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.