mail bombs sent to various public loudmouths, then these weren't bombs.  For one, the advantage of a pipe bomb is that all of its parts, the detonator, the timer, the wiring, the shrapnel, the powder, etc., are contained within the device.  Real pipe bombs more or less look like...pipes.

Also, the clock attached by wires to the "bomb" doesn't have a timer.  So, it's just a clock, rather like the one that strange kid in Texas made for his school project a few years ago that looked like a bomb.  It may have gotten the attention of the then-President, but it wasn't even a functional clock.  The CNN "bomb" at least can tell time.  Given that there is no apparent detonator, it can't blow up.

So, it isn't a bomb.  It cannot explode.  It was made not to maim or kill, but to scare.  That explains why it had to look so obviously like one of those bombs that Wile E. Coyote would make out of parts from Acme.  Even to a piker, it had to look like a bomb.

But here's the part that sends me to Cynicville:  Someone at CNN, probably a mailroom employee, dumped what looked like a bomb onto a table or desk in what appears to be a break room and took photos of it.  Then they told law enforcement about it.  That's not what people do when they receive a bomb, or even a "bomb", in the mail.

Given that within minutes similarly worded reactions appeared across social media, and a fully formed op-ed piece was posted in proper news outlets, my inner cynic is getting restless.

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

God Bless You, Frank Miller

A Friday profile of Frank Miller was offered by The Coracle a few years ago.

So Long, Swamp King

From outlaw country to the Allman Brothers to Lynyrd Skynyrd to about half of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's catalog, whenever blues, rock, and country collide to make a recording, it's because of him.

Waldo Peirce

Originally published on January 25, 2013

"I'm a painter, not an artist".

I always wanted to write a biography of Waldo Peirce, mainly because of two photographs, separated by about twenty years.  The first is of Peirce with his Harvard roommate; the second of Peirce with a writer friend on a beach in France in the 1920's.  There is nothing remarkable about either photograph, except that his college roommate would become one of the most influential and famous journalists of the early 20th century and his beach buddy would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

There is much about Peirce that I really shouldn't care for, as he was born into money, had a first-class education shoved into his grudging hands, and was able to move easily through the seminal experiences of the American century, dragging along four wives, five children, and a considerable number of paintings.  It all came to him rather easily, along with rude health and vigor.  He once stated that he never worked a day in his life.

But, what's interesting about him is that he was what Goethe and Balzac referred to in their respective languages as a "life-artist".  As we have seen before with literary artists such as Yukio Mishima and James Magner, there is something compelling about those who wish not only to create tactile art, but to merge their lives with it so that it is a seamless expression of the sheer joy of living out of the bounds of normal expectation.

Peirce was sent to Phillips Andover and then to Harvard where his roommate was John Reed, eventual author of Ten Days That Shook The World, who was a great chronicler of the worker's movement in the United States and of the Russian Revolution.  So prized was Reed's sympathetic reporting during Lenin's rise to power that he is buried in the Kremlin Wall.  [Some may recall a film of thirty years back entitled "Reds", which starred Warren Beatty as Reed].  Reed and Peirce took a trip to Europe upon graduation and got into some trouble with the shipping line on the return voyage.  Peirce, upon leaving port, decided that the ship and its accommodations weren't to his liking so he jumped overboard and swam back to shore.  Upon discovering a missing passenger, the ship's captain had Reed locked in the brig under suspicion of murder.  There are a number of endings to this story, the most amusing is that Peirce was waiting at the dock upon Reed's arrival back in the United States, having taken a faster ship, thus untangling the potential murder charges.

During World War I, like other men who would one day claim distinction in the art world [a full list may be found here], Peirce joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps and served with distinction at the front, gaining some French medals along the way.  After the war, and again like many Americans who served, he remained in Paris to be a part of the very large and creative expatriate community that included Ernest Hemingway, who became one of Peirce's life-long friends.

From a Harvard Magazine article from some years back:

Living and painting in Paris off and on in the 1920s, Peirce became friends with many of the notables who defined this period in the arts: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Bernice Abbott, Archibald MacLeish, LL.B. ’19, John Dos Passos ’16—and Ernest Hemingway, another wartime ambulance driver. He and Hemingway stayed friends for life, a relationship not sustained by many other Hemingway associates from the Paris days; their letters to each other were filled with news, gossip, and witty passages, often interlaced with Spanish and French asides. Both men were voracious readers. Both were remarkable presences in a room, regaling others with ribald tales, great stories, and vivid word pictures. Their six-foot frames and beards were as impressive as their artistic talents. (Peirce was occasionally referred to as the “Hemingway of American painting,” but said once that made as much sense as “calling Hemingway ‘the Peirce of American literature.’”) Both men shared a formidable gusto for life and adventure—each married four times—and possessed an unending, consuming curiosity about the world around them. Fishing was their passion, and several times Peirce joined Hemingway in the Dry Tortugas and the Marquesas Keys. Never without a sketchbook, he captured these expeditions in oils and watercolors. When Hemingway’s face graced the cover of Time in 1937—he had just published To Have and Have Not—the magazine used a Peirce portrait of his friend holding a fishing pole, eyes focused on the line. The two can also be found together in other Peirce paintings—fighting bulls in Pamplona, drinking in Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, catching tarpon in the Gulf Stream.

On his many visits to Key West, Peirce was always sure to bring both his paints and his children, along with a rather singular sense of his parental duties.  Hemingway wrote in a letter:

"Waldo is here with his kids like untrained hyenas and him as domesticated as a cow. Lives only for the children and with the time he puts on them they should have good manners and be well trained but instead they never obey, destroy everything, don't even answer when spoken to, and he is like an old hen with a litter of apehyenas. I doubt if he will go out in the boat while he is here. Can't leave the children. They have a nurse and a housekeeper too, but he is only really happy when trying to paint with one setting fire to his beard and the other rubbing mashed potato into his canvasses. That represents fatherhood."

He lived a long life and left many works of art scattered about museums both great and small, including the Smithsonian.  The bulk of his estate was left to Colby College in Maine, near where he lived his final two decades, including not only paintings but some of the most entertaining letters one can ever hope to read.

Archaeological News

Discovery of Ancient Spearpoints in Texas Has Some Archaeologists Questioning the History of Early Americas

BOLO

Giant inflatable colon stolen in Kansas City

Useful Information

HANDY HINT 25: If you stir coconut oil in to kale, it makes it easier to scrape in to the bin. pic.twitter.com/NPYkW3J4jv

— Handy hints (@unhandyhints) October 23, 2018

The Erosion of American Liberty

CDC warns against dressing up pet chickens for Halloween

Quotation of the Day

"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't" -  from Modern Philosophy by Roger Scruton.

Ghost Legions

Consider these staggering statistics. Prime-age American men in employment spend 2,200 hours a year in work and work-related activity; employed women spend 1,850 hours; unemployed men spend 400 hours, mostly looking for jobs. But 7 million American men between 25 and 54 spent 43 hours a year working. That averages out to about 7 minutes a day. 

And what did they do with their time? Learn French? Paint watercolours? Help at a local nursing home? Vacuuming? None of the above. They spent less time in volunteer and religious activities than the other three groups. They don’t read newspapers much. They don’t vote much. A third of them have used illegal drugs in the past. 

Basically they did nothing much.

Yeah, they certainly aren't going to church.

Every Word

The Cherokee Nation is not buying it, denouncing Senator Warren’s extraordinarily tenuous claim to native ancestry as “a mockery,” “dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens,” “inappropriate and wrong,” etc. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage,” Cherokee Nation secretary of state Chuck Hoskin Jr. wrote. 

Identity politics is generally goofy and often trivial, but this is no trivial thing: The Cherokee Nation is a separate sovereign nation, with the rights and dignity that implies. It deserves to be treated with respect, not used as a prop by an ambitious low-rent hustler from Oklahoma.  

White people did some pretty rotten things to the Indians over the years. But making them take Elizabeth Warren on top of it? That’s just mean.

What gets me is that the very same people who tell me that Chief Wahoo is racist support Warren and claim they will vote for her.

A logo for a team you don't follow in a sport you don't care about in a city and state in which you wouldn't be caught dead, is racist.

The woman who looks like you and reflects your ideology?  When she steals native identity, that doesn't even earn a shrug.

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

Is ‘Christian Humanism’ Gone Forever?  The last of the brave thinkers and authors in this tradition are long gone.  Can anyone replace them?

Swein MacDonald

Originally published on January 8, 2013 

My mother's family are Highlanders.  If you are of Scots descent, you know what that means.  If you aren't, well, it's a bit hard to explain. 

Scotland is divided into the Highlands, Lowlands, and The Borders.  The Borders is the area that abuts northern England.  While Highlanders tend to carry names that begin with "Mac", Borderers carry the familiar Scottish surnames of Armstrong, Elliot, Scott, Douglas, Hepburn, Bruce and Johnston, among others. North of the Border is the Lowlands, which includes most of the economic and political life of the country, an area from the Firth of Clyde in the west to Moray Firth in the east. In the Lowlands one finds the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. 

Inverness and north lie the Highlands, an area of geographic distinction from the rest of the country.    The Highlanders belong to the various clans that claim particular, sometimes spectacular, roles in the history of the northern Britons.  My mother's family are the Mackay on the maternal side, and the McIntyre on the paternal.  Again, this is meaningless save to other Highlanders.

Highlanders are by turns aristocratic and common; sagacious and intemperate, literate and pre-verbal.  Because of their physical isolation from the other areas of Scotland, they became self-sufficient and remarkably redoubtable, forming the tightly-knit system of clan membership that kept them protected from the vagaries of English rule.

They were a hardy, active and warlike people - of this there is no possible doubt. Everybody who has left early evidence testifies to it, and not generally in flattering terms. Such people need to be well nourished, and the Highlanders were always great meat eaters. They bred cattle in their glens, and their woods were full of game that they loved to hunt. At a time when the Lowlander of central Scotland was little better than a serf, tyrannized by greedy bonnet lairds [landed proprietors], and lived mainly off brose and oatmeal, the Highlander was well fed. 
[Scottish Highlanders, Barnes and Noble Books, 1992. P.29]

In such an atmosphere, Highlanders also tended to be closer to the more mystical elements of human experience.  Hence, they claim to have developed an acute form of what psychologists refer to as hyper-observation.  In the Highlands, it's called "second sight".  Those blessed, or cursed, with second sight can predict events before they happen, note occurrences from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and receive terrific visions.  My Great-Granny Mackay was one of her clan's seers and she could be positively spooky sometimes.  My grandfather used to try to get her to pick horses for him, but I don't think she was keen on betraying the gift so that her son-in-law could win a few extra bob at the track.

While every clan has its seer, there is usually one who stands out even in the competitive world of Highland para-psychology.  That man or woman is generally declared a "Highland Seer", although I don't think the office is all that formal.  The first so recognized was Coinneachd Odhar of Brahan in the 17th century, who died after being "burned in a barrel of tar at Chanonry Point on the Black Isle on the orders of the Countess of Seaforth, after he declared he 'saw' her husband in dalliance with a courtesan in Paris."*  For a fair part of the 20th century, the best known Highland Seer was Swein MacDonald.  Well, depending on whom you ask.  To some, he was a consummate con man.

There isn't all that much about him online, which is appropriate, as he really didn't seek fame or fortune.  [Although notoriety he certainly found.]  After working as a performing psychic, he retired to a humble life in a crofter's cottage in the Highlands, a life many of us would think rather perfect.  From there he would offer his "readings".  He charged very little for these and gave what he made to charity. But, whether a lord or lady, movie star or undergrad in his cups, MacDonald offered both hospitality and a sometimes frighteningly accurate prediction for them.

My particular memory of him is that he would be featured on Scottish radio every New Year's Eve, telling us what we might expect in the year to come.  With a talent for the theatrical, something that can never be taught, his presentation was the only part of New Year's entertainment that I never missed, even after moving back to the US, when I would listen to the BBC on an underpowered shortwave radio.

MacDonald died in 2003.  The current Seer does not seek publicity, so the great accessibility offered by MacDonald is no more, which is understandable, but somewhat of a pity.  Highlanders never seek to be regarded as "grand", you see.  That's best left to the Lowlanders.

This anecdote from MacDonald's life is to be found in a remembrance of him published in The Herald of Scotland on the occasion of his death.  There is something wonderfully Highland about it:

"Well-known names in show business, the film industry, and among the nobility regularly called on him, either in person or by telephone. He had offers to be flown to the United States, to Switzerland, and to the Middle East for consultations with the rich and powerful. Of course, the media loved him. The sceptical news editor of a Glasgow-based paper telephoned him gruffly to arrange an interview. ''I don't like your attitude, my man,'' Swein told him stiffly, ''and furthermore you are conducting an illicit affair with a woman called M.'' The startled news editor abruptly terminated the call."

[*from Tremayne's History of the Scottish Folk: The Highlands.]

Quotation of the Day

"We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism" - Clay Routledge

The Government Fixed The Schools Again, I See

Thanks, Common Core: ACT Scores for Class of 2018 Worst in Decades

I used to scoff as conspiracy-minded people who thought that the government was deliberately creating a generation of gormless ignoramuses because they're easy to control.  Yeah, I don't scoff anymore.

I mean, too many of the politically active young people I know repeat the same words without having any notion of their definition or historical context.  If you disagree with them, they need to go to safe spaces and play with children's toys.

They've become the Eloi.

Other Than That, the Study was Perfect

American Academy of Pediatrics policy and trans- kids:Fact-checking

These claims struck me as odd because there are no studies of conversion therapy for gender identity. Studies of conversion therapy have been limited to sexual orientation—specifically, the sexual orientation of adults—not gender identity, and not children in any case. The article AAP cited to support their claim (reference number 38) is indeed a classic and well-known review, but it is a review of sexual orientation research only. Neither gender identity, nor even children, received even a single mention in it. Indeed, the narrower scope of that article should be clear to anyone reading even just its title: “The practice and ethics of sexual orientation conversion therapy” (Haldeman, 1994, p. 221, italics added).

Considering the suicide attempt rate among transgendered young people is as high as 50%, it may be time for an objective study.  Being "woke" will earn a researcher grants, but it also leads to the inaccurate address of psychological issues.

Of course, being "woke" is rarely anything other than a form of self-congratulation on the part of the researcher, so that is well-covered.  I mean, what's a few suicides here or there...and here and there...as long as it means grant money and tenure?

Just Put Them in a Stall with a Feedbag

Panasonic's human blinkers help people concentrate in open-plan offices

A stupid fix for a stupid office plan = Stupid squared

Credentialed Experts are Going to Be the Death of Us

Harvard Calls for Retraction of Dozens of Studies by Noted Cardiologist: Some 31 studies by Dr. Piero Anversa contain fabricated or falsified data, officials concluded. Dr. Anversa popularized the idea of stem cell treatment for damaged hearts.

It Sure Seems That Way

Feminism and royalty are made for each other

Today, in contrast, feminism is the status quo. The dominance of feminism, and in particular the new orthodoxies being established through #MeToo, tells us that high-profile women, journalists, BBC presenters, film stars and royalty now have more to gain through being associated with feminism than with appearing to reject it. Feminism today supports and reinforces the privileges of the elite: it does not pose a threat to them...No, today it seems as if royalty and feminism are perfectly suited to each other: both are posh, prissy and condescending.

A Quotation of Note

"We're back to feminist puritanism again ... We're talking about mental imbalance. We're talking about hysteria that has nothing whatever to do with women's rights. These are neurotics who are talking about hatred of men, who are poisoning the culture." - Camille Paglia

On Behalf of My People, Liz, Please Stop This

Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. released a statement saying “a DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship,” adding that Warren is “undermining tribal interests":

“Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America. Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation.” 

“Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

More:  Did Elizabeth Warren Just Kill Identity Politics? If the Massachusetts senator is now a person of color then the term has no meaning.

Something Actually Useful

Ten Must-Have Travel Apps for Carefree Trips

Get used to links such as this.  I'm in the middle of organizing the second portion of a three-part circumnavigation and in the research stage.

For those interested [Hi, sis], the first part took my wife and me from the Pacific Northwest to Hawaii, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australia.  This included crossing both the equator and the International Dateline [on the water; not in the air].

Part two will take us from the Gulf of Mexico through the Keys and across the Atlantic, with stops in the Canaries, into the Med, along the Costa del Sol, and on to Western Africa.

Part three will include South America.  That one won't be planned until I'm halfway through part two.

So, What's with All the Malthusian Terror?

Things look pretty good at home, too. There are things I would prefer to see done differently, and some important problems that are not being treated as seriously as I would prefer. But the nation is at peace, and it is prospering. (For the most part.) Americans have developed a weird, cultish, caesaropapist attitude toward the presidency, without ever stopping to consider that the nation has thrived under the administration of a succession of very different men with very different political agendas: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, now, Donald Trump: The fact that America just keeps on trucking irrespective of the qualities or character of the man in the Oval Office ought to make us think rather less of the presidency and rather more of ourselves — and think better of our neighbors, our businesses, our public institutions, our civil society, and much else — including the citizens who do not share our political views.So why the mass hysteria?

The Reality of the Post-Christian Age

Moral Pollution In Place of Reasoned Critique

Repent! Repent! The End is Near!

The UN climate-change panel that cried wolf too often

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

Why atheism was central to the great evil of the 20th century

James Magner

Originally published on January 11, 2013

"Larry, I can't find my car keys.  Would you just drop the papers off at my house?"

I didn't usually mind driving out to Magner's house, as it was in a pleasant neighborhood that overlooked the lake, any more than I minded being called "Larry". [Larry having been Magner's last research assistant.  I recall hoping that my successor at least would be called by my name, but she was probably called Larry, too.]  It was just I was never sure what would meet me at his door. 

Sometimes it would be unlocked and I would find him out in the back yard, wandering with the neighbor's dog, locked in a deep conversation with the animal.  Sometimes the door would be locked, because, in the twenty minutes it took for me to get there, he would have forgotten that I was coming; I would find him either at the corner bar and grille or the Chinese restaurant next to it.  Sometimes he would be just standing at the door, looking like Walt Whitman's impossibly younger brother.  Other times, he would be in the dining room poring over a pile of notes that contained correspondence with other professors or other poets; stray verses for poems in mid-composition, or the grocery list that was mostly made up of things for his neighbor's dog.

When he was writing he would wear a weathered John Carroll University sweatshirt in that shade of gray familiar to those of us old enough to recall the days before synthetic fabrics became the preference in athletic apparel.  On those occasions, I knew to drop off the "papers" [really, it was just the mail from his faculty mailbox; the usual detritus of announcements about grading deadlines, upcoming sports events, a term paper that was two months late, and other items familiar to educators] and leave, as he would be so deep in a shell constructed of rhyme and meter that normal conversation would have been impossible, and may have destroyed his creative trance.

The days I used to prize, though, were those when I would find his front door unlocked and Erroll Garner playing from the stereo.  That meant that whatever he had been working on was completed to his satisfaction and he was feeling expansive enough to talk to me for hours of his days in the demi-monde, what it was like to hang out with the Beat poets like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, his Korean War memories, and, since he had once been a boxer, the best moves to use when you know you're over-matched [as I always was when boxing].  I really enjoyed it when he would begin sentences with statements like, "You know, Kerouac used to do this thing with his face...."

In the classroom he was a natural teacher.  There is no better professor of poetry than a poet, of course, as he knows not only how difficult it is to compose in even rough verse what has been captured by the heart's imagination, but the importance of perspective.  It was also interesting to think in terms of the practical concerns of a poet, such as what it takes to get something published and how much one anticipates how the verses are received by others.  Thus, Magner presented poems not just as some editor's choice for a textbook, but as portions of the souls of artists.  He was always particular about recognizing the familiar in the poet's narrative voice. 

I once saw him teaching a class filled with shy, and a little overwhelmed, freshmen, trying to get them to venture away from the safe observations that had gotten them through high school lit classes and into this new world of Magner-ness.  "So, who's Hardy's narrative voice?  Can you describe him?"  When met with the inevitable silence, he would ask in a voice lifted from a Hanna-Barbara cartoon, "Is it Joey Bananas?"  It would take awhile, but he'd get them loosened up enough to become thinking readers of lyrical verse.

Once, when discussing Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens", he stopped in mid-discussion and said, "It sounds like a song by Eddie Foy."  He then began to compose, extempore, the music to which Foy would have set the poem.  It was through Magner, and his nimble classroom technique, that I finally gained an appreciation for Gerard Manly Hopkins, a poet for whom I had no previous use.  For that alone I am obliged to him. 

One evening, after his third Manhattan, he found an old cigar box resting on some books on the bottom shelf of his library and handed me correspondence from Thomas Merton.  I hadn't known, but wasn't surprised, that the two had written back and forth for years and that Magner had once studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood and even been a monk.  In addition to Hopkins, he gave me something else that I had never had before: an appreciation for the poetic that may be found in ordained service to God.

James Magner was a long-time professor at John Carroll University, a Jesuit institution in greater Cleveland, where I studied literature at the graduate level and served as his researcher and general dogsbody.  He published at least five books of well-received poetry and a wonderfully lyrical fictionalized autobiography. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1965, 1968, 1973, 1976, and 1978.  I regret that small poetry is so transient these days that finding copies of his work is difficult, however from a review of one of his longer works, "Till No Light Leaps", the critic observed that his poetic voice was "an amalgam of Melville and St. Augustine, bridging both Eastern and Western philosophy, presenting an original view on the Christian notion of fate."  Yeah, that's why I'm not a poetry critic.

One of his publishers noted, "As every individual soul who was fortunate enough to know Magner will affirm, he had that unconditional love for and immediate acceptance of everyone just exactly as they were – as they stumbled, as they stood, as they soared. He was one of those rare birds in this life who was both brilliant and insightful, yet compassionate and humble – an uncommon and wondrous concoction of love and intellect that enabled him to quite easily identify and affirm the unique essence of each and every person – without regard to race, religion, profession, status, or education."

James Magner died in the summer of 2000.  A couple of months later I received a slim volume of previously unpublished poetry in the mail, sent on by his executor.  In the frontis he had written, "To Larry Rob, with appreciation."  In the back was found a letter from the poet Richard Eberhart, one of his other friends, that said, "Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive."

Well, Magner survives in the hearts of all of his students, especially those who went on to teach, to serve as novitiates in monasteries, and to ordained priesthood.  Thanks to him, I have always seen priesthood not as a professional function, but as a form of poetry itself.  While that may explain my rather unimpressive career arc, I hope it also explains why, in the most simple and "normal" of circumstance, I can feel God's pleasure.

Another Brit Discovers America

Cleveland? It's America down to a T! Discovering the delights of a sensational city and finding the perfect place to experience the REAL USA

Of course, the writer is from Glasgow and, having lived in both cities myself, I can't think of two that are more simpatico.

A Pungent Question (and Its Answer)

You know what's interesting about hurricanes?  They turn clergy into climate experts.  It's like magic.

Tales of the Post-Christian Age

Modern-day witches are creating rituals to foster solidarity, activism, and healing.

This May Just Be News to Folks at The Atlantic; Oh, and Episcopal Clergy

The Atlantic: Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture

You May Wish to Rethink Your Party's Acronym

No One, I Mean No One, Thought It Would

A WOMAN IS HELMING DOCTOR WHO, AND THE WORLD HAS NOT COLLAPSED

Personally, I'm fatigued by the phony sexism invented by marketers to hype their product.
Also, the very first producer of Doctor Who in 1963 was...dun-dun-dah!..a woman.

She has been profiled by The Coracle.

Now, the Police Report

3:08 p.m. A Kalispell man called 911 because his neighbor’s cows were drinking out of his cows’ water trough.

Watch Your Phrasing, Professional Restroom Operator Monthly

It’s back-to-school time and that means changes are in the wind for most portable restroom operators.

Emmett Till Could Not Be Reached for Comment

The 26-page lawsuit...alleges that T.F. “was forced to endure multiple court appearances, detention in a juvenile facility, detention at home, the loss of his liberty and other damages until several of the girls reluctantly admitted that their accusations were false” this summer.

I would urge my ordained colleagues, who desire political recognition, to be circumspect about the "Believe All Women" movement.

The Joy of the Post-Christian Age

After spending 50 years tearing down everything everyone held dear, mocking morality, breaking apart a system of ethics and behavior, cynically undermining all sense of public etiquette and cultural norms… now we’re being told everything they said to do is all wrong. 

Suddenly what pretty much everyone has done in the past is grounds for dismissal and attack. Went to parties and got drunk? Now you’re a sinister potential rapist.  

Heck, read the whole thing.

Dislikes of a Curmudgeon

"Craft Beer" is unholy muck that is made deliberately sour and over which I am supposed to fawn or else be judged a barbarian.  Nah, you can keep it.

"Small Plates".  I'll take a regular plate, thank you.  Especially at these prices.

"Flights".  No, I don't want a sampler.  I'll have a proper drink in a proper glass and will pay you a proper price.

"No problem...."  If it is a problem for you to take my order in a restaurant, or if you even contemplate that it is a problem for me to order something from the menu and have you bring it to me in return for my money, then you need to get into another line of work.

The Coracle's Saturday Literary Corner

William Faulkner Was a Really Bad Postman

Sun Ra

Originally published on December 12, 2012

"I hereby declare myself another order of being.  Will you give up your destiny?"

Legally, I was too young to be in a nightclub; by about three years.  I had a tendency to take advantage of my older appearance to get into places where musicians I wanted to see were performing.  Sometimes it would be to places like the Smiling Dog Saloon on Cleveland's West 25th St., where a sixty year old man dressed in gold lame with a pharoah's headpiece was leaning over me, while he conga-lined across the floor, bidding me to repeat after him and declare myself another order of being.

I did so, if just to appease his intergalactic majesty, Sun Ra.  Also, I was concerned that if I didn't go along the bouncer would notice me and notice that I was only eighteen years old.

Still, sneaking into a nightclub was a chance I was willing to take to see one of the most unique, if not the most unique, jazz composers, performers, and orchestra leaders of the 20th century. 

Every performer needs his or her "hook", the gimmick that marks them as particular and causes them to pleasantly lodge in the memory and regard of the public.  We all know, if we're old enough, that Jack Benny was cheap, that Rodney Dangerfield did not get no respect, that Pete Townsend would bust his guitar on stage at the conclusion of a performance [oh, to have had that guitar repair contract].  Duke Ellington was elegant; Count Basie wore a yachting cap; Dizzy Gillespie's cheeks blew out like a puffer fish's.

Although Herman Poole Blount originally had no stage gimmick, he did have enough talent to play any type of jazz, even the kind that was heard only within his head.  As a young man, he played piano with both jazz groups and rhythm and blues bands.  He loved all kinds of music and was able to, after listening once to a musical selection, render it on paper in correctly transposed notation. 

In the mid-1930's he formed his own band, The Sonny Blount Orchestra.  They toured a lot of small towns and were critically acclaimed, which meant they were flat broke and out of business within a year.  He then found a lot of work with all sorts of bands in Birmingham, Alabama; enough to keep him from starvation, anyway.

To understand Blount's transformation, one must have an appreciation for the particulars of Birmingham jazz.  Each city has a style, of course, some are obvious and well-known: the raucous, joyful noise of Chicago, the jangly energy of Detroit, the earthiness of St. Louis, the low-down bluesy-ness of Memphis, the antique slide and jump of New Orleans.  The jazz of Cleveland is always marked by the use of the organ.  To this day, I cannot hear a Hammond B3 and not find my senses transported to Euclid Avenue at night.

Birmingham nightclubs favored the exotic in their stage design, with dramatic lighting and murals depicting scenes of far-away dreamscapes.  The sound they produced was tight and big, with full orchestras inviting people, both black and white, to the dance floors.  Because it was a small city, B-Town musicians saw themselves as a community, always well-dressed and, in public, well-behaved.  Their camaraderie was obvious both in their mutual regard and in the remarkable music they produced.  It was once said that one B-Town jazz man could read the mind of another, knowing when an extemporaneous key change was coming or whose turn it would be to offer the next solo without having to rely on any obvious form of intramural communication.

It was in this milieu that Blount really learned his craft; and it was in Birmingham that he had a moment of, well, let's just call it a form of interplanetary psycho-sacred epiphany.  We'll let him describe it:

"… my whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself.... I wasn't in human form … I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn … they teleported me and I was down on stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools … the world was going into complete chaos … I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me."

While it took a few years, and service in the US Army during WWII, to realize, it appears that Sonny Blount never really returned from Saturn.  He was replaced by Sun Ra, the persona and the name that he adopted in the early 1950's.  Although they would bear slightly variant names during the next forty years, from that time forward, Sun Ra would always be the leader of his "Arkestra".

Yes, the Arkestra wore costumes, too

So it was in the winter of 1974 that I found myself, after discovering his music in the dusty back wall of the record library of the radio station where I served as a part-time, late night DJ, experiencing the magic and mystery of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Space Arkestra.  While some of it was truly weird, most of the music was a recognizable collision of bebop, Miles Davis-style laments, orchestral jazz, and improvisation on an early synthesizer.  It was both classic and spacey at the same time.  One moment, after one of Ra's jaunts around the room bidding us all to repeat after his bizarre intergalactic creed, and at the end of a particularly dis-harmonic moment of space jazz, without a word he and the Arkestra smoothly jumped into Ellington's "Take the A Train" and played it flawlessly.  In fact, it may have been the best live version I've ever heard. 

Sun Ra died in 1993.  No one was really sure of his age as he was always secretive about his past, but he was believed to have been around 75.  He left a very large fan base, as one might expect from a cult music figure, but was also a great influence to some of the more flamboyant of the funk and hip-hop acts that would mark the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Why use words when we can use music, though:

The Post-Christian Age Sure Isn't That of Enlightenment, is It?

Accused doxxer of GOP senators allegedly threatened to publish lawmakers' children’s health info

I find politicians distasteful, but this is foul beyond words.

C. S. Lewis was Prescient

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

A Text Worthy of Government Transmission

A Pungent Text

Everyone at the office just received a text message that said, "Sale on Trump Steaks! 1/3 off! Text MAGA for special deals". What?

Well, This is Wonderfully Tragic, or Tragically Wonderful

For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” 

Oh, it gets better:

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

A Pungent Recollection

Things I've thrown in bars:

A stool

A billiard ball [which, to be fair, had just been chucked at me; I was returning it to its sender]

A punch

My money around

Yes, I'm totally disqualified for service on the Supreme Court.  Well, those things plus that I haven't a law degree.

By the way, while the political/media class is busy telling us about thrown ice cubes, someone attempted to assassinate the Secretary of Defense.  That would seem a larger story.

From the Washington Post, No Less

Eclectic Cleveland itinerary makes for a perfect weekend getaway

A Pungent Observation

The cost of a 10' U-Haul truck to move from Connecticut to western Tennessee: $1553.

The cost to move from western Tennessee to Connecticut: $409.

Supply and demand reflects the desirability of a location.  Go, Yard Goats!

Bob's Got a Point

Idiot wind
Blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol

I Loathe Interrupting the Media's Latest Tantrum, but This has Happened

A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier