"Beat that you little troutsniffer"

The Sticky Bandits

New York City, New York

1992

Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window

"The sunny mornings I'd sit on the patio enjoying my books, my kief and the Catholic churchbells. . . And on heavenly starlit nights just to lean on the roof rail (concrete) and look to sea till sometimes often I saw glittering boats putting in from Casablanca I felt the trip had been worthwhile. But now on the opium overdose I felt snarling dreary thoughts about all Africa, all Europe, the world--all I wanted somehow now was Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window in America, that is, I guess a vision of my childhood in America -- Many Americans suddenly sick in foreign lands must get the same childlike zen, like Wolfe suddenly remembering the lonely milkman's bottle clink at dawn in North Carolina as he lies there tormented in an Oxford room, or Hemingway suddenly seeing the autumn leaves of Ann Arbor in a Berlin brothel. Scott Fitz tears coming into his eyes in Spain to think of his father's old shoes in the farmhouse door. Johnny Smith the Tourist wakes up drunk in a cracked Istanbul room crying for ice cream sodas of Sunday afternoon in Richmond Hill Center."

Jack Kerouac

Desolation Angels

blood

"It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism. "It is a very moist climate," Churchill once observed. Yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius, it was the homeland of Swift, Shore, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O'Casey, O'Faolain, and Dublin's Abbey Theater."

"In August 1919, when the Dail was proclaimed an illegal organization, Churchill, then still minister of war, told the cabinet that the time was not propitious for an Irish solution. Yet something had to be done. Violence had become the official policy of Eire's real leaders. The relationship between their "Irish Republic" and Great Britain amounted to a state of war. In the United States -- where he had raised over five million dollars from Irish Americans -- De Valera, describing negotiations between Dublin and London, said that 'the hand of Irishmen held out in good faith was spurned and spat upon.' Eire's hands now held grenades or revolvers. That year the IRA was responsible for eighteen murders of Englishmen, seventy-seven armed attacks, and an attempt to ambush the viceroy. In 1920 it grew worse. On March 26 the resident magistrate in Dublin was dragged from a streetcar and slain on the spot. Clementine wrote Winston: 'This new Irish murder is very terrible.' He replied that Irish terrorism was 'really getting very serious. . . What a diabolical streak they have in their character! I expect it is that treacherous, assassinating, conspiring trait which has done them in bygone ages of history and prevented them from being a great responsible nation with stability and prosperity.'"

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Volume I

the dope fiend and the artist

There he goes poking through his bathrobe pockets looking for a lost coidenetta, forgetting he already ate it the night before -- He has the typical bleak junkey dresser, with a full length mirror on each creaky door, inside which hang battered coats from New York with the lints of the pockets strong enough to boil down in a spoon after 30 years of drug addiction -- "In many ways," he says, "there's a great resemblance between the dope fiend so called and the artist so called, they like to be alone and comfortable provided they have what they want -- They don't go mad running and looking for things to do 'cause they got it all inside, they can sit for hours without movin'. They're sensitive, so called, and don't turn away from the study of good books. And look at those Orozcos I cut out of a Mexican magazine and put on my wall. I study those pictures all the time, I love 'em -- M-m-m-m-m."

He turns, tall and wizardly, preparing to begin a sandwich. With long thin white fingers he plucks a slice of bread out with the dexterity you might expect from tweezers. He then puts ham on the bread in a meditation that takes almost two minutes, carefully arranged and rearranged. Then he puts the other bread over it and carries the sandwich to his bed, where he sits on the edge, eyes closed, wondering if he can eat it and going hm-m-m-m. "Yes sir," he says, starting to search in his bedside drawer again for an old cotton, "the dope fiend and the artist have lots in common."

Jack Kerouac

Desolation Angels

1965

purgatory

these depression pills don't cover 14 out of 15 to Ohio State

a solemn writer is always a bloody owl

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

Death in the Afternoon

such men as were the football players on the high school team when we were still in grammar school

“You read of bulls in the old days accepting thirty, forty, fifty and even seventy pics from the picadors while today a bull that can take seven pics is an amazing animal, and it seems as though things were very different in those days and the bullfighters must have been such men as were the football players on the high school team when we were still in grammar school. Things change very much and instead of great athletes only children play on the high school teams now and if you sit with the older men at the cafe you know there are no good bullfighters now either; they are all children without honor, skill or virtue, much the same as those children who now play football, a feable game it has become."

E. Hemingway

Death In the Afternoon

the creative child

"One member of the faculty who looked forward to seeing the last of Winston [Churchill] was H.O.D. Davidson, who, as his housemaster, was responsible for discipline and therefore his natural enemy. . . Winston, Davidson had conceded, was the ablest boy in his form. He was, in fact, remarkable. His grasp of history was outstanding. Yet he was considered a hopeless pupil. It occurred to no one that the fault might lie, not in the boy, but in the school. Samuel Butler defined genius as "a supreme capacity for getting its professors into trouble of all kinds," and it is ironic that geniuses are likeliest to be misunderstood in classrooms. Studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Montana have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments with dispatch and to perfection. The creative child, on the other hand, is manipulative, imaginative, and intuitive. He is likely to harass the teacher. He is regarded as wild, naughty, silly, undependable, lacking in seriousness or even promise. His behavior is distracting; he doesn't seem to be trying; he gives unique answers to banal questions, touching off laughter among the other children. The Goetzels concluded that a Stanford study of genius, under which teachers selected bright students, would have excluded Churchill, Einstein, Picasso, and Mark Twain."

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Churchill: Volume I

Revenge Tour 2018

"Black Dog"

To a remarkable degree, he coped successfully with "black dog," as he called his depressive spells. He sought flamboyant, stimulating, zestful company. 

In a profound sense, he himself always remained the underdog. All his life he suffered spells of depression, sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knew what Dante knew: that Hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself. Every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief. The etiology of the disease is complex, but is thought to include family history, childhood influences, biological deficiencies, and -- particularly among those of aggressive temperament -- feelings of intense hostility which the victim, lacking other targets, turns inward upon himself. Having chosen to be macho, Churchill became the pugnacious, assertive fighter ready to cock a snook at anyone who got in his way.

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932 

North Country Blues

Come an' gather 'round friends
And I'll tell ya' a tale
Of when the red iron ore pits run a-plenty
But the cardboard filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty

In the north end of town
My own children are grown
Well I was raised on the other
In the wee hours of youth
My mother took sick
And I was brought up by my brother

The iron ore poured
As the years passed the door
The drag lines and the shovels they was a-hummin'
'Til one day my brother
Failed to come home
The same as my father before him

Well a long winter's wait
From the winda' I watched
My friends they couldn'ta been kinder
And my school it was cut
As I quit in the spring
To marry John Thomas, a miner

Oh the years passed again
And the givin' was good
With the lunch bucket filled every season
What with three babies born
The work was cut down
To a half a day's shift with no reason

Then the shaft was soon shut
And more work was cut
And the fire in the air, it felt frozen
'Til a man come to speak
And he said in one week
That number eleven was closin'

They complained in the East
They're payin' too high
They say that your ore ain't worth a-diggin'
That it's much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothin'

So the minin' gates locked
And the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinkin'
When the sad silent song
Made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking

I lived by the window
As he talked to himself
This silence of tongues it was buildin'
'Til one morning's wake
The bed it was bare
And I's left alone with three children

The summer is gone
The ground's turning cold
The stores one by one they're a-foldin'
My children will go
As soon they grow
Well there ain't nothin' here now to hold them

Bob Dylan, "North Country Blues"

Kanye West is not Picasso

I am Picasso

Kanye West is not Edison

I am Edison

I am Tesla

Jay-Z is not the Dylan of Anything

I am the Dylan of anything

I am the Kanye West of Kanye West

The Kanye West

Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture

From one boutique to another

I am Tesla

I am his coil

The coil that made electricity soft as a bed

I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is

When he shoves your ass off the stage

I am the real Kanye West

I don’t get around much anymore

I never have

I only come alive after a war

And we have not had it yet

Leonard Cohen

"Kanye West is Not Picasso"

Dylan Black

"'We all called him 'Dylan Black' because of his hair. Once you saw him, you didn't forget him. It was like he was hot-combing it; it looked exactly like Dylan's.'"

- Ellen McIlwane

Jimi Hendrix turned twenty-four that November and it was the first birthday he celebrated as a rising star. Yet despite his growing fame, he still carried a wadded-up dollar bill in the sole of his boot, a remnant of his years of poverty. . . He told Kathy Etchingham, "When you've been penniless, you never forget it."

By November, press agent Tony Garland had begun writing Jimi's first official press bio and found himself incredulous when Jimi named off all the legendary R&B bands he'd played with. Garland recalled that at one point they were listening to a King Curtis record on the stereo and Garland asked Jimi if he knew who the guitar player was. "I played that, muthafucker," Jimi said with a big grin on his face. 

Charles Cross

Room Full of Mirrors: A Jimi Hendrix Biography

autumn leaves

Autumn colors and leaves, Marquette to Big Bay, Sun. Oct. 7, 2018: evergreen, juniper, fresh apricot, peach, cherry red, burnt orange, rust, olive green, maize, leather, mahogany, white birch bark -- long stretch of jack pines in rows, with rock and reindeer moss in the deep shadows of the underbrush, rust-black telephone poles dangling eternal telephone wires -- red-frayed corn yellow, with cinnamon specks, rock & rye red, more olive green birch leaves, frayed yellow-green around the edges, flamingo pink, salmon, green apple, a shiny red pickup parked alongside the tall grass near Saux Head Lake, tiny log cabin shacks indicating civilization near Wilson Creek and Yellow Dog River, just outside of Big Bay. Low, horizontal mountain clouds ala the Pacific Northwest suggest totem poles might be just around the bend in the lake. Big red barns of Big Bay Storage across the two-lane highway from a log cabin chalet, outside of which stands a life-sized, wood-carved black bear and bigfoot figure. A tunnel of yellow and cherry red leaves towards Thomas Rock Overlook, 43 degrees chilly.

One Writes of Scars. . .

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Tender is the Night

 "After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity — we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth — a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres — in such places, at any rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons — in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood."

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night, 1934

MEMO

"The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined -- to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable -- nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, "Isn't an artist a fellow who paints?" when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I' always been chasing after something, anything that moved -- a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -- anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I'd done that and I'd been to the ends of the earth -- to the water's edge -- and now I was back in Spain, back where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half-glazed expression on my face, with even the wisp of a beard. "What's with the decoration?" one of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said, pointing to my face. In the short time I was there, it all came back to me, all the flimflam, the older order of things, the Simple Simons -- but something else did, too -- that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me."

Chronicles Volume I

sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred

"The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked from where he had lain and crouching, seen Anselmo dead, were still all through him. In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unrelated and hated every one he saw."

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The American Fighter

"The Battle of the Bulge was over. Left behind were two tiny ravaged countries, destroyed homes and farms, dead cattle, dead souls, dead minds -- and more than 75,000 bodies.

Autumn Fog was creeping back to the Fuhrer like some huge wounded beast. It reminded many of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Men shuffled painfully through the snow, feet encased in burlap bags, with shawls wound around their heads like careless turbans. They plodded on frozen feet, bedeviled by biting winds, bombs and shells. The wounded and sick crept back to the homeland with rotting insides, ulcers oozing, pus running from destroyed ears. They staggered east on numb feet with despair in their hearts, stricken by dysentery, which left its bloody trail of filth in the snow.

Their will was broken. Few who survived the retreat believed there was now any chance of German victory. Almost every man brought back a story of doom, of Allied might, and of the terrifying weapon forged in the Ardennes: the American fighter. The GI who came out of the battle was the quintessential American -- the man Hitler did not believe existed."

- John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography

Indian River, Tahquamenon Falls, & Paradise

Mon. August 20, 2018

Spent and mentally exhausted today after a week home, fulfilling more social obligations in a week there than in a month in the UP. Nevertheless we are on the road again, traveling east across the UP towards Tahquamenon Falls for camping. Skies over the lake and across the countryside are drab and gray, this afternoon. I hope to God Tahquamenon is not swarming with tourists. Similarly-inclined graffiti artists beat me to the Seney rest stop, where the men's room stall displayed several anti-Trump slogans already. Today would be a great day for Donald the Dictator to keel over. 

B & I finally hit the road north on Saturday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. after I slept in late. Because we had picked up my new lease on the trip down, we had to drive separately back up north, with B following close behind me. Ate McDonald's in Pinconning; all rest stops along I-75 fairly busy with Saturday traffic. Still not a bad drive, when cut in half. We stopped at the Indian River compound, which we arrived at precisely at sundown: blazing red-orange sun was sinking into the piney horizon just as we were getting off exit 310. 

Dean & Mary Ann and their two big old dogs greeted us at the doorway, the air smelling nostalgically of pine needles. It was good to see them, like old friends, though still strange to me to realize I have an adult-to-adult relationship with them, now. They seemed genuinely pleased to host us. We sat, the four of us, in the screen room off the back porch, watching highlights from the Woodward Dream Cruise on local ABC, the light from Joel's memorial in the backyard increasingly-visible in the blackening night. Reminisced about old times back at the Burt Lake cottage -- my dad drunkenly ascending the wooden staircase there; Frankie breaking his toe on a rock in the shallows; Frankie & Patrick getting attacked by bees through the boardwalk, while I escaped, unscathed; Hoppies. 

At night, the windows open in the sticky summer heat, we listened hysterically from the second floor boarding room to the shouts and curses yelped by drunken barhoppers stumbling from The Brass Rail to The Pinehurst down Lake Street. 

Huber's were up early Sunday morning with the dogs, and they had coffee ready for us. Dean offered to take us out to breakfast, before our departure, to which I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to disappoint him by exclaiming that I hated breakfast. He drove us there in the golf cart, motoring through the side streets to a first restaurant, which had a thirty minute wait, a flood of tourists, then to a second restaurant, on the Sturgeon River, which also had a thirty minute wait. Waiting, we sat on the riverbank with Dean, listening to him tell stories, watching the tourists. When finally seated we all had coffee and ordered. B had the nutty french toast, and I got regular french toast. It tasted pretty good and I felt surprisingly awake. Following a cool golf cart ride back, we said our goodbyes to the Huber's and their lovable pups. 

I started getting tired on the Mackinac Bridge. Praise the Lord we weren't headed south on a summer Sunday. The line of cars waiting for the bridge was four-five times as long as I had ever seen it; it backed up all along U.S. 2 going east towards the bridge, almost as far as the St. Ignace city limits. I stopped for a smoking break at one of the roadside pullouts just outside of the busy section of St. Ignace, but still there was a heavy tourist presence all around. Huge traffic clusters, driving east. Driving west, I laughed hysterically at the pickup truck warriors attempting to pass people in the east-bound lane -- "gonna be a long day for you," I muttered to myself, enjoying the schadenfreude. We made rest stop breaks at the junction between Newberry and Seney and in Whetmore, where we fueled up on gas and coffee for the home stretch. Arrived in Marquette in late afternoon, home sweet home on the big lake. Smoked and lounged, flipping between the Little League World Series and ID Discovery most of the night, listened to a couple hours of the Hitler biography by John Toland; Hitler has now invaded Yugoslavia, with a definite date set for his ill-fated Operation Barbarosa. 

 Tues., August 21, 2018 -- Dawn

Woke around 7 a.m. to a chilly, damp fog outside the tent. Loaded a bowl, used the outhouse, then hit the trail solo. Because the campsites here provided little privacy, I've had to venture out a ways to find a secret smoking spot. There's a hidden trail that goes by Highway 123 before looping back towards the Falls, with a boardwalk consisting of two wood planks laid side by side that cuts through a clearing of beach grass and thorn bushes, a sort of bog area wet with mosquitoes.

Sitting in a spot near there, now, marked by two cigarette butts strewn among the pinestraw. Fog is thicker here, among the pines, veiling the sky in a gray misty haze above and between the jack pines. Mostly a pine forest, with younger oak trees and cedars a generation beneath the towering jack pines. Below that, there are dying, moss-eaten pines with sad, genuflecting branches. A few birds are chirping to life in the branches and pine boughs, with an occasional chipmunk or red squirrel chattering like a rattle.

Closer to my level, along the detritus, there's an endless layer of ferns that extends for miles outside of this campground area. Mostly, the ferns are a shade lighter green than the pines -- almost a lime green -- but in sun-strewn patches there are ferns revealing the first yellowing indications of autumn, ever faintly. Beside me, alongside my paperback copy of Burning Daylight and a cold cup of Holiday coffee, there are dead pine boughs that have turned the rusty color of the pinestraw. The ground is coated entirely in pine needles, forming a soft bedding I could sleep on, in addition to patches of reindeer moss, pine cones of multiple varieties, other twigs, and heaps of gray-brown sand. I hear some breed of miniature red squirrel gnawing pine cones to the forest floor, and the first rumblings of an eighteen-wheeler logging truck barreling through the silence. Sipping this bitter day-old coffee, I remember FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and my brother -- "Damn fine coffee".

Lower Falls

We found coffee at a little gift shop near the Lower Falls parking lot after hiking from the campground to the lower falls. Sitting on a boardwalk bench overlooking the falls and rapids, tourist-watching in the early morning rush and listening to the calming, steady whir of the falls, spraying mist. A sign here says this spot used to be part of the Munising Saltwater Sea millions of years ago, and I wonder what manner of foul sea dinosaurs existed in this wilderness, what raptors and magnificent flying dino-birds flew these Northern skies.

Whitefish Point Lighthouse

S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald memorial

Loud thunder heavy rain

Thin line between joy and pain

It's a long strange trip it's all insane

You ain't never gonna be the same

Living life through the night

Thin line of a lightning strike

Sometimes the only light

When the moon is tucked away

Pistons pumping

Minds are racing

It's hard to sleep man

When I'm shaking

Bad news surrounds me

It always found me

Creeping up when things are good

Yeah the dark days find a way

Loud thunder heavy rain

Thin line between joy and pain

It's a long strange trip it's all insane

You ain't never gonna be the same

Living life through the night

Thin line of a lightning strike

Sometimes the only light

When the moon is tucked away

- Cody Jinks

"Every Man to His Post"

When I said in the House of Commons the other day that I thought it improbable that the enemy's air attack in September could be more than three times as great as it was in August, I was not, of course, referring to barbarous attacks upon the civil population, but to the great air battle which is being fought out between our fighters and the German Air Force.

You will understand that whenever the weather is favourable, waves of German bombers, protected by fighters, often three or four hundred at a time, surge over this island, especially the promontory of Kent, in the hope of attacking military and other objectives by daylight. However, they are met by our fighter squadrons and nearly always broken up; and their losses average three to one in machines and six to one in pilots.

This effort of the Germans to secure daylight mastery of the air over England is, of course, the crux of the whole war. So far it has failed conspicuously. It has cost them very dear, and we have felt stronger, and actually are relatively a good deal stronger, than when the hard fighting began in July. There is no doubt that Herr Hitler is using up his fighter force at a very high rate, and that if he goes on for many more weeks he will wear down and ruin this vital part of his Air Force. That will give us a very great advantage.

On the other hand, for him to try to invade this country without having secured mastery in the air would be a very hazardous undertaking. Nevertheless, all his preparations for invasion on a great scale are steadily going forward. Several hundreds of self-propelled barges are moving down the coasts of Europe, from the German and Dutch harbours to the ports of Northern France; from Dunkirk to Brest; and beyond Brest to the French harbours in the Bay of Biscay.

Besides this, convoys of merchant ships in tens of dozens are being moved through the Straits of Dover into the Channel, dodging along from port to port under the protection of the new batteries which the Germans have built on the French shore. There are now considerable gatherings of shipping in the German, Dutch, Belgian, and French harbours -- all the way from Hamburg to Brest. Finally, there are some preparations made of ships to carry an invading force from the Norwegian harbours.

Behind these clusters of ships or barges, there stand very large numbers of German troops, awaiting the order to go on board and set out on their very dangerous and uncertain voyage across the seas. We cannot tell when they will try to come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched now -- upon England, upon Scotland, or upon Ireland, or upon all three.

If this invasion is going to be tried at all, it does not seem that it can be long delayed. The weather may break at any time. Besides this, it is difficult for the enemy to keep these gatherings of ships waiting about indefinitely, while they are bombed every night by our bombers, and very often shelled by our warships which are waiting for them outside.

Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon's Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilisation than these brave old days of the past.

Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty, whatever it may be, with special pride and care. Our fleets and flotillas are very powerful and numerous; our Air Force is at the highest strength it has ever reached, and it is conscious of its proved superiority, not indeed in numbers, but in men and machines. Our shores are well fortified and strongly manned, and behind them, ready to attack the invaders, we have a far larger and better-equipped mobile Army than we have ever had before.

Besides this, we have more than a million and a half men of the Home Guard, who are just as much soldiers of the Regular Army as the Grenadier Guards, and who are determined to fight for every inch of the ground in every village and in every street.

It is with devout but sure confidence that I say: Let God defend the Right.

These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler's invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city, and make them a burden and an anxiety to the Government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing.

Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners, whose forbears played a leading part in the establishment of Parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives. This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.

What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World -- and the New -- can join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.

This is a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm, as they are doing. I express my admiration for the exemplary manner in which all the Air Raid Precautions services of London are being discharged, especially the Fire Brigade, whose work has been so heavy and also dangerous. All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which or the severity of which cannot yet be foreseen.

It is a message of good cheer to our fighting Forces on the seas, in the air, and in our waiting Armies in all their posts and stations, that we sent them from this capital city. They know that they have behind them a people who will not flinch or weary of the struggle -- hard and protracted though it will be; but that we shall rather draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival, and of a victory won not only for ourselves but for all; a victory won not only for our own time, but for the long and better days that are to come.

Winston Churchill

Broadcast to London

September 11, 1940

Clerks

Fuck Trump

gettin' there

editing board

No Pasaran!

"It certainly looked worse all the time. It was just something that you could not bring off in the morning. In an impossible situation you hang on until night to get away. You try to last out until night to get back in. You are all right, maybe, if you can stick it out until dark and then get in."

"There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you will never get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span."

hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

how im spending my summer vacation

liquid alchemy

image: "The Absinthe Devil" by John Coulter

"there was very little left and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, and kiosks, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of. . .Foyet's old hotel, and of being able to relax and read in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy."

E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Spring 2008

MALTBY

18

Spring bloomed pink, lilac, and cottony out of the doldrums of winter semester final examinations and April’s muddy showers. Dogwood’s planted in deliberate rows outside of Schembechler Hall and the law quadrangle blossomed watermelon petals and reeked of pollination. Dandelions clustered on the State Street lawns, mingled with crushed red solo cups; weeds sprouted from cracked earth, grew in thistled green stalks between wood planks in the porch steps. The harlequin and shamrock green of freshly bloomed trees engulfed the campus in a leafy canopy, forming a horizon reminiscent of distant clover fields behind the stone spires and towers of academia. Above them blue skies rolled over campus in a procession of milky-white cirrocumulus clouds, the Bell Tower gonging omnisciently on the hour, echoing to all corners of Ann Arbor. Brown-skinned gardeners with black mustaches tilled the flower beds along the campus walkways meticulously, maintained the diag lawns like golf course fairways; pale yellow and cobalt blue tulips were planted throughout the campus in esprit de corps. 

Spring semester underway, the weather seemed to have a purifying effect on Ann Arbor’s remaining student body and faculty. The novelty of color on campus, in addition to the intoxicant of freshly-scented spring air, produced an easygoing atmosphere throughout campus that suggested Ann Arbor had unanimously adopted a southern pace of life for its summer terms. Wayfarer sunglasses appeared en masse. Undergraduates walked buoyantly on the campus sidewalks and across the diag in flip flops, basking in the relative emptiness of Ann Arbor and the resulting solitude. Long-haired hippies flung frisbees and strummed guitars amidst the tree trunk columns in the diag. Nerdier types ran across the diag lawns with broomsticks between their legs, chasing bludgers, beaters, and the golden snitch in mock Quidditch club matches, while more athletically-inclined students played traditional sports like tennis, volleyball, and basketball at the Palmer Commons courts. Girls emerged on campus and at afternoon day-drinking events in pastel sundresses, denim shorts, tank tops, and boat shoes, baring tan lines, perky cleavage, fleshy thighs and long, nubile legs. They clustered in packs at Dominick’s outdoor bar and patio, recently opened for the season, where they drank big bowls of sangria, pulpy and magenta, or on the outdoor patio at Good Time Charlie’s; the most attractive of these took up running outdoors in nothing but sports bras and Nike shorts, sweat beads dripping beckoningly from head bands.

Across State Street -- kiddycorner from BOX house -- we noted increasing amounts of foot traffic to Raymond Fisher Stadium, the Michigan baseball stadium. There, the Michigan baseball team broke countless school records that spring. Led by Big Ten player of the year Nate Recknagel and Big Ten pitcher of the year Zack Putnam, the Wolverines raced to a school record 46 wins, that season, winning the Big Ten regular season title and the Big Ten tournament championship, subsequently, earning a berth in the NCAA Tournament for a fourth consecutive year before losing to Arizona in the Ann Arbor super regional, hosted on campus. Groups of us ventured over for games that spring. One such occasion, Al and I were selected for and participated in a hot dog eating contest, held on top of the dugout during an afternoon game – ostensibly we were selected for our outlandish attire, Al in “Miracle”-reminiscent youth USA hockey jersey, me in road red youth Brendan Shanahan jersey; we both barely remembered guzzling the hot dogs next day. Another, B-Russ led a party of several others in rolling a keg down the street to the stadium, where we set it up alongside folding chairs in the outfield grass, prompting implicit approval from alums and older spectators who witnessed it before we were booted, sympathetically.

Otherwise, Ross and I mostly watched spring unfold from the comfort of beach chairs that we set up around a kiddie pool in our front lawn, languidly idling, sipping bourbon, maintaining a steady buzz through the afternoons in the heat. For the incoming freshman, their parents, and tour groups of prospective students, we modeled with our bottles of Old Crow in Hawaiian shirts and Raybans, self-aggrandizing in our decadence, as if we had achieved something in our indolence. If we got really bored, or really drunk, we might set up the “you honk, we drink” sign Ross had spray painted during football season. On weekends, when Al was home from work, we day-drank on the roof and porch, staging several impromptu keg parties. We invited over the neighbors from fraternity senior houses, and vice versa, for barbecues and beer pong; the front doors of State Street were unanimously open to neighbors all summer long, as in a dormitory hall, kegs and beers free of charge.

Visions of Yzerman

Woody Guthrie

Old Man Trump

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate

He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed that color line

Here at his Beach Haven family project

Beach Haven ain't my home!

No, I just can't pay this rent!

My money's down the drain,

And my soul is badly bent!

Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower

Where no black folks come to roam,

No, no, Old Man Trump!

Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

I'm calling out my welcome to you and your man both

Welcoming you here to Beach Haven

To love in any way you please and to have some kind of a decent place

To have your kids raised up in.

    

Beach Haven ain't my home!

No, I just can't pay this rent!

My money's down the drain,

And my soul is badly bent!

Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower

Where no black folks come to roam,

No, no, Old Man Trump!

Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

woodyguthrie.org