Sunday

29 October 2017

— back on Day Light Losing Time

539 BC: Cyrus the Great, founder of Persian Empire, enters Babylon and allows Jews to return to their land.

312: Constantine the Great enters Rome after victory at the Milvian Bridge, much popular jubilation, topped by fishing Maxentus’s body from the Tiber and beheading it.

969: Byzantines occupy Antioch, Syria,

1390: First ever trial for witchcraft in Paris; three people run out of luck.

1618: Sir Walter Raleigh, adventurer, writer, courtier, gets to learn what head removal is about, allegedly for conspiring against James I.

1675: Leibniz makes first use of long s (∫) as a symbol in integral calculus.

1787: Prague: Mozart’s Don Giovanni premieres.

1792: Oregon: William E. Broughton names Mount Hood  after 1st Viscount Sam Hood.

1863: Geneva: Eighteen countries meet to form the International Red Cross.

1863: U.S. Civil War; General Grant wins one against General Longstreet.

1901: Amherst, MA: “Jolly” Jane Toppan, nurse, arrested for murdering Davis family of Boston with overdoses of morphine. (She will confess to 31 murders, said her goal was to set the record.)

1901: Man who snuffed President McKinley gets the jolt.

1921: Boston: Second trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

1921: After winning 25 in a row, the Harvard football team looses to Centre College in Kentucky.

1922: King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy appoints Mussolini PM.

1923: Turkey becomes a Republic.

1944: Soviet army enters Hungary.

1956: Suez Crisis begins.

1960: Louisville: Cassius Clay wins his first professional fight.

1961: Syria exits United Arab League.

1964: Tanganyika and Zanzibar become Tanzania.

1964: Murf-the-Surf steals Star of India from NYC Museum of Natural History.

1972: Germany swaps three surviving Palestinian perpetrators of the Munich Olympic Massacre for hostages of highjacked Lufthansa Flight 615.

1986: PM Thatcher opens the last stretch of M25 motorway.

1991: American Galileo spacecraft becomes first probe to visit asteroid, 951 Gaspra.

1994: Guy in a trench-coat outside White House fence fires 29 rounds from his semi-automatic rifle at guys in suits on White House lawn; gets tackled by citizens; gets 40 years for attempted murder of President Clinton, who was inside watching a football game.

1998: South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission condemns both sides for atrocities.

1998: Seventy-seven year old John Glenn goes up into space for a few victory laps.

2004: Al Jazeera broadcasts Osama bin Laden video in which he admits direct responsibility for 9/11.

2008: Delta and Northwest Airlines merge, reducing US carriers to five.

2015: China announces the end of One-Child Policy after 35 years.

Good Morning All,

Lord love a duck, today’s Day Book contains my #1 all-time absolutely most favorite poem. Bar none. No bull shit, the poem that first sang to me as a junior in high school, thanks again to wacky Miss Krastin, and yet sings to me, as eloquently as it did then, if not more so. 

Hint: It is not Mr. Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Nor is Mr. Roethke's The Waking. Nor Mr. Sandburg’s Red-Headed Restaurant Cashier. Nor Miss Dickinson's Some Keep the Sabbath. Nor Mr. Housman’s Loveliest of Trees. Though those are all in my top ten.

It is by a Chicago lawyer/poet, Clarence Darrow’s partner for ten years, and is one of 212 monologues, each  narrated by a dead person buried in the Spoon River Cemetery in small town Illinois. 

Yup, Edgar Lee Masters, who is buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, the model for Spoon River. 

Miss Krastin lent me her dog-eared copy, not in a plain brown bag as she had done for Catcher in the Rye, but just handing it over with a grin. As I have already reported in these pages, I loved the book so much I wrote 100 dead-folk poems myself, and after I showed them to my 12th English teacher, Mr. Taylor, got the supreme compliment from him I needed to see a psychiatrist. And I got a compliment from a girl for whom I had the serious hots  when one of my poems appeared on the front page of the Chronicle, the school's monthly, probably submitted by Miss Krastin.

The poem is Fiddler Jones. I shall resist insulting you with a paraphrase. Fiddler simply asks how people see things. Is a field full of clover something that can be turned into money, or a beautiful place to go walking? He’s a farmer, but his passion is playing the violin. Money is not of much interest to him, although he does enough farming to hold onto his forty acres. He lives for beauty, the beauty of the music, the beauty of the people dancing to his music, the beauty of nature and the shared humanity.

My forty acres would be my career in teaching, though I’d say I was a lot luckier than Fiddler in that I enjoyed being a teacher far more than he a farmer. My fiddle, such as it is, started out as a Smith Corona portable, and is now this MacPro. Since the age of fifteen I have never not been tapping words onto paper or screen. Not without wholes lots of commercial success (just as I doubt Fiddler Jones ever made much money from his fiddling), and not very often (although occasionally!) with artistic success. But I can tell you I have enjoyed the journey!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: 

Fiddler Jones, Edgar Lee Masters

The earth keeps some vibration going

There in your heart, and that is you.

And if the people find you can fiddle,

Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.

What do you see, a harvest of clover?

Or a meadow to walk through to the river?

The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands

For beeves hereafter ready for market;

Or else you hear the rustle of skirts

Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.

To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust

Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;

They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy

Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”

How could I till my forty acres

Not to speak of getting more,

With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos

Stirred in my brain by crows and robins

And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?

And I never started to plow in my life

That some one did not stop in the road

And take me away to a dance or picnic.

I ended up with forty acres;

I ended up with a broken fiddle—

And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,

And not a single regret.