5/5/2026

 Tuesday, May 5, 2026

1916 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic and stayed until 1924

1965 First large-scale US Army ground units arrived in South Vietnam

2022 WHO study of excess deaths worldwide said 15 million more people had died than normal, far above the official COVID-19 death toll of 6 million 

2025 The Vatican announced that it would convert and donate a Popemobile into a mobile health clinic for wounded children in Gaza, Palestine, in accordance with one of Pope Francis' final wishes.

In bed at 8:30, onto the LZB in the middle of the night, up at 4:22; 0435 128/75/85. 120 204.8; 43/35/55/42, mostly cloudy day ahead.

Morning meds at 6 a.m., with half dose of Bisoprolol at 5 a.m.  At 5:05 a.m., my AppleWatch jiggled and gave me a "low heart rate" warning, registering a heart rate of 34.  What does this mean in light of what Dr. Singh has told me about "false readings because of the ventricular tachycardi???

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I finished it this morning, wondering why I had devoted as much time as I did to it.  In the last chapter of the noevel, Joyce uses Stephen Dedalus to articulate Joyce's theory of Beauty, based on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas:  Pulchra sunt quae visa placent, or that is beautfiul the apprehension of which pleases.  That said, a reader has to wonder why Joyce wrote the way he did, the incoherent, circular, stream of consciousness, head-scratching, hard to follow way that he did.  He didn't do it when he wrote Dubliners, but he started with in Portrait, went full-bore in Ulysses, and became completely incomprehensible in Finnegan's Wake.  Did he really think he was making something beaufiful?  I guess he did.  Maybe he thought only a handful of people were able to truly appreciate "real" breauty, meaning he himself and a few literary dilettantes, perhaps the types that got into Deconstruction and a lot of the post-Modernism stuff impossible for most of us to grasp.  The Ezra Pound types.  In any case, this poor child from St. Leo parish on the south side of Chicago gets lost pretty easily in a verbal thicket of non-sequiturs of the type Joyce loves.  I'm the same way with most contemporary poetry that is incomprehensible.  The poets must think their work is beautfiul because it is to them, but for readers other than them, it's meaningless.  What's the point?   Consider this "poem" by Gertrude Stein.  It's a small excerpt from Tender Buttons, published in 1914, 2 years before the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

Does this have any meaning, to a reader or even to Stein? 

When is a "ceasefire" not a ceasefire?  The Americans and Iranians are shooting at each other in the Persian Gulf/Strait of Hormuz.   SecDef/SecWar Pete Hegseth and the President say that these acts don't exceed 'the threshold of hostilities' necessary to invalidate the ceasefire, or something like that.   He also says that the 'battle for Hormuz' is "separate and distinct" from the war with Iran.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

 “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. . . . Political language – annd with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. . . . “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. . . . In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. ― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

 

Callou callay!  A gorgeous Baltimore oriole on the suet feeder this afternoon.  Time to put out some oranges.  We've also had white-throated and white-capped sparrows feeding on the ground under the feeders, the the occasional bluebird as well.  I've seen some surprisingly aggressive behavior,by a mouning dove lately, even towards another dove.  It seems like I ought to be able to think up some line of poetry about that, but I draw a blank.  I'm reminded of Joan Clark's experience among some Quakers, whom she characterized as very passive-aggressive.😧