“Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” ~ Thomas A. Edison
A 30 SEC READ: A story by Kahlil Gibran
I was strolling in the gardens of an insane asylum when I met a young man who was reading a philosophy book.
His behavior and his evident good health made him stand out from the other inmates.
I sat down beside him and asked:
‘What are you doing here?’
He looked at me, surprised. But seeing that I was not one of the doctors, he replied:
‘It’s very simple. My father, a brilliant lawyer, wanted me to be like him. My uncle, who owns a large emporium, hoped I would follow his example. My mother …. And the story continues. … read the ending here: 30 SEC READ: A story by Kahlil Gibran
[Memento Mori] | John Ashbery (1927–2017) | Harper’s Magazine
Over the weekend, Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ashbery passed away at the age of 90. “Part of what makes Ashbery so absurdly good is his faith in the essential goodness of the absurd,” wrote Matthew Bevis in the June 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine. “He’s one of our most truly encouraging poets on account of his willingness to let himself go, to let the social self (call it ‘character’ or ‘personality’) deliquesce into the anarchic, labile, inner chemistry of selfhood.” Below is a selection of Ashbery’s work, which began appearing in Harper’s in 1969.
• “Absent Agenda,” October 2010
• “The Water Inspector,” February 2000
Source: [Memento Mori] | John Ashbery (1927–2017) | Harper’s Magazine
Violence is unable to change anything for the better
“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favours such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.” ~ Daniel Berrigan
Today, Aug. 28, is also the day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. It is also the day the world first heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which was delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech he called for an end to racism in the United States and called for civil and economic rights. If only we could be proud of how far we have come.
I’ve decided to include quotations that I like and that I receive from Pace e Bene here on my blog. This is another one of those.
You said ‘who’ invented terrorism?
“This country has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for more than half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism.”
Paraphrased from “If Not Empire, What?: A Survey of the Bible” by Berry Friesen and John K. Stoner
Why is the reaction to a solar eclipse such an anomaly?
If only people watched, sung about, and worshiped the Sun and Moon and the Earth and the rest of Nature and the universe everyday as much as they do on days when they happen to align for a couple of minutes like they did yesterday, Aug. 21, 2017. A cosmic testament to the ancient short attention span of the human race.
An anomaly is defined as “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.” An eclipse is to be expected. Even surprising things are to be expected from Mother Nature, Earth Mother.
#eclipse2017 #totaleclipse
What is the meaning of your life?
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
—Margaret Atwood
Happy Birthday to Robert Stone
According to today’s Writer’s Almanac, Stone wrote:
“Writing is lonely. […] But most of the time you are in a room by yourself, you know. Writers spend more time in rooms, staying awake in quiet rooms, than they do hunting lions in Africa. So, it’s a bad life for a person because it’s so lonely and because it consists of such highs and lows, and there’s not always anywhere to take these emotional states. […] It’s a life that’s tough to sustain without falling prey to some kind of beguiling diversion that’s not good for you.”
Can you relate?
Take care of yourself and each other. Take care of your father and your mother because they’re the only ones you’ll ever have. Take care of your brothers and sisters, they, too, are unique to you and will usually be there when you need them most, just as you should be there when they need you. Take care of your friends because they, too, are unique to you and you’ll never have any others just like them. Take care of your home, because it, too, is unique to you and you’ll never have any other just like it. ~ cjzurcher
Picture taken at Lavender Pond Farm in Killingworth, Conn.
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” ~ Haruki Murakami
Brian Williams? Mass Media war poetry on national television?
This is f—-ed up!
What is he thinking?
Is that what people watch on their living-room-wall-size tv’s?
Brian Williams: “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” Williams said.
“I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’ And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making, what is for them, a brief flight over to this airfield.”
Why not quote MLK?: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” MLK, Jr. Let’s get a grip, people.
Happy Birthday John Steinbeck
It’s the birthday of John Steinbeck. See The Writer’s Almanac for Feb. 27 for more details. 
In Chapter 17 of The Grapes of Wrath, he wrote
The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water. And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country. Thus it might be that one family camped near a spring, and another camped for the spring and for company, and a third because two families had pioneered the place and found it good. And when the sun went down, perhaps twenty families and twenty cars were there.
In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.
It’s the birthday of Judy Blume, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1938)
From today’s Writer’s Almanac
It’s the birthday of Judy Blume, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1938), the best-selling author of more than two dozen books for young people.
She was 27 years old, with two preschool-aged children, when she began writing seriously. For two years, she received constant rejections. Then in 1970, she had her big breakthrough, with the young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It’s the story of 11-year-old Margaret Simon, the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother, and her adolescent attempts to make sense of things like religion, boys, and menstruation. The book was banned in many schools and libraries. It’s one of the most challenged books of the last third of the 20th century. But it’s also beloved by many, and it has been a big best-seller over the years.
She lives mostly in Key West, where she writes at a desk facing a garden. In the summer, she writes in a small cabin on Martha’s Vineyard. She always writes in the morning. When she’s working on a first draft, which she says is the hardest part, she writes seven days a week, even if only for an hour or two a day.
Blume is also the author of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (1972), Blubber (1974), The Pain and the Great One (1974), Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977), Superfudge (1980), Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson (1993), and recently, Going, Going, Gone! with the Pain and the Great One (2008). Her books have sold more than 80 million copies.
Yusef Komunyakaa, Poetry Reading 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23
Where: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St., New Haven
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection
Celebrated for his powerful and carefully crafted poems, Komunyakaa has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Louisiana Writers Award. About his work, the poet Toi Derricotte wrote for the Kenyon Review, “[Yusef Komunyakaa] takes on the most complex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life. His voice, whether it embodies the specific experiences of a black man, a soldier in Vietnam, or a child, is universal. It shows us in ever deeper ways what it is to be human.” The Beinecke Library acquired the papers of Yusef Komunyakaa in 2014.
Contact: [email protected]
Langston Hughes’ birthday today
Today is the birthday of the man known as “The O. Henry of Harlem,” American poet Langston Hughes (1902). In 1926, he was working as a busboy at a hotel in New York City when the poet Vachel Lindsay arrived for dinner. Hughes placed some poems under Lindsay’s dinner plate. Intrigued, Lindsay read them and asked who wrote them. Hughes stepped forward and said, “I did.” And that’s how he came to publish his first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), at the age of 24.
When asked what he wrote about, Langston Hughes answered, “Workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago — people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter — and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”
For more visit www.writersalmanac.org.
Words of wisdom from birthday girl Colette
Today is the birthday of Colette who said
“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”
Pres. Elect Donald Trump’s actions frighten Americans. We were once a country that felt safe
Today’s New York Times reports that after the Asian nation’s leader, Kim Jong-un, announced that preparations for testing an intercontinental ballistic missile were in their “final stage,” President-elect Donald J. Trump responded on Twitter, writing: “It won’t happen!”
What right does he have to say things that might provoke and enrage a world leader and incite that world leader with nuclear capabilities to use weapons of mass destruction? HE HAS NO RIGHT.
Aren’t his actions grounds for stifling him in any way we can? Grounds for taking away his presidential elect status?
Aren’t his bullying actions of a childish nature and not something of the nature we want in our White House?
We should stop looking for stars and galaxies and start looking for planets
To celebrate American Archive Month in October, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has released a collection of images, including this shot of a cluster of stars 20,000 light years from Earth. The blue and green shows cosmic haze where clouds form; x-rays are shown in purple.
Can’t we compromise in 2017? It’s only been 140 years!
“… The compromise involved Democrats who controlled the House of Representatives allowing the decision of the Electoral Commission to take effect. The outgoing president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant, removed the soldiers from Florida. As president, Hayes removed the remaining troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. As soon as the troops left, many white Republicans also left, and the “Redeemer” Democrats took control. They already dominated most other state governments in the South. What was exactly agreed is somewhat contested as the documentation is scanty.
“Black Republicans felt betrayed as they lost power and were subject to discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. At the turn of the 20th century, most black people were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every southern state, despite being a majority in some.”
From Clarence Darrow’s The Story of My Life:
“Neither government nor political economy is an exact science. They concern the arrangement of human units. If it were possible to demonstrate what sort of an arrangement would be best for the individuals of the state, it would be of no avail. Humans cannot be controlled like inanimate objects, or even like the lower animals. Each human unit is in some regard an independent entity with his own ideas, his hopes and fears, loves and hates. These attitudes are constantly changing from day to day, and year to year. They are played upon by shrewd men, by influential newspapers, by all sorts of schemes and devices which make human government only trial and success, and trial and failure. Human organizations are simply collections of individuals always in motion and always seeking for easier and more harmonious adjustment, and never static …
This is a changing world, and still it must maintain a certain amount of consistency and stability or the individual units would separate, and chaos would make any co-operation impossible. “
For more information, visit The Compromise of 1877, or the Tilden/Hayes Compromise
