Thursday, December 5, 2024
D+30
63 BC Roman consul Cicero delivers the last of his famous Catiline Orations before the Senate on the fate of the Cataline conspirators
1955 Historic bus boycott begins in Montgomery, Alabama by Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists
1967 Pediatrician Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested in New York while protesting against the Vietnam War
In bed at 10:15, awake at 4:30, and up at 4:40, thinking of Lilly.
Prednisone, day 205, 7.5 mg., day 20. Prednisone at 4:55. Morning meds later. Sore shoulders.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
. . . painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her course as a screen between us and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advance of Decrepitude.
Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime
There are things like playing the organ or discovering the North Pole, or being Astronomer Royal, which we do not want a person to do at all unless he does them well. But those are not the most important things in life. When it comes to writing one’s own love letters and blowing one’s own nose, “these things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. When I was younger, I enjoyed playing golf. I didn't golf because I was good at it. I was quite the opposite. I golfed because I enjoyed being outdoors in a lovely setting. I enjoyed being in the company of friends. I enjoyed the trees, the grass, and the sky. I even enjoyed the color and curves of the sand traps and the wateriness of the water hazards. I never kept score because the number of my strokes was of no importance to me. Whenever I stroked a golf ball very well, it was a pleasant surprise for me.
I have the same attitude toward painting and drawing. I've never been good at it. I very rarely try to draw freehand because I'm so bad at it. I also have no creativity in terms of subject matter and composition. I look for another painting, or drawing, or photograph or graphic of some sor and I do my best to copy it. I take a photograph of the image, print it on a piece of 8 and 1/2 X 11printer paper,, cover the printer paper and the canvas or other surface I am working on with grid lines and then copy the photo on the surface to be painted, scaling up for larger canvases. In my younger days, I sometimes used an opaque projector, although that was difficult because the need to stand in front of the canvas to draw on it cut off the image being projected. Duh! I bought an expensive Lucy Drawing Tool, but I never mastered its use. For watercolors and gouache pieces, I bought a light board which is a great assist although the heavier the watercolor paper, the more difficult it is for the photographed image underneath to penetrate the watercolor paper. So, although I have very little talent for drawing or painting, I nonetheless have been doing both for decades, using whatever assists I can, and enjoying the process and the results. Despite the many copying mistakes I make, when I keep at it, I enjoy the resulting painting or drawing. Something about the finished product will be pleasing to me despite my mistakes or I won't keep it. If there is nothing pleasing, I'll paint over the disappointing project and use the canvas for another project. Those that I keep, I want to display on a wall or atop a bookshelf or wherever. The keepers please me more than masterpieces by masters simply because I did them. I spent hours of my life, perhaps days of my life, working on them, absorbed in the process, and enjoying it. The finished product reminds me of those hours or days and of why I I liked the image in the first place. Unlike golfing or attending a football or basketball game, I have more than a memory after the activity, I have a painting or a drawing, which, as Churchill wrote, is 'a friend' that serves "as a screen between [me] and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advance of Decrepitude." What a lucky guy!
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Pablo Picasso
The painting I attached to these notes is a self-portrait I did in oil paints many decades ago when we lived on Newton Avenue in Shorewood, I was presumptuous enough to sign it, something I stopped doing long ago. I especially like it because I had stored it in a space under the basement stairs in our house outside Sakville and a mouse pooped on it, leaving an ineradicable white steak on its surface. That mouse poop seemed somehow appropriate to me, sort of a sic transit gloria mundi thing, or a memento homo quia pulvis es thing.
"Now he was speculating whether Laurette would pose half-nude on the car seat. The whole idea was preposterouly silly but why not? It was no more cheeky than the idea of his resuming painting. Part of the grace of losing self-importance was the simple question: "Who cares?" More importantly, he didn't want to be a painter, he only wanted to paint, two utterly different impulses. . . .Clive didn't want to be anything any longer that called for a title. He knew how to paint so why not paint? Everyone had to do something while awake.
Jim Harrison in "The Land of Unlikeness" in THE RIVER SWIMMER
VA Swallow Study. I had my 'swallow study' at the VA today with the speech therapist Nicole, an MU grad. It was an interesting process including a videoed x-ray of my mouth and throat in the act of swallowing a liquid, then a pudding-like barium substance, and then a hard cookie or cracker. Nicole said my swallowing was 'functional' but noted that both the pudding and the hard cracker didn't go all the down my throat and some tended to divert to my epiglottis, which covers and protects my airway from food descending my throat. Apparently, the peristalsis in my throat muscles is as strong as it should be so she gave me instructions for a swallowing exercise to do 3 to 5 times every day, 10 repetitions each, It is very difficult for me to do so I'm not hopeful.
Hero's Salute. While I was waiting for my appointment with Nicole, I heard an announcemnt of the PA system: "Your attention, please, There will be a Hero's Salute on 9C, Room ----, in 10 minutes. All are invited . . ." Ir was the first time I had heard such an announcement and asked a staff member as I was leaving what a "Hero's Salute" was. She informed me it was a gathering when one of the veterans at the hospital dies. He is attended by family members, doctors and other hospital staff, and any visitor who is able to attend to salute him and pay their respects. Also, on my way down in the elevator after my swallow evaluation, I asked another vet in the elevator how he was doing and was told he had just received the news that he did not have a feared cancer. I shook his hand and congratulated him. At the next floor, the elevator stoped and let in a third old vet in a wheelchair and I asked him how he was doing and he said he had trouble hearing without his hearing aids. The vet who had just received the good news about cancer, took off his hearing aids and gave them the the one in the wheelchair, saying 'please, take these. They will work for you and I have two.' Another day at the VA medical center.
"Suckers" and "Losers" From Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter, December 4, 2014:
Trump has also vowed to cut the post–World War II government far more than anyone before him has done. He has put Musk and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE); Musk proposes to cut $2 trillion out of the $6.75 trillion U.S. budget. How he would accomplish this is hard to imagine, since most of the budget is “mandatory” spending already baked into the budget, and much of that is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. During the campaign, Trump promised he would not cut these very popular programs.
One of the things that constitute “discretionary” spending—which must be renewed every year—is veterans’ benefits, and yesterday Jeff Schogol of Task and Purpose noted “a growing chorus” calling for cuts to Veterans Affairs disability benefits after The Economist on November 28 called disability benefits “absurdly generous.” Disabled American Veterans spokesperson Dan Clare pointed out that the U.S. was at war for twenty years—in Afghanistan for twenty and in Iraq for eight—increasing the VA budget. Since Congress passed the PACT Act, formally known as the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, in 2022, more than 1.2 million veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxics have been treated for resulting health conditions.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
BY RANDALL JARRELL
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Anniversaries thoughts. The Catqlin3 Orations. we translated and read some of them in my 3 year of studying Latin in Brother Birminham's class at Leo High School in 1957-58. "Birmo" was about 150 years old and used powder snuff which he would sniff during class, some of the 'snuff stuff' dropping onto our desks as he strolled the aisles. Quo tandem, Catalina, abutere patienitia nostra? In the fourth year of Latin sudies, we worked on Virgil's Aenead. Armun virumque cano.
Rosa Parks reminded the world of how, at best, demeaning Jim Crow laws were. She was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White man. I was 14 years old, a freshman at the all-White Leo High School, in highly segregated St. Leo parish, in highly segregated Chicago, when the Montgomery bus boycott was occurring. I heard nothing about it in the school or from the St. Leo pulpit. From my memoir:
In 1960 and before, Auburn Gresham had a population of almost 60,000: 98.7% white and 0.2% black.. In 1990, the population was still just under 60,000 but with the demographics reversed: 98.7% black, 1.1% white. In 2000, the population had dropped to 55,928: 99.4% black, 0.5% white. Just to the north and east of Auburn Gresham was Englewood, my parents’ old neighborhood. A look at the demographics of Englewood provides a good picture of the racial pressures on Auburn Gresham as the Black Belt expanded. In 1930, Englewood had a population of 89,063: 98.7% white, 1.1% black. In 1940, the population was 2% black and in 1950, 11% black. By 1960, the population had grown to 97,595: 30% white, 70% black. In 1970, the population was 96% black and in 1990, the population had dropped to 48,434: 99% black.. By 2000, the population had dropped to 40,222, still virtually all black. The Wikipedia entry for Englewood is “a vacant town with buildings falling apart and 43% of the residents living below the poverty line. Over 700 murders have occurred there in just 10 years.”
The Catholics in the Auburn Gresham district belonged to St. Leo parish and St. Sabina parish, just west of St. Leo. The two churches were only ¾ of a mile apart; Mapquest’s estimated traveling time is 3 minutes. Yet the number of Catholics in that neighborhood was ample enough to support two thriving parishes each offering at least 4 Sunday masses, often standing room only (unless Monsignor Malloy was cramming the pews.) St. Leo had Sunday mass in the church every hour on the hour till noon and every hour on the half hour in the high school chapel.
To white Southsiders, the expanding Black Belt was a metastasizing cancer. When blacks moved in, whites moved out. There were efforts to foster integration, but they all eventually failed, usually quickly. A neighborhood was going to be either black or white, never both, at least not for long. One black family moving in was like one cancer cell taking up residence in an organ. Hence Monsignor Malloy’s crusade to “keep out the undesirables.” What he saw coming was his entire parish of urban Irish and German Catholics evacuating, being displaced by poor rural Mississippi blacks almost none of whom were Catholic.
What Malloy saw looming at the parish level, Cardinal Stritch saw at the archdiocesan level. Catholics in the path of black expansion were abandoning their parishes by the thousands, leaving Catholic churches and schools struggling to keep their heads above water in a tidal wave of black Baptists, African Methodist Episcopals, Church of God in Christ folks, and assorted evangelicals, pentecostals and ‘holy rollers’ of all sorts. Storefront churches popped up like dandelions, with self-appointed pastors renting spaces formerly occupied by small white retail and service establishments. This presented Stritch with many challenges. What to do about the old churches and schools and rectories and convents and devalued real estate in the newly black neighborhoods?
The protests against the Vietnam War were occurring in New York and across the country as I started law school. It was, to say the least, a difficult time for me in more ways than one.
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