Lord. How Long. How Long. In the UK Too

     . . . . In an entry Elsewheres, I concluded with "Lord. How long. How Long."  To my astonishment, people asked what that means.   

  . . . . People with a religious background or any experience of protestant, Jewish, African American recognize it immediately.  It's part of US literary tradition by now, in many parts, even recognized within canon.  This is the rhetorical Introduction and Refrain of passionate lamentation over inexplicable suffering and oppression, begging an explanation from God,  of Why, Lord? why at all? Why to me? to us? and for how long, Lord, will you allow this to go on?

Versions of "How Long" are everywhere in the Old Testament, whether in the Book of Habakkuk or the Psalms. It is in protestant hymns and prayers, it is naturally, particularly prevalent in African American religious tradition, whatever the mode of expression, and beyond that has been heard even in pop music made by African Americans and covered by whites, yea, even in the UK -- even when the lamentation is about another band member playing off on the side in secret with another band, as with Ace's one hit wonder.*

So, yes, among the lamentation of African Americans -- and British people of color too, who are at least as religious out of the protestant traditions as in the US, to speak "Lord. How long. How long,' as a response to a white guy doing absolutely nothing for racial justice except to say, ya! go risk your life and health -- go go go! and then demand cookies from god himself (who he is currently referring to as karma points!) for typing that in the comfort of his comfy home and bank account, far far far away from anything remotely threatening, whether the pandemic, eviction, or police brutality, is something very many people immediately 'get', so to speak.

But not this tone deaf white guy -- who also poo pooed  Covid-19 as a cozy disaster that would over in two weeks. Thus, this traditional African American expression in prayer, in sermon-oratory -- see Dr. Martin Luther King

and music, secular and popular, and has been since the early days of slavery -- is appropriate.  How long, Lord, must we put up with clueless complacent white guys  typing clueless, complacent words, and then demanding a reward?

* Another example of how African American traditions get reworked into commentary upon what is happening right this minute can be heard in the soundtracks to both Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Spike Lee's imminent release, Da 5 Bloods, which comments on our conditions both back in political and film history -- Vietnam -- and that history commenting on contemporary events.

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The BLM Protest movement is indeed global. The monument to African slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol, on which Bristol's modern fortune was founded, was pulled down. The protest in London by the US embassy is enormous!

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2020-06-07/thousands-attend-black-lives-matter-protest-in-bristol/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-britain/thousands-join-black-lives-matter-protest-outside-u-s-embassy-in-london-idUSKBN23E0A3?

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-07/more-black-lives-matter-protests-to-take-place-across-the-uk-on-sunday/

With horses featuring in stories about the clashes between cops both here 

and the UK, with the horses and the cops in armor, while a pandemic rages, I have no trouble re-visioning the uprisings in the 14th century in England,

particularly the largest, longest one, the Watt Tyler Revolt, or, the Peasants' Uprising, against Richard II -- particularly directed at his uncle, Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt -- whose newly built palace, reputed to be the most exquisite in Europe, was not looted, it was destroyed, deliberately, every part of it, from marble wall facings to the smallest bibelot,  ground to shards and dust, and then burned.  That's how tired the people were of waiting for justice, dignity and food for So Long. 

So. Long.  So. Very. Long.

It Always Comes Back / It Never Changes

     . . . . El V did The World That Made New Orleans Zoom birthday party last night, though as the party giver and her husband, whose birthday it was, are in California, it was afternoon in their backyard for them, and for their friends in their backyards.

It was so good -- for them, for him and thus for me.  Different faces and voices! A chance to talk about something else!  Things felt almost normal again.  This came after the horrors that Wednesday, and yes, mostly yesterday too, were.  I was just sick from it, and then yesterday I was sick from being sick.  The Zoom party pulled me back together. I slept pretty good then, last night.

Every time it seems we're plateauing it gets worse. And again, it is black bodies, black voices, black courage, who are out there, saying and doing what must be said and done, while I remain comfortably in our privileged white isolation.  History continues to go round and round, returning to where it begins.

But, hey, the stock market soars, so all's right with somebodies' world, and so what that the cops who wail on those whose worlds are not all right, and never have been, that's just how it has been, always has been, and always shall be, amen, because it stand between 'Them and the only thing that has value, that we value, OUR PROPERTY.  Never forget that for long periods what was meant by "a man of virtue" was, "a man of property." Property = virtue.  After all Our stock market and Your economy are not one and the same.  [ Current Reading Aloud is Riot. Strike. Riot. (2016) by the insufferable Joshua Clover.  It's stuffed with political economic theory, which he pontificates provocatively, sometimes erroneously, but always with a lively mind.  Like so many works that are published right before a momentous event and change, one cannot help but speculate fruitlessly as to how he might have written it if writing it right now.]

How can one be an historian, an historian of US history and slavery, and not be sick to her stomach? We're right back to where we were in the 1950's, the 1920's, the 1890's, the 1870's and all the years before that to 1619. Mirroring the 1850's this racial hatred too is the wielded means and the presented motivation for a coup on the nation.

So, since we wrote a book about the history of this from the beginning of it in our nation, up until that successful effort to go to war to take over the country for the benefit of the Slaveocracy haters, a group of pastors have asked us to do a Zoom discussion with their congregants about the material in The American Slave Coast, next Wednesday -- a current version of 'getting out of the house'.

     . . . . Here is an interview and photos with our friend K up at Jumel Terrace. It begins with a Forward by the interviewer,  that says better what I am feeling these last days better than I do, and who, being African American, has far greater moral authority and reason to feel and say it:

"I am so tired...."

...The black community’s determination and ingenuity to thrive and prosper in the face of adversity should be seen as nothing new – but it’s the continuous road blocks of systematic racial oppression and suppression that feel very, very old... 

Our dear friend is living right there, in the center of the Harlem Renaissance; his neighbors are their generation of black intellectuals and artists, as were their own parents and their neighbors, going all the way back to before the 1920's. They tend to meet most days and hang out, arguing, discussing and exchanging views, on his front stoop.  I.e. he lives in a real neighbhood, a real community, unlike us, down here which is dead fred, now that the real estate developers drove out our community for the sake of businesses that catered to tourists almost exclusively -- and now there are no tourists, and not even the NYU students.

The truth is – and Thometz knew it – was that he wasn’t going to be selling any of those books, at least not to any walk-in customers in 2015. He saw the bookshop as his own protest, to challenge and confront passersby about race. Situated in a historically-black neighbourhood, he was also aware of the difficulty for locals to accept the idea of a white man owning and selling rare books about black history. “I’m not naïve, I know that there are some people in the neighborhood talking about me saying ‘this white guy thinks he knows everything’. But you know, I understand that. The white people, I don’t understand as well.”

     . . . . This, from today's LRB daily email offering from their archive; the year it was published (2000 -- another age!) I requested the anthology for Christmas, and which shows that even Churchill, in the darkest days of WWII, sought out inspiration from black writers.:

...The Harlem Renaissance has been overlooked in many accounts of American Modernism, but the new Norton Anthology of American Literature gives it a good deal of space....

     . . . . As addendum to our adage from the song we wrote way back in the 1980's, and el V's band performed at CBGB's  "When The Plague Hits the City," -- everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck --  this has been good for book biz, which so very often denies black writers space and support, even while profiting from their suffering.

To paraphrase, my agent was pushing back a meeting necessary for the completion and timely release of my book — which is about how black people can apply the lessons we derive from traumatic experiences to our careers — so that white people could reflect on how to help black people. I countered, insisting that our meeting take place as scheduled because black people’s lives are in danger, and I shouldn’t have to sacrifice momentum on a book written for black people because white people are performing empathy.

     . . . . Everything about the action, thinking, language, rhetoric and behavior of white supremacists and racial injustice never goes away because we, as a nation of white people, cover it up comes back, Part the Umptyth -- shades of the Slaveocracy surveillance and control of the Post Office, monitoring and confiscating and burning any materials that even contained the word, 'slave' -- including novels, and not just Uncle Tom's Cabin, that screed penned by satan.

Law Enforcement Seizes Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19

The masks, reading “Stop killing Black people,” were meant to quell the spread of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately affected Black Americans.

... The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) spent tens of thousands of dollars on the masks they had planned to send all over the country. The first four boxes, each containing 500 masks, were mailed from Oakland, California, and were destined for Washington, St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, where on May 25 a white police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old handcuffed Black man, setting off a wave of protests across the country.

But the items never left the state. The U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers for the packages indicate they were “Seized by Law Enforcement” and urge the mailer to “contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for further information.”

And, then, you know, Rand Paul, blocking the anti-lynching legislation in the Senate -- Rand Paul who is such a despicable person his neighbor tried to kill him.  Anyway, shades of the entire history of the USA -- even FDR didn't even dare try for anti-lynching law -- too politically dangerous for him, as he continuously explained to his wife, Eleanor, who just as relentlessly kept pressuring him to do it.

The First Lady lost that battle, but she never gave up her war for equality and against systemic injustice.  We can't give up either. It is our job, our obligation, and, as John Quincy Adams declared, "my moral duty as deemed by Almighty God."

June 1st, 2nd Part

     . . . . The desire to Know, first hand -- sent us outside two hours before curfew. We have returned within 45 minutes. It's now 10 to 10 PM.

Serious action up at 14th Street; 95% males, white and black, 25 and under, They Say.

The walk was scary from the moment we set outdoors. Due to the many beatings as a child, my instinct is always when I sense violence is to get the fuck outta there.

Small huddles and larger groups of people -- some right outside our door, changing clothes, from one set of designer athletic wear, to another set -- and walking along the streets of luxury retail outlets -- some of which amazingly still have no boarding, no anything.

OTOH, we saw some weedy white guys with baseball bats standing around too, and howling about no respect for the police, and "Violence big time tonight."

All of these people were without a clue, but looking for opportunity. White guys not wearing masks, black guys wearing masks.

Saw no cops though. Just helicopters.

I was spooked, though I wanted to See for myself.

Then there were Others, just sitting at the park tables and benches on our block, chatting away, eating pizza. They too were without a clue.

I just don't know.

Bad guys are planning bad things. These aren't the protesters of the Community Strikes Back.

May Went Out With Bang and Fire

     . . . . Tearing off the May page of the wall calendar this morning, a yellow sticky slapped on the page back in February was revealed – we were to be at the Spoleto festival this coming weekend, seeing Rhiannan Giddens, who has been shouting out Cuba and Its Music for such long time. It was part of my birthday present that el V had planned back in February. I'd completely forgotten about that, as I have just about everything from Before.

     . . . . Didn’t sleep until very late last night due to helicopters, sirens, fire trucks, protesters and rioters and looters (these last three are not in the same category) going on all night.

Surges of action, back and forth from up in Brooklyn (until the bridges were closed), and down from the north in Midtown, from the east in Union Square, and us right in the middle of it.  Already by 2 AM there were multiple fires and smash-and-grabs. It's the fire -- and there was one set on the Prince Street corner a block above us -- that have us scared    

 . . . . Returned from walkabout checking out the neighborhood. Haven't seen so many cops on these blocks in -- well, ever -- as are on the blocks today. It seemed to be about half and half of masked vs maskless people out and about.

People filling U Hauls with their apartment goods -- moving out, when at this time of the year the U Hauls would be bringing in the possessions of all the wealthy young students moving in.  

Bars, restaurants, cafés, coffee shops, yogurt shops, etc. that from last weekend through Saturday had built out and blocked off all the sidewalks and much of the streets for normal pedestrians, today retracted that in favor of boarding up their places and constructing more security.

All the stores finally boarding up. I was puzzled all along that they hadn't done it.  Looks as though it was Prince Street, with all those high end, desirable types of shops from Prada to Coach, from Chanel to Guicci, from Apple to NARS, to David Yerman got trashed from Broadway on the east, to 6th Ave. on the west.

The people doing these looting its aren't part of the protests, aren't protesters at all.  They are gangs who know what they are doing, at least when it came to the luxury stores. They came in vehicles, for one thing, and a lot of these vehicles have out-of-state plates, according to the journalists who were there -- who threatened and attacked too for daring to record.

These criminals are using the ongoing tragedy to expand their profession of breaking and entering and grabbing for profit.  And, ya, these do look to be people of color, already dressed in the most up-to-date expensive, designer athletic gear. But they are not the same frustrated, angry, desperate people setting cop cars on fire -- aided and abetted I will bet good money by provocateurs, not to mention the cops themselves (I put protesters, rioters and looters in separate categories).  The looters don't have that kind of guts of protesters, and certainly don't share The Community Strikes Back moral backbone.

I'm betting the looters will be back here tonight -- though I hope I'm wrong. [edited to add mayor de Blasio has just imposed an 11 PM curfew; his daughter was among the protesters arrested last night.]  That would make 4 straight nights of no sleep -- as if that's the suffering on the level of every front line we can think of which protesters are suffering, along with the relentless erasure of justice, rights, dignity and hope.  In the meantime, deathcultpsychopathchief cowers and whines in the White House bunker.  The Protesters aren’t letting up in D.C. may the Lord bless and keep them*And even to protest the takeover of the US by the Biggest Looter, it takes African Americans to again put their bodies at risk to both covid-19 and arrest and beating and murder -- and we benefit. As awful as we believe things to be, we are all too comfortable, even now, in the pandemic, to do anything.

Saw some big burly types get out of a very fine ride with Texas plates, and just walk around our street looking at places. I think looting (as opposed to getting necessary supplies denied, like water and insulin) awful, but it sure as hell isn't a surprise or shock (though while it is going on, it's, well, scary). Looting, sanctioned and otherwise -- see accounts of London during the Bubonic Plague -- though then the booty tended to kill the looters too -- has always happened in plagues and wars and by now with all the disasters this nation has been going through just from climate change, the organized thieves have lots of experience of knowing when to arrive in a place of massive disruption.

Thank goodness E's latest CARE package of THC:CBD products arrived this morning! I need some soothing.  Our wine delivery just arrived this afternoon too -- while a lot of liquor stores got trashed, ours thank goodness was spared. But today, as well as their steel shutters, they are boarding up over the shutters too. And sitting in the back and in the vast cellar with their shotguns -- in company with some of their male relatives. Their supply of French wine is vastly depleted because of those embargos deathcultpsychopathchief slammed on French products.  So how much longer will I get wine?  People are reporting that in a lot cities with the liquor stores looted and the remaining ones anywhere nearby closed and boarded up and stock removed, they can't get a drink now.

After being thrilled Wednesday at having moved back to Manhattan -- and bringing us some organic, free range meat, personally butchered by the farmer (which means I probably won't need any more for a lot of the summer, particularly as I tend to quit eating meat all together in the summer) -- yesterday afternoon P and K went back to the Family Big House on Long Island Sound. 

     . . . . I didn't think I'd been losing any more weight since about the middle of April when I was able to start exercising again and calmed down. I'm eating very well, resumed drinking wine in May, and despite the workouts, since I go out hardly at all, I didn't think there would be any more weight loss. El V is still losing weight, very slowly, gradually, in a very healthy manner, but I thought surely I'd hit plateau for how we're living.

But as of this morning I had to pull out a smaller sizes, packed away from back in the days when I was recovering from being truly way too thin. What's up with that? Anyway, I put on some gold, shiny earrings and a gold chain, before going out (masked -- guess I'll never wear lipstick again?). Tonight, after dinner, I'm painting my toenails.  It's barely 60 today, but by the weekend it will be in the 80's. It's gonna be a long hot summer, one way and another, and I'm ready to live it through!

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*   Interesting that across the country all these protests are local, since people now can't travel easily -- unlike the looters and the provocateurs to riot and looting.

This Is The End ... Not With a Cry

     . . . . Put our vote-by-mail ballots in the mailbox, despite the Dems determined we not have our Presidential Primary (PLUS, hello???? a Real Election for local and state offices). 

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     . . . . "Reopening the City Too Soon Is, Effectively, Age Discrimination" -- and other kinds of descrimination too.  Centers NYC, but applies across the board, particularly to totalitarian capitalist sociopathic 'leadership' states, such as the USA, Brasil, the UK, Sweden, and Russia. By design and by lack of ability to lead and deal with such a crisis, it has been decided to lose a huge number of lives forever into the future (and let's remember climate crash is also going on and not stopping) to this virus, rather than contain and eradicate -- allo for the sake of the bloated corporate richies and their minions to get RICHER. Thus here we have no tests, no tracking, no tracing, disappearing stats.

NOTE: not all nations have chosen this route, see: New Zealand; Cuba, Austria, etc.

Soon, New York will start pulling up shutters and setting out chairs. Work-from-homers will venture beyond their neighborhoods from time to time. Employees will trickle back into offices. Housekeepers, electricians, dentists, and security guards will repopulate the subway, because they will have no choice. The city is gambling that we have learned enough in these past months to keep the risks under control — that masks, distance, hygiene, and anxiety will keep us, if not exactly safe, then safe-ish. With no cure, no vaccine, and limited treatment, we have to rely on our own behavior and that of everyone around us. We have to trust our fellow New Yorkers to stay home at the first sign of the sniffles, to share our habits of caution, to wait for the next train if necessary, to step politely aside. We have to trust the MTA to keep crowds thin, employers to think through workplace logistics, the transportation department to dissolve the knots where pedestrians might jam the sidewalks, the school system to have a plan for a million kids that will protect their families too. Lockdown was easy compared to this.
And because that whole latticework of new habits and mutual consideration is so fragile, those who are at greater risk of getting sick will have to avoid it altogether. We’re opening a new chapter in the tale of two cities: the young and the healthy will (sometimes enthusiastically) take their chances; the old and the vulnerable will effectively remain under house arrest. To reopen now is to accept a new form of segregation, the exclusion of entire at-risk populations from public life, including everyone over, say 65. This is a civil-rights issue, and the reason we face it is that we have bumbled the better option: testing everyone.

If New Yorkers could get tested en masse and quickly isolate those who are infected, separating them from their families for two weeks, then the healthy could all pitch in to heal our wounded city. It’s not inconceivable. Wuhan, a city larger than New York, has reportedly tested 6.5 million residents (or maybe 9 million) in ten days. The Army tests all new recruits before they can join the ranks. In the short term, we would need to tolerate intrusions into our privacy that cannot be made permanent. Before you could enter a public building or sit at a restaurant table, you’d have to scan a QR code on a phone or wristband certifying you as COVID-free. No test, no service.

In the absence of widespread, repeatable, and accurate testing, we’re left with a radically unfair choice. Instead of isolating the infected, we will isolate the old and infirm, as well as plenty of vigorous people with an assortment of risk factors. Reopening schools means cutting grandparents off from their grandchildren and teachers from their parents. If you have diabetes or high blood pressure (or live with someone who has diabetes or high blood pressure), you’d be wise to avoid serving on a jury or entering a mall. Public transit will serve only for the young and healthy or the foolish. The threshold of every public building becomes a site of discrimination. [....]

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     . . . . The situation here ... it's beyond ... there is NO way to observe Distance. Too many people, too many bicyclists, too many family groups, too many joggers, just too many for any Distance at all. The amount of vehicular traffic is even higher than yesterday with everybody putting up construction to move their business onto the sidewalk and into the street. But there are all these vehicles. Plus people are clustering without masks right up close already, up and down the blocks.

Then there is this -- I'm walking carefully. Suddenly I hear approaching from behind this very loud male voice. It turns out a youngish guy on his bluetooth or whatever saying, "Ya they called me immediately to say I tested positive. My roommate though hasn't gotten any calls." And he continues in this vein -- I'm across a wide street by now and behind him, the wind is blowing from him -- and I can hear distinctly every word he's shouting to the world. NOT WEARING A MASK.

WTF.

On another block, a guy w/o a mask is futzing with his motorcycle, coughing his lungs out. I am between him and a whole cluster of people outside a cafe up close and personal and no masks.

I have no idea what we're going to do this summer. Though surely a lot of these people are going to get really sick?

Wine Wednesday.  I am partaking myself.  Because whatheeff else?

John Quincy Adams Receives Early Christmas Gift!

     . . . . After several more 1832 entries in which John Quincy Adams flagellates himself for being an insipid poet (frequently following a 5 AM translation out of Hebrew stanzas of the Psalms, which appear to be his life-long project to turn into his own English poetry), a failure as a poet, a silly Diarist, since many men have achieved great things and never kept a diary, and ejaculations that every one of his literary efforts should be chucked into the fire (which they never are), he receives brilliant news!

Now, this is news to we readers in 2020 as well, since the Library of America Diaries have not told us that JQ actually submitted Dermot Mac Morragh, or The Conquest of Ireland,* for publication (or as he'd referred to it at the start of the year as "The Tale of Dermot".  But submitted he had, though I do not know any more about that than it went, evidently, to Melvin Lord, "Boston Booksellers, 1650-1860." This bit of information I gleaned from here.

______

Washington, D.C.2 - December 1832

I answered the letter yesterday received from W. L. Stone, and one received this morning from Melvin Lord at Boston.  He says that his edition of the Poem of Dermot is all gone -- That he has no copies left -- This has relieved me from much anxiety -- The puck [sic] of critics are just opening upon it; and if they now destroy it de fond en comble they cannot injure the publisher -- My Shoulders must bear -- I comfort myself with the reflection that Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review pronounced Byron a Poetaster, and Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers deals out the same measure to Walter Scott -- I remember too that Byron was dissuaded by a friend from pubishing his Childe Harold, and Scott from finishing his Waverley.  A Poem is at best but a Lottery ticket and if I get a prize barely to repay me the price of my ticket, I must put with it for good luck -- Snow.

Alas, it seems he foretold correctly -- Dermot did not  garner laudatory reviews:

Indeed, it is that short sentence of four words,–By John Quincy Adams,–to which Dermot Mac Morrogh will be solely indebted for all the attention it will receive. Were it not for this magic sentence, we doubt if many readers would get further than the middle of the first Canto; and we are quite certain that none would ever reach the end of the second.

I am still continuing with the 2019 biography of James Monroe.  As I'm now into his administration and JQ has finally arrived back in the US from his appointment as minister to London, to take up his cabinet post as Secretary of State -- these two books are dovetailing seamlessly.  Sometimes I forget from which one I heard a juicy bit. Both are read aloud experiences, JQ with the two of us at bedtime, and the James Monroe from an NYPL audio download to which I listen while working out.

Learning that John Quincy was determined to commit historical fiction is heart-warming, being as good historical fiction was always my own childhood ambition.  This is who the historical Dermot was.

However one gets to know him and his life, John Quincy Adams is worth knowing; and, he becomes more worthy the longer he lives.This cannot be said about most of us.  And certainly not about our own Diaries!
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*  Dermot Mac Morrogh, or the Conquest of Ireland: An Historical Tale of the Twelfth Century, in Four Cantos by John Quincy Adams (Classic Reprint) is available from Amazilla here.  For some reason this delights me no end! There are even reviews, one of which pronounces Dermot an easy read.

Dermot's full text can be found at this University of Michigan website. As well as the poetry, it begins with JQ's own inevitably prolix Introduction and Description (soon after arriving to take up his post as Secretary of State, it was Congressional Recess.  President Monroe had gone to his Virginia farm for R&R - he wasn't well.  Within two weeks, Adams had drowned him in at least ten multiple-page letters from D.C., about everything.  

Breathing Lilacs: Tragedy Is Personal

     . . . . The memory of yesterday's scent of lilacs at Washington Square Park lingers. Which brought to mind, then, Walt Whitman's, "When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd", his elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  Washington Square Park, though not yet a park* -- all of what was to be known as Greenwich Village -- was Whitman stomping grounds too.

I buried my masked face in them, heedless of the bees -- at least until I noticed them, so entranced I'd been by the strong come hither the blossoms broadcast. That I could smell them so vividly, even through the mask shows 1) the difference in air quality here due to virus; 2) how little the mask prevents air born from coming through. Well yes, the mask is to protect others; it doesn't protect us. O the perfume was heady!  The bees' presence also made me happy.

Did three different class guest spots this last week, including one around The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans, for a Tulane class.

El V is incredible. His SooperDooperPooter for processing, editing and producing video and film and audio got delivered yesterday, and he had it up and functional before bed! So's he able now to send quickly these enormous files of content to the VIMEO website for sharing with the film maker in New Orleans, with whom he's  working on the Cuban content, among other things. It's so great to have decent tools. To render (this word has a special meaning within this Adobe PremierePro program, which I won't clutter this post with)  his work loads and then send them along used to take something 24 hours, and even the slightest burp in internet service or speed would stop it, and then it would have to start all over from zero, including all the edits, tweeks, synching, volume control, color saturation, etc. Now he can do it in minutes!

Seems last night I got mildly high from the amount of Erica’s THC Soothing Salve, and her Freeze lotion, which I vigorously and lengthily rubbed into both of us last night as both of us have screaming neck and back pain. Felt happy and peaceful, giggled a lot together during Reading Aloud. John Quincy Adams just gets to be more fascinating and enjoyable the older he gets.  

And, just before lights out a friend emailed this Yo-Yo-Ma Book Section link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/books/review/yo-yo-ma-by-the-book-interview.html

Q: What books are on your nightstand?

“The World That Made New Orleans,” by Ned Sublette.

“Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,’” the oral history of one of the last known African survivors of the Middle Passage, by Zora Neale Hurston.

The memoirs of Alexandre Dumas, the first volume of which I am struggling through in French.

“Spirit Rising,” by the unparalleled Angelique Kidjo, who recommended the first three titles. She and I are working on a new project that explores some of the less-known intersections between what we think of as Western classical and African music.

What great book company to be in -- Alexandre Dumas! even.  So big shout outs this week from both Rhiannan Giddens (Cuba and its Music) and Yo-Yo-Ma (The World That Made New Orleans) -- and Angélique Kidjo too -- who back when it came out had herself photographed holding up The American Slave Coast!  for Ned's books!

Of course I am ignoring just about everything that isn't part of our own little world -- all too easy to do, when in quarantine.  But mentally ill neighbor across the hall helps keep me grounded in the awareness of other realities, with one request after another: opening cartons, bottles, etc. that she can't because she took much of her medication, fell and hurt her arm and shoulder; cooking for her; providing ear plugs and three phone calls of how to use them >?< in one day; a wash cloth because she doesn't have any; toothbrush and toothpaste, etc. 

That we're having nice days is certainly having an effect upon our mood this week. We're just generally more relaxed and peaceful. For now.

All I can say is, "Thank you lordessa, for B and his weekly supply of cornbread!"

Even the absentee ballot requests for both of us arrived -- finally! -- in yesterday's mail, so I will be able to vote in next month's Dem Pres Nom primary -- from which ballot the Dem party bigwigs including Cuomo have done everything they can to 1) not hold; 2) remove Bernie Sanders.

Also, for a variety of reasons, some of our friends are moving back to NYC . . . .

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*  Fort Green Park was Whitman's park of the heart, from at least the 1840's on.