Happy New Year -- May 2015 Be Healthy, Prosperous and Satisfying

A fine start to 2015:

on British telly season 3 of Last Tango In Halifax begins Sunday. It shall surely arrive here on PBS sometime soon after.

As the temps are supposed to stay around freezing here for a few days at least, and the weather's supposed to turn nasty after New Year's, about noon I took out the cart for a grocery shopping marathon that started at Gourmet Garage, truundled east to Whole Foods, went across Houston and turned back west to Morton Williams, then beyond to Raffettos Est. 1906!, the Porto [sic] Rico for the Finest Coffee and Teas Since 1907 [their coffee and tea may be best, but their spelling isn't ...],

then back east again to SoHo Wines & Spirits. The cart was entirely filled by the time I buzzed for el V to come down and help me hump the stuffs up to the shelves and fridge.

Lots of salad materials, as the lettuces, kale, etc. actually looked good today. Alas for fresh produce though -- the vegetables that were good, like the sweet peppers and eggplant -- the eggplant! it was beautiful! -- are on el V's restricted list of foods. Butternut squash, I got -- to make into a soup or just bake, don't know. There were no brussels sprouts. The cauliflower was $6.99 a head, so no. Got some broccoli, mushrooms, zucchini, pears and apples, and organic dried apricots. Lots of cheeses and olives stored yet in the fridge, so need for those.

No champagne for fizzy stuff is terrible for el V's condition, so some bottles of Frascati, that light, fresh tasting wine from the Latium / Lazio region in which is located Rome, on the western side of Italy, that's not as high in alcohol content as generally They are making wines (and beers ) have now.

This is the year and logo of the bottles I got.

Frascati was fashionable in the era of the jet set,* before most USians outside of NYC or San Francisco were drinking wine much, or at all.  I first heard of it from reading Erica Jong and Vanity Fair magazine in college -- when I drank tequila or beer, but mostly I, ah, just, ah, smoked . . . .  and has not been heard of since, at least around here.

But this fall the Soho Wine guys (Italians all) ended up with a few cases as part of some larger purchase from one of their Italian wine distributors, who is pushing Frascati as part of a deal with its vintners.

The day I saw the Frascati on the shelves of the Italian wines section, I grabbed one, to try it, and as a tribute of sorts to Erica Jong and her fearless, adventurous explorations of everything that promised pleasure, interest and inspiration.

Opened once it was chilled, while starting a pasta dinner, it was equally wonderful to drink after the meal was finished as it was to drink with the food. Best of all, it turns out that, consumed cautiously, el V's GERD can tolerate drinking 2 - 3 glasses without ill effect.

It's also very inexpensive -- $7.99 a bottle, plus the hefty state liquor tax. Of course, these days, quite a few Italian products have gotten a lot less expensive here, as Italy's economy is still in the sewer and showing no signs of climbing out.

So far, the Wine guys say, I'm the only one who has been buying the Frascati, so it's certainly not fashionable. Which is terrific for me, except if I'm the only one buying it, then the Wine guys won't be ordering it. But if if this wine does get fashionable again, it would be too expensive for my budget.

Just noticing, now, how I went off at the keyboard, I realize that one of the dimensions of my ongoing wine delight is that wines are tightly twined with history, history of place, history of trade -- and geography.

P.S. So many books have entered our apartment since the week before Christmas and two more arrived yet today! BooksBooksBooks! As our reading has been so project-focused latterly, which meant perusing documents as opposed to reading, while many great books in history were published this year, our friends evidently wanted to make sure we didn't miss them.   Many, many thanks!

P.P.S.  One more day to go and I can declare I wasn't sick a single day of the holiday season.  :)

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*   If I'm recalling correctly -- it's been at least 10 years since I watched La Dolce Vita -- Frascati wine bottles are seen in that film from 1960?

The Trip to Italy (2014)

By everything I know about myself I should loathe this film.  However, I am charmed.

Two Brit actors of middling fame, comedians also, it seems, impersonating movie and television figures, riffing off of famous movies, all down the Italian coast, while staying in fabulous places I could never afford to stay in, and eating in restaurants I could never afford to eat in. I should be offended!  My class consciousness outraged.

Instead, I'm amused and entertained, as these two, Steve Coogan and Bob Brydon (never heard of either one of them until seeing this film, but I'm not British), quip, very slightly, on occasion, bicker, their way down the coast of Italy.

It helps that the scenery in which they are hanging out is spectacular, and so is the photography.  It also helps that there is actual feeling within both of them, not only for Shelley and Bryon in Italy, and their poetry, but for Shakespeare.  It is moving, in fact, and pulls the whole roll of filmic sequences together, their bits with Yorick,

Hamlet and Shakespeare within one of the crypt cave ossuaries of Naples. In other words, like Shakespeare's fools and clowns, these two, who have made careers of playing clowns and fools, are neither clowns nor fools.

It's a sort of art house production, I guess.  Its an IFC, and played here at the Film Forum.  It's currently streaming at Netflix, and if you like quirky things, that are good natured, not deep, have lovely locations, which play a lot with the history of movies and iconic actors, this is a lovely way to pass an hour plus.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013)

May I suggest, highly recommend, the 89 minute documentary, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013)?

A trailer can be seen here:

He was already noticing the all surveillance police state back in the days of the Truman administration, in which he thinks it really began.

This fits into the trilogy of works that this month have boomeranged my sense of history back to the Civil Rights and Vietnam era: Katharine Graham's Personal History, the 1988 - 1991 China Beach from ABC,

and Selma, about Martin Luther King, the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.  They've hit me hard, because of the contemporary escalating police violence and white supremacy and racism.  The scenes in The United States of Amnesia of the Chicago cops rioting at the Democratic Convention back in 1968.

Would that we still had Vidal speaking and writing today, and many many more like him.  For what he did see and understand and warn us of, I forgive him his scurrilous mendacities about General and President Grant.

How beautiful he was as a boy, youth and young man, and how elegant and handsome he was in his middle age and early old age.  And always, sharp and well-informed.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, is available streaming from Netflix.

Da List -- 2014 Reading Round-Up

Started work on my essay for this annual feature of Da List.

Part One is "My Year in Mississippi": William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner,




Jones County and Jefferson Davis (McPherson published a short book about him this year).

Part Two is "Women Who Starred in 2014": Louisa Catherine Adams, Katharine Graham,




and Jennifer Homans's Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet.

Without illos, single-spaced, the material I've gathered out of the year's comments on these, is over 40 pages. There's a lot to work with here.

Collected all the notes into a single document this morning.  So on the memory stick it goes, to the copy shop. It is inconvenient not having a printer at home. Yet I still calculate, considering how expensive printer cartridges are, it's still less expensive by far going to the copy shop -- 3 cents per page, and less over 150 pp.  Yes, an Asian family owned and staffed . . . . How long will they survive on this strip that godzilla thug, NYU, is attempting to grab all of for its expansion?  They are so close to the supermarket -- which the Purple Gang is doing everything in its considerable power to eradicate -- that going there isn't inconvenient, really, other than they aren't open on Sundays . . . .

BTW, finally a rec for sf/f by a subscriber to the List came in -- for Gibson's Peripheral.



Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings still holds without any rival as the number one fiction rec.  But by-and-large, there are few fiction recs at all.  My own reading journal has very few novels in it, and the commentary to almost all of them consists merely of  "did not finish."

TL;DR -- But! -- HOMER

Which goes in tandem with "Why Homer Matters".

Here It Is!

The official, el V Spotify Lechón playlist.

Notice the Three Kings perched on the veranda rail.

We just went on a shopping spree for our kitchen. As we're pretty much non-shoppers we were surprised that everything was heavily discounted.  So that was nice.

As we're getting a tropical storm, the streets tend not to be heavily populated with vehicles or the sidewalks with people, Yay!  It wasn't raining that hard either, and it wasn't windy.  As it's tropical storm it's not cold.  Temperature 15 degrees cooler, and it wouldn't have been so much fun. But they're not and it was.

In The Christmas Spirit

Listening to Christmas music from Memphis, from back in the day, Booker T

and the MG's best known Christmas album, In The Christmas Spirit, released in November 1966. A friend sent it along his morning.

The aroma of the still not entirely finished pulled pork pervades. That's because I removed the glass lid to check on the progress at 10 AM.  Before that the cooker kept the smell remarkably enclosed.  We scented nothing all night long, sleeping deep and comfortably.  But once I lifted the lid, that rich complex of aromas wafted out, free to tease and titillate.  I'm impatient to pull it -- I want to see how the substitution of tart cherry juice for cider vinegar turned out -- vinegar, like chocolate and so many other things, are on his "Can't Have" list.

Pouring rain, just as They prophesized.  There are frustrated travelers at the airports and train stations.  Maybe in cars too, because there's flooding around here -- and further west and north, snow storms.

I'm so glad I broke my back doing all I did Monday and Tuesday, because doing some of it in the rain, would been just frackin' miserable and there'd be no holiday spirit going on.

Most of all, it's Christmas Eve AND I AM NOT SICK THIS YEAR!

Hope all of you are safe, warm and dry, bebeeeze ....

It's just getting going in Puerto Rico, where the holidays continue at least through Three Kings Day; here the kids are dancing the traditional bomba, a dance that brings together traditions from both Puerto Rico, Haiti and Cuba,  which is a deep part of Afro-Puerto Rican cultural identity.

ETA:  Right Now!  el V's popping in all these songs from the DR, PR, Cuba and Spain about lechón (roasted suckling pig dish, which is highly valued and beloved throughout the Spanish speaking world)  to play for us via his Spotify account, in honor of our pulled pork!  Which makes me smile very much.

Solstice Day

The week leading up to the winter solstice is one of the most beautiful weeks of the year, particularly when the daylight hours are tenebrous, filtererd through lowered, occluded skies.

The effect is that of the silver backing on glass, throwing mirrored images from earth to heaven and back down again, punctuated by the brilliant colors of the holiday lights lighting windows, buildings and streets with as much cheer as at night.

Yesterday the temperature was firmly set just at 32, so, no happy birds dancing about in the Nativity stable. A slight flurry of snow sparkled around me as I bustled along. Apartment mates were shopping together for the Christmas tree to be the centerpiece of their Christmas party. A pedestrian sauntered along wearing a wool hat with reindeer antlers. Young women carried shopping bags blazoned with the logos of expensive stores, filled, no doubt with what they wear to this weekend's parties. Raffetto's (est. 1906!) was packed with people. I felt alive-O! I also knew the snow flurry was just that and wouldn't last long.

Feeling so Christmassy, then the arrival of unexpected news (which can't be spoken yet) that is like a huge gift out of the blue, planning the preparation of the pork shoulder for the Christmas Eve pulled pork, looking forward to today's Solstice party.

Then we wake to learn of this.

A lone, mentally ill, black man shot someone in Baltimore and then came here and shot two cops sitting in their car in Brooklyn, then went a subway station platform and shot himself. The NYPD union heads, already furious with the Mayor, are screaming that de Blasio is the one who murdered these police, and started a twitter feed with #bluelivesmattertoo.  That hashtag is a declaration of war on the rest of us.  They are COPS and we, we are merely civilians.  That

language is militarized, not the language of policing.  This shooting is NOT the same issue as "Hands Up Don't Shoot", which is about being killed by police for being a person of color.  Most of all, what does de Blasio's actions have to do with this murder?  The man who is responsible didn't even live here, at least not at this time -- he seems to have some connection with Brooklyn in his earlier years.

OK. Why it is when a white guy does something awful, it's always just a lone deranged white guy, not a conspiracy, i.e. as with John Wilkes Booth, which was a conspiracy. Why is it that those who want to go back to the conditions of, at least, Jim Crow, always need to steal music and slogans from black people and progressives?

OTOH, my own sense is that the Black Lives Matter -- I Can't Breathe -- Hands Up Don't Shoot -- protests have focused rather too much on the cops per se rather than on the broken and delegitimated justice system, which is about feeding poor black bodies into privatized prisons, supported with tax dollars, which further are a pool of basically unpaid labor providing even products to the luxury market such as fine bed linens.  But that's too complex for a march, right? Nobody knows all that history or cares about it, right?

I am conflicted about pushing these thoughts away for a few days, and concentrating on feeling as good as I get to feel ....

A Song for the Season & Our Times-- "The Borning Day", Harry Belafonte

One Christmas, when I was 19, I discovered this, an emotionally wrenching, yet beautiful track, "The Borning Day,"  moving in its simplicity.

Though "The Borning Day" was included on Belafonte Christmas albums, it seems that he first recorded it in 1963, for Streets I Have Walked , a world music album,  long before the marketing, qualifying concept "world music" had arrived. This song was my second entry into Caribbean culture, after the book of poetry that I found in my high school library, that contained not only the first African American poets, and those brilliant writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but some Afro-Caribbean poets too.  The language, the landscapes, even the words, in English as they were (the Caribbean poets were all from the English Caribbean) were all doorways into new worlds, new ways of seeing, and certainly new ways of hearing.

Ever since the first time I heard it, "The Borning Day" has been the iconic Christmas song for me, even before all the traditional Christmas carols with which I grew up singing (and believe me, I cannot sing now, and I could not sing then either, but then it didn't stop me singing carols at the top of my voice -- ouch!).

Pigeon peas & rice, though the Caribbean poor couldn't afford the saffron in the rice we see here.

Lyrics to "The Borning Day" here.

Hear it:

More on Belafonte (and Langston Hughes) here.

'Tis Of The Season -- Angels and Birds and Blessings

It's a lovely day here, with temperatures higher than they've been.  Though the wind, when it hits, while walking where it flows, is chill, it's not a strong wind.

Doing some preliminary Christmas food shopping, on my way to Raffetto's (est. 1906!) this morning, it seemed a good time to for my annual meditation about

Christmas while gazing at the simple, traditional Nativity scene St. Anthony's puts up on the Houston side of the church. This is something I make time to do every Christmas at least twice, once in the daytime and once at night. I tend to enter what perhaps resembles a state of prayer, leaving me feeling refreshed and thankful for my privileged life.

I am also thankful for St. Anthony's, the anchor of this neighborhood where I've lived my adult life for the most part. The church, the friary, the convent and the school have saved our immediate blocks from being entirely taken over by billionaire giganticism and become 100% an alcohol, Chanel and restaurant corridor, where only the bloated plutocracy can afford to live and eat.



Today, there was something new going on with the Créche: birds, just our plain old street sparrows and pigeons. They filled the stable, among the Holy Family, the angels, the humble cow and the donkey, with their chirping and cooing, swooping and fluttering, perching upon the wings of angels for a minute to puff and chatter. They were happy birds, dancing upon the festoons of evergreen within and without the stable, in air that was invigorating, not freezing. Some of the sparrows were not flying, but hovering in place, over the manger, beating their wings at the speed one associates with humming birds, not sparrows.

The birds' happiness made me so happy that I burst into tears.

This must have had something to do with St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, who is credited in Church history with creating the first nativity scene, because he wanted people to understand the depths of poverty into which Our Lord was born, and the pure miracle of a birth that was for the sake of peace on earth and good will to all men -- and animals and the earth itself.

So, right there, on the sidewalk next to Houston Street, filled with honking and sirens, on my way to buy pesto and pasta, I was given a Christmas blessing.

The Polish Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz & Jerzy Hoffman.- Winter Solstice Is Coming!

Henryk Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 "because of his outstanding merits as an epic writer".

His epic was addressed the wars and political events the resulted in the first dismemberment of Poland, that led inexorably to dissolution as a state. At the time the author received the Nobel Poland, as a nation, no longer existed.  Certainly, contributing to his selection, was the passion and devotion with which the author worked to keep the world's mind upon the issue of the plight of the Polish people and Poland's dissolution.  The reestablishment of the nation-state of Poland didn't happen until after the end of WWI -- the Second Polish Republic, or, the Second Commonwealth of Poland.

Known in Poland as "The Trilogy", the volumes are:

1884 - With Fire and Sword (Polish: Ogniem i mieczem); set in the period of the Cossack uprising against the Polish Nobility in what we know as Ukraine.

1886 - The Deluge (Polish: Potop); set during the Polish-Swedish war.

1888 - Fire in the Steppe (originally published under the Polish title Pan Wołodyjowski, which translates to Colonel Wolodyjowski); set during the Turkish invasion of Poland's eastern frontier.

These books have been turned into very fine epic, historic films, that contain everything anyone can want from such fare: swashing, battles, sieges, duels ( cannon  pushed and dragged through the snow), stunning location scenery, romance, intrique and betrayal, love and romance, ballrooms and love, and at least in one of them, strands of magic and sorcery.

The last of Jerzy Hoffman's Sienkiewicz adaptations was With Fire and Sword, Released in 1999, it was the most expensive Polish film ever made at that time -- the year the Polish Film Festival began, as well as the year Poland joined NATO. It was something that could now happen since their independence from the USSR, as the Third Polish Republic in 1991.

Its New York opening was somewhat of a sensation. It was lauded with much more respectful enthusiasm than the local cinestes usually accord historic, period films. As well as recognition of the film's high cinematic values, the enthusiasm perhaps reflected the respect felt for Poland's long struggle for independence from the USSR -- solidarity! That said, the film is splendid in every aspect.

Husaria! My favorite!

Previously Hoffman had filmed The Deluge (1974), which may be my favorite of the three. A nominee for Oscar's Best Foreign Film, it lost to Amacord.  The first of the films Hoffman produced was Colonel Wolodyjowski (1969).

As we see, while the 16th century is viewed as Poland's gold age, the 17th century was one of struggle and hardship for Poland*, which only got worse as the great powers of Prussia, Russia and Austria vied to slice off her parts for themselves. Despite the hope and faith of the Polish nobility (one of whom even bore Napoleón a son), Napoleón not only did not reestablish Polish independence, he betrayed them, even while keeping the Polish beauty as his mistress and bringing her to Paris.

Nor did the Congress of Vienna reunite Poland's parts nor recognize it as a state.

More here concerning the Sienkiewicz novels, the Hoffman films, and ... Tolkien.

This trilogy of films is a perfect viewing experience for the short, dark days of the winter solstice.
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*  Recall, this is the era of Dumas's The Three Musketeers.

Tonight - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at NYC City Center

"The Life of Odetta" is the performance tonight.

Yesterday at least 25,000 peacefully marched and protested here in solidarity with the March in Washington D.C., protesting police brutality and the actions that include results such as unjustified death, executed with impunity, with no consequences to the perpetrators.

Those who demonstrated against this yesterday were surrounded at all times by police in riot gear, carrying the same weapons as the military, surveilled by helicopters and drones.

Yesterday was also NYC's unwelcome situation of hosting the annual Santacon -- thousands of really drunk college revellers who are really obnoxious and badly behaved.  Mostly, need we say, white people.  Not a cop was in sight where they charged and held up traffic, barfing and insulting those around them.  Anyone who objects to these hordes descending upon us the second Saturday in December, making our lives difficult -- we're called grinches and anti-liberty.  Nevertheless, the hipsters of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the organizers wanted these jerks to pee and vomit this year, refused to participate.  Can't have a Santacon without participating bars serving discounted drinks  . . . .

Under these circumstances, an Alvin Ailey (a New York dance company, it was founded in 1958) choreographed dance biography of the performer of "Freedom Trilogy" (1962), in the heart of the Civil Rights era, seems about as appropriate as NYC can be.

Kongo Mangaaka and -- Phoenician Hippoi

Maps, oliphants, raffia textiles, masks, crucifixes and nkisi.

Oliphants, still carved today in Kongo and Angola, were among the ornamental objects presented by the Mani-Kongo to European powers, including the Pope and the Medicis, as "business cards", initiating a relationship between them, himself and his kingdom for trade and mutual benefit.  Thus there are many of these found in public and private art collections from the Mediterranean up to the northern royal collections of Sweden and Denmark. Oliphants are still being carved in Angola and elsewhere. Nkisi are still being made there and in Cuba, at least. Power vessels containing power materials have been discovered by archeologists in Maryland, Virginia, and Louisiana.

The invitees were academics at the graduate level or museum / gallery people, most of which are also part of universities, such as both Yale and Princeton. However, el V was the only one in this company, including the Met curators of both this coming exhibit (September 2015) and the Met's African, Oceania and South American wing, to actually have been in Mbanza-Kongo.  As told when it happened, and almost didn't happen, it's very difficult to get into Angola.  The powers do not want outsiders.

Before the the early 19th century all surviving objects are nonrepresentational -- abstract and geometric -- whether sacred or ornamental. This break into respresentational occurs, presumably due to the change from European partnership with the region's rulers, to colonial invasion into the interior out of their long confinement on the coasts. Now there is direct conflict instead of trade, that includes the destruction of culture and folkways.

This is the era in which objects first appear, such as female wooden sculptures depicting the rulers' desire for population, particularly of men (recall, entire regions of Central Africa were depopulated by then by centuries already of the slavery industry, taken to everywhere in the New World).

A nkisi. Ritually prepared materials -- power packets -- would be secreted within the figure.

It's from the early 19th century as well that were created another variety of the nkisi power figures, mangaaka.  These were huge in size, taken and removed from nodes of mercantile communities.  These figures were, scholars speculate,

A mangaaka.  Very few of these large nkisi have survived.

the last line of defense of communities that had been barely surviving, subjected to intense stresses, such as loss of both population and trade, from colonial invasion by Portuguese, French and Belgians. The mangaaka have been ritually cleansed of their secret power packets somehow, before the European invaders and / or pirates seized them, and thus got into European collections.

Named hippoi by the Greeks, because of the horse heads at stem and stern.

So, it may be asked, how does one get from mangaaka to Phoenician hippoi? The Met currently has up for a while longer a special exhibit called "From Assyria to Iberia, the Dawn of the Classical Age."  Most of the objects are borrowed from other institutions and collections, which is why this is a "special" exhibit (with no photography allowed, not even cell phones).

After our session finished at noon, after the networking, and so on, we were given passes to the Met's galleries. El V and I had lunch in the museum restaurant, before going through the "Assyria to Iberia" galleries.  As usual, I am

struck by the refinement of the Assyrian artists, particularly in the cylinder seals. Each time I look at these objects I am more impressed by the Assyrians than the last time. Their visual imagination expresses a spirituality that we can't comprehend emotionally, yet is deeply striking: the human-beast composite figures of

Cylinder seal depicting a Mistress of Animals, surrounded by horned beasts.

guardianship and expressions of power. The griffons, and especially, the Masters and Mistresses of Animals.  What is that all about, really?  Their sacred tree?  There seems at least some deep influence of these figures and designs upon the Scythians, who show up quite a lot later.

We spent a long time looking at a panel that showed cargo being taken off a Phoenician hippoi ship.  Trade was much the focus of this exhibit. Just as with the coming Kongo exhibit -- many of the objects in that show are pieces sent to European princes (including the Medicis!) by the Mani-Kongo, who controlled the most extensive trading system on the continent, back in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

It was an emotional day, from the sense of tragic sadness and desperation felt in those sculptures of women cradling and nurturing -- not infants as the western eye always interprets initially -- but grown men, just made small, in the vain hope of repopulating the land.  While in the meantime, the women have been taken off to have their wombs forever repopulating the slave breeding and trading industry in the New World.  Then this joy in the exquisite refinement and achievement of what artists could create so very long ago, in the millennium before the ACE.

Not only is the detail exquisite -- in the round one can see each toe of the boy's foot -- it's also mysteriously, even tenderly, erotic. Note the placement of the lioness's paw around the boy's shoulders, holding his throat to her mouth ....

Yet, there too, the sense of tragedy.  A bit of ivory work that may perhaps be ranked by the world's art historians in these matters as the most perfect of ivory work in the world, surviving.  There was a matching ivory panel to this piece, but it could only be represented by a photograph, because it was looted from the Baghdad museum in 2003, never to be seen by the public or scholars again.

This ivory was from the elephant herds living in what we now call Syria. They were hunted to extinction long before ACE for the sake of their tusks, so what goes round, comes around?  We look at the ivory tusks from these elephants of the Middle East, all that survives of their DNA, and think again of the ornamental oliphants given to European princes by the Mani-Kongo, whose elephants too are nearly hunted to extinction for their ivory.

But what survives from a temple in the Phoenician port of Spal, which today we know as Seville, is gold. Gold has no dna ... nevermind . . . .

At that thought, our feet and backs couldn't take any more marble floors. We left to meet up with the people visiting NYC from North Carolina who wish to do some events around The American Slave Coast after publication. This includes the largest bookstore in the triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), historical black college radio, and so on and so forth, and hopefully a gig or two presenting at one of the academic institutions which will finance this jaunt. While we were meeting, we were observed for long minutes by a drone garbed in Christmas lights, through le Café's large windows facing the street . . . .

After that we stopped in at the Grad Center's Christmas party, came home to eat rice and vegetables and read.

Somehow . . . it felt like the Christmas season had started.

Death of Tolkien's Smaug Inspired By Longfellow's "Hiawatha"

From the UK Guardian, in the Books section:

Hiawatha faces Megissogwon, manito (spirit) of wealth, who is impervious in his shirt of wampum, the hard shell beads once used as currency. After a day-long battle, Hiawatha has only three arrows left. Victory appears impossible until --

Suddenly from the boughs above him

Sang the Mama, the woodpecker:

‘Aim your arrows, Hiawatha,

At the head of Megissogwon,

Strike the tuft of hair upon it,

At their roots the long black tresses;

There alone can he be wounded!’

And so, thanks to a bird’s revelation of his fatal vulnerability, another monstrous symbol of material wealth is brought down by a bowman almost at the end of his arrows.

Huh.

There is much more background to this, and how it was discovered, here. The discussion in the article of the relationships among Hiawatha, the Kalevala and Tolkien's epic are illuminating.

The Guttenberg "Hiawatha" here.

See Jeff Thompson's National Geographic illustrations of Hiawatha and Megissogwon here.

I love this convergence of the Eddas, The Kalavala, Hiawatha and The Hobbit's Smaug so much -- particularly, as the article's author notes, that both Longfellow and Tolkien were language professors.

Katharine Graham: Personal History (1997) / Torture Report - Bush Era Crimes

This weekend I read fairly non-stop Katharine Graham: Personal History (1997) the memoir of the publisher, president and chairman, eventually, of The Washington Post. The book reads very fast, and never flags in interest.  Reading through hers and the Post's experiences during the

years of Johnson and Nixon - Vietnam era -- the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and impeachment -- was fascinating.  Reading Graham's memoirs intensified my viewing involvement with China Beach.

Graham was born (1917) very wealthy, and raised in an emotionally dysfunctional family with materially austere upbringing in terms of regimens, possessions and clothes, though there were lessons, art, literature and a great deal of other intellectual enrichment, that included the high achieving friends of her parents (among her mother's life-long closest friends were the Steichens). Dysfunctional as it all was, Graham herself managed to have very close relationships with both her parents and all her siblings.

Surrounded all her life by servants, even after marrying a (relatively) poor fellow, she barely learned to cook, never ironed a piece of clothing, or even knew how to shop for clothes. She lived through all of the changes the 20th century was fated to experience -- including a very slow coming to consciousness of women's systemic subordination as unfair. She overcame a great deal, and in her memoir at least, comes through as person who doesn't aggrandize herself at all -- in extreme contrast with her narcissist mother.  However, she may not have realized just how much she still was viewing the world from the perspective of the truly powerful and privileged.  She was a centerist in everything, which her position provided the privilege to be.

It was her plutocrat father (who, among other accomplishments organized setting up the World Bank) who initially bought the small circulation, struggling

Washington Post at an auction (1933).  By then both Isaac Eugene Meyer and his wife, the poor German Lutheran Agnes Ernst, daughter of a bankrupt alcoholic feckless fellow, both preferred the political life in more tolerant D.C. to living in New York, where antisemitism was intense.

Eventually Graham's husband, Philip Graham, who was one of her father's best friends, was not only publisher, but given the controlling shares of the family owned Washington Post.  When Philip, after severe mental illness, committed suicide (1963), Katharine Graham took on the paper that both her beloved father and husband had given so much of their lives.

I finished the book (625 pp.) last night.  Woke this morning to the even more hair raising sense of déjàvu.

OMG! Bush46's debacle of Iraq, Blackwater, CIA, torture and lies, committed under cover of the waving bloody shirt of 9/11. What was going on during the Iraq invasion - rendition era -- lying about it, keeping it secret -- is part what Nixon and Co.'s men believed they had the right to do.  Breaking laws was their right, and they despised the laws and the people who believed in them.

If this Senate Intelligence Investigative report of CIA torture came out next year, when the new r-Senate conveys, one doubts strongly this would have gone public.  It took an independent publication -- The  New York Times, for the Pentagon Papers*,

and the Washington Post for all the president's men, the Watergate and Ellesberg break-ins, funded by private campaign contributions, lied about by Nixon and his cronies from first to last -- to inform the public.

With the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the media, Nixon's lawsuits to stop, halt and desist repeated all the same tired lines we've been hearing for decades whenever the gummit, the intelligence community (and the civil police forces), Homeland Security, etc. etc. -- that none of this can be made public because of national security.  And this applies to content about matters and actions taken place long before the present administrations, content already published, etc.

The Washington Post is now owned by the eviLe fellow who owns amazilla. This is the ultimate consequence, which surely she had never suspected, of taking that privately held family media company public.

I admit to have been thinking about this even before reading Graham's Personal History.

UPDATE:  The Supreme Court ruling on amazilla employees overtime standing in lines to be searched for theft -- it did not escape this reader's notice that Katharine Graham had no sympathy at all for labor unions -- except way back in the day when she was f*cking a labor guy in SF when she was just a kid, with her first journalism job gotten for her by her daddy.

PLUS: The surveillance choppers are flying again, now that the rain from whatever storm has slackened, because the Eric Gavin protests have not quit.  On the subway to and from medical appointment, many a group of young were observed chattering with exhileration, carrying fresh packages of baby wipes -- presumably as remedy from tear gas?  Moreover, which hasn't been mentioned as far as I know in the media, here at least, many of these groups of the young are not English speakers, but clearly here from Europe in solidarity ....

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*   The official title is United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.