5/30/2026

 Saturday, May 30, 2026

1431 Hundred Years' War: 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal in Rouen, France

1912 US Marines were sent to Nicaragua

1965 Viet Cong offensive against the US base Da Nang began

2023 400 leading AI industry experts signed a letter warning, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” 

2024 A jury in New York City found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records

2025 Donald Trump announced that the tariff on steel and aluminum imports would be doubled to 50%, potentially raising prices for housing, autos, and other goods.

In bed at 9, up at 4; 0420 124/75/53 133 203.0; 53/62/51, cloudy, Beach Hazards warning, waves 2 to 4 feet, dangerous currents.

Morning meds at 9:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I finished The Scarlet Letter this morning, before Geri woke up.  I wanted badly to finish it because reading it had been such a struggle.  I looked for some reviews of it to see if I was alone in having a hard time with it, and the first set of review I found was in Goodreads, with a heading "The Scarlet Letter Question."  A reader wrote:

I just finished this book and I have to admit I struggled with it a lot.  I found it boring and not nearly as deep as I was expecting it to be.  I could hardly read three pages in a row without getting distracted and putting it down for hours.

Oh, yes.  Other readers used terms such as "far from accessible," "monotonous and long-winded," and  "fantastically badly written, turgid prose throughout."   Others disagreed, not surprisingly, but I found reading the novel to be, to use Donald Rumsfeld's term, 'a long, hard slog."  I read it and listened to it, most often at the same time.  I usually like listening to Audible renditions because it reminds me of lying on the floor when I was a kid, listening to stories on the radio, especially the huge, old console radio at my Aunt Monica's house.  

I thought I had read this book as a youth, maybe in high school, and that I had enjoyed it.  If I did, which I'm not finding hard to credit, I must have been quite a nerdy high school student.  Perhaps it was The House of the Seven Gables that I read and enjoyed.  Or perhaps I'm just hallucinating,  I thought that the story was mainly about hypocrisy, but there wasn't all that much about hypocrisy in it.  Rather, the main focus was on the personal experience of guilt and shame, both by Hester Prynne and by Arthur Dimmesdale.  In Hester's case, the experience was social as well as personal, i.e., the magistrates and townspeople branded, humiliated, and shunned her - not so much for having sex, which she did in secret, but for becoming pregnant and having a baby with no husband in the picture.  In Dimmesdale's case, the guilt and shame were private and internal, springing from his consciousness of the tremendous disparity between Hester's public shaming and shunning, and his freedom from social punishment for the same sin as Hester's, and from his consciousness of wrongdoing in the general moral sense and because of his special position as a clergyman,  Dimmesdale reminded me somewhat of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,  Their sins/crimes are very different, of course, but each was haunted by the sense of guilt. and each could be redeemed only by acknowledging his guilt.  Chillingworth reminds a reader of Iago, insidiously befriending Dimmesdale only in order to betray and sicken him, and indeed to drive him mad.  On the other hand, Iago's Othello was, but for his tragic weakness of jealousy and distrust, a strong man whereas Chillingworth's Dimmesdale was a weak and indeed pathetic man, even in the most pejorative sense of the word.  The strongest and most admirable character in the story is Hester.  She is the only mensch, although her daughter Pearl may have turned out OK as a rich adult.  She wasn't exactly an ideal child. 

Last year on this date, I was thinking about music, and especially about

Brandi Carlile.  I'm a big fan.  One of the reasons is this song, "Everytime I Hear That Song," which she wrote with her longtime collaborators, Phil and Tim Hanseroth.  Phil is also Brandi's brother-in-law, having married her younger sister, Tiffany.  They all reside in homes on Brandi's land in the State of Washington, home state of all of them.  Brandi is a lesbian and has been married since 2012 to Catherine Shepherd, with whom she has two daughters.

A love song was playing on the radio / It made me kind of sad because it made me think of you

And I wonder how you're doing, but I wish I didn't care / Because I gave you all I had and got the worst of you

[Chorus]

By the way, I forgive you / After all, maybe I should thank you

For giving me what I've found / Cause without you around

I've been doing just fine / Except for any time I hear that song (Ooh)

And didn't it break your heart / When you watched my smile fading?

Did it ever cross your mind / That one day the tables would be turned?

They told me the best revenge / Would be a life well-lived

And the strongest one that holds / Would be the hardest one to earn

[Chorus]

When I woke up in the morning / I was choking on some words

There were things unsaid between us / There were things you never told

That's twice you broke my heart now / The first was way back when

And to know you're still unhappy / Only makes it break again. 

Carlile and other songwriters are poets, and the ones who sing their own songs (and others') are troubadours. It was great that Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Power to the people!  I admire and appreciate so many great songwriters and lyricists, and probably many not-so-great ones.  I love old pop classics, with Sophisticated Lady at the top of my list (lyrics by Mitchell Parish, born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky), followed by hundreds of others.  I love country and western classics, written by poets named Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson.  Unlike so much of what is passed off as modern poetry, the poetic lyrics of these songwriters are meant to be understood by everybody, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babuska.  It's poetry about love and loss, God and Man, betrayal, addiction, heartache, homelessness and restlessness, loneliness, family and friends - the most basic elements of life.  The poems are meant to be sung, not read, and heard, hopefully by men and women who will be moved by them as Brandi Carlile sings "any time I hear that song."  We have a perfect marriage of lyrics and music, the emotional pull or punch of the song is irresistible, as it is with Sophisticated Lady and, thankfully, so many other great songs/poems.  As I write these words, I think of the tribute Brandi Carlile gave on the death of her friend John Prine, singing his sad, simple, and beautiful song, Hello, In There.  I think too of another sad, simple, and beautiful song that I always associate with war and the loss of friends, My Buddy.  I am powerfully moved by powerful poetry, like Yeats's Vacillation, and Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father, Kenyon's Otherwise, and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, and no less moved by powerful songs, poems in their own right.  I am surprised by how easily I am emotionally moved by music in my old age, much more than when I was younger.  Any orchestral concert or ballet performance involving the concerted efforts of a great many people will do it, but so doew watching the 2021 "Official Music Video" of Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee, not only because of her great recording of Kris Kristofferason's great song but also becasue of its reminder of her death, for which I can't come up with a fitting adjective.

I wonder if everyone, or at least most of us, have a former romantic partner whom we identify with a song.  I wonder too if I like Brandi's 'Everytime I Hear That Song' because it reminds of my two past love interests and songs I don't like to hear because they remind me of 'what might have been.'  The earlier was my First True Love Charlene, with whom I identify Tommy Edwards' It's All In The Game and even more, The Folks Who Live On The Hill.  The second was my first spouse Anne with whom I identify My Funny Valentine.  Each of them lives on in my memory and I think of them, in very different ways,  whenever I hear "our songs."   For decades, I truly carried a torch for Charlene because, I suppose, of the shocking way in which our relationship ended, one of the great mysteries in my life and something from which I never experienced "closure."  All of which is to say that I've never known why our two year love affair ended, why she dumped me while I was away on acive duty in the Navy.  I still remember the deep hurt however and am reminded of it whenever I hear Tommy Edwards crooning the songs we danced and 'made out' to.  With Anne the ending of our marriage was a long time coming and no surprise to me, though it was to her, so when I hear My Funny Valentine, it hurts only because it reminds me of our failures, especially my own failures, to face up to challenges in our marriage long before we separated, starting during my time in the Marine Corps.  It was more than 65 years ago that Charlene dumped me, a lifetime, and more than 40 years since Anne and I separated, yet I still have  reactions to songs that were part of our lives.  Music hath charms, but also barbs, as Brandi Carlile's song so clearly reminds us.