Blog of Days

http://www.archive.org/details/CC_1914_11_14_Tillies Charlie talks wealthy farmer’s daughter Tillie into eloping with him PuncturedRomance

Some Like it Hot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OhdD5n405I

  Can you name the movie in which the below takes place?

here’s the later film: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/filmvideo/cinema-trailers/8862855/The-Ladykillers-the-original-film-trailer-for-the-1955-Ealing-comedy.html

BRINGING UP BABY …..YOU MUST KNOW THOSE ACTORS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9uUJQRzh4k

THE BIG ?

DUCK SOUPhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsw9jYU_rJI

KNOW THIS MOVIE? SURE YOU DO

THE GREAT DICTATOR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IvPIWzQcUY  THE SPEECH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfDUv3ZjH2k

On this day, one of America’s greatest writers died, leaving us with works that teach and will endure:

http://www.steinbeck.org/

http://salinaspubliclibrary.org/john-steinbeck-library

The Grapes of Wrath, excerpt

And the great owners, who must lose
their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to
read history and to know the great fact:  when property accumulates in too few
hands it is taken away.  And that companion fact: when a majority of the people
are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need.  And the little
screaming fact that sounds through all history:  repression works only to
strengthen and knit the repressed.  The great owners ignored the three cries of
history.  The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed
increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression.  The
money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were
sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out.  The
changing economy was ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered,
while the causes of revolt went on.

The tractors which throw men out of
work, the belt lines which carry loads, the machines which produce, all were
increased; and more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for
crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads.  The
great owners formed associations for protection and they met to discuss ways to
intimidate, to kill, to gas.  And always they were in fear of a principal–three
hundred thousand–if they ever move under a leader–the end.  Three hundred
thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be
theirs and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.  And the
great owners, who had become through their holdings both more and less than men,
ran to their destruction, and used every means that in the long run would
destroy them.  Every little means, every violence, every raid on a Hooverville,
every deputy swaggering through a ragged camp put off the day a little and
cemented the inevitability of the day.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”

HAS Nothing changed? “I must go over into the interior valleys. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing format he first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.
Do you know what they’re afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. … I’ll do what I can. … Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.”

http://www.steinbeckhouse.com/

• Cup of Gold – 1929
• The Pastures of Heaven – 1932
• The Red Pony – 1933
• To A God Unknown – 1933
• Tortilla Flat – 1935
• In Dubious Battle – 1936
• Of Mice and Men – 1937
• The Long Valley – 1938
• The Grapes of Wrath – 1939
• Forgotten Village – 1941
• Sea of Cortez – 1941
• The Moon Is Down – 1942
• Bombs Away – 1942
• Cannery Row – 1945
• The Pearl – 1947
• The Wayward Bus – 1947
• A Russian Journal – 1948
• Burning Bright – 1950
• Log from the Sea of Cortez – 1951
• East of Eden – 1952
• Sweet Thursday – 1954
• The Short Reign of Pippin IV – 1957
• Once There Was A War – 1958
• Winter of Our Discontent – 1961
• Travels With Charley: In Search of America – 1962
• America and Americans – 1966
• Journal of a Novel – 1969
• Viva Zapata – 1975
• The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights – 1976
• Working Days: The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath – 1989
• The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (newspaper articles
  written in 1936)

Steinbeck’s advice to writers: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/steinbeck/steinbeck.html

  Nobel Prize speech  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SKEODtaQUU

http://nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/4/steinbeck/chrysanthemums.htm   

It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and
tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly
hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain did not go together.

Elijah Rising is now used by high schools and colleges as a
teaching tool.  The manuscript was placed
in Teaching Tolerance Library of the Southern Poverty Law Center by Morris Dees
under title: Michael’s Journal

The mysticism and religious fanaticism of the Dust Bowl era
has had a profound impact on the arts. Popular TV shows like HBO’s Carnivale
have brought this strange time period into the mainstream. These were years
marked by war, a global depression, racial hostility, and a collective search
for salvation. In author Lyn LeJeune’s new book, Elijah Rising (inGroup Press,
October 2011), a man’s descent into madness begins as the world goes to war.
Disillusioned with his boring life in New York City, a wealthy white heir to a
railroad fortune follows a black tent-fundamentalist preacher out west. Their
goal is to bring God to those uncivilized and uncharted parts of America. But
as they venture deeper into the unknown, it is they who may most require the
grace of God. Elijah Rising is a love story filled with captivating descriptive
writing, profound characters, and a learned sense of history. LeJeune has
written timeless, high-end fiction for even the most discerning tastes.

***Note from author: Howard Zinn – greatly missed – was one
of my first readers.  He wrote this to
me:  “I read it in two sittings, became
involved in the story. You write every well!”
Now who wouldn’t have pursued the book to publication? It is now
published by InGroup Press.

ISBN: 978-1935725084 http://www.amazon.com/Elijah-Rising-Lyn-LeJeune/dp/1935725084/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310946856&sr=1-1 and where all great books are sold

When I first read the manuscript for Elijah Rising, I was blown away by Lyn LeJeune’s style of writing. You can’t read her books without a pen, because you constantly find yourself underlining (and writing gigantic stars next to) lines that are so poetic and profound that you simply have to store them somewhere for future reference. Elijah Rising is solid literary fiction, and I’m so proud to be publishing the book this summer. It’s now available for pre-order (both in paperback and e-book format) on our website.

You can find Lyn on Twitter and her blog, where she often brings smiles to my face.

Anthony DiFiore, Publisher

Elijah Rising by Lyn LeJeune

The story of the Ishmael-like friendship between two young men: a wealthy white New Yorker, Michael Cooke Holt, and a black tent-fundamentalist preacher, Elijah Broom, set in that period of turmoil and crisis in American history in which scientific marvels, social unrest, economic disasters, and the First World War, created new vistas about the individual and the nation.

Elijah Rising http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935725084/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_HtMFob0NPKDDQ via @amazonalso on Nook &ebooks, your bookstore, almost anywhere!

About the author: Lyn LeJeune Lyn LeJeune is the author of several novels. Her stories have been published in literary journals such as Big Muddy: A Journal of The Mississippi River Valley (East Missouri University), The Bishop’s House Review (Duke), The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Nantahala, Milestone, Identity Theory, Our Stories, Demolition Magazine and Stone Table Review, and The Best of Our Stories. She was recipient of the Paris Writers’ Institute Scholarship for study in Paris, France. Lyn studied writing at Skidmore, where she worked with Marilynne Robinson and Mary Gordon, Duke, and the Breadloaf Writers Conference.

Lyn routinely holds seminars on writing and development of oral history projects and has a gift for one-on-one conversation, communicating with large audiences, and working with smaller audiences in venues such as book clubs and seminars.

One of Lyn’s first readers for Elijah Rising was Howard Zinn, who commented: “I read it in two sittings, became involved in the story. You write very well! Best wishes, Howard Zinn”

Lyn is 100% Cajun and makes the best gumbo in South Louisiana.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER I – “BLACK PROPHET ON A FIERY CROSS”

                  BLACK PROPHET ON A FIERY CROSS                      

                                               Put it over the plate for Jesus.

Billy Sunday

The frigid winds of February have assaulted New York like the beginning of an ice age. Then I saw him. I had given up on him, believed he had been blown away with the winds of time. I’d been afraid that he had perished, sucked into the meanness of humanity in these last years.  But today I stared at his picture; there he was majestic before me, his words no longer hued in bright colors just for me, but in plain and simple black and white, spread out on the table like demented symbols. Black hands held and threw the words at will.

Little Washington is standing upright on a platform, the sun is streaming down on his shoulders, his eyes are frenzied.  He is wearing a suit and tie.  In his outstretched hands he holds a Bible, as though he were making a final offering to the world: Take this or you shall be left behind.  Is that what he is saying to the crowd?  The caption below the picture reads: Young Negro preacher speaks in tongues.  Elijah Broom captivates even white southerners in Tennessee revival.  An alien hand rubbed my back, leaving bloody nail marks as it moved from my neck to my spine. That was the pain of it, the shock.  Little Washington, now the great Elijah, had made his way to a home, a place to belong, and planted himself into the mind of America.  Did he respond to a calling, one that had been with us as we looked down upon his dead mother that long ago day?  Had God spoken to him from his open Bible, reached out and clutched his soul in big, white fabricated hands?  The portent of this intention, this transformation, was captured in the picture.  Elijah was out for retribution.   The article goes on to describe him: He is not five feet tall, a little yellow Negro that speaks about the flood and redemption.  When asked if he is going back to Africa with Mr. Garvey, he says: ‘No sir, I am in the presence of the divine country.  I have followed the instructions of my Lord, for I have been called to cleanse this land.  Alleluia’.  And then he kisses his Bible.  He always kisses his Bible.  

My hand reached for my eggs and bagel, but they had become like pieces of my past, inedible.  The smell of salty fish that I had come to love in these last years had turned to carrion of days past, putrid, stale, deadly.  I walked back and forth from one end of my flat to the other for hours.  I was flushed, my skin prickled, my head was airy. Was this really him?  How could I be sure?  I looked at the picture over and over again.  It was like he’d been suspended in mid-air, a jumping man, hand held up to God, the Bible elevated, as though he was telling God, you, you read this!  See what you have done!     When I sat down again, I forced myself to finish reading the article, because I knew it was without doubt my Little Washington. No longer the Little Washington of the streets. I was captive to his form.  I could hear him:  His screeching is unearthly, it fills the tents with something either heinous or holy; it infects the people, no matter their race or their standing in life. Dogs howl to dear heaven when he begins and ends.  It was as though I had entered a petrified forest, alone, but summoned forward.

I had once imagined him dangling from a tree branch, his head askew, neck pulverized from the constant swinging.  He would not die. That image bombarded me far too many times and I remembered every moment in the last few years since I’d touched him. As it always was and will be, the voices joined me.  They laughed at my intentions.  I had no choice, in my heart, but to go to him. I believed that he needed me.  A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.  That I mumbled and babbled as though it were my personal worn proverb, biblical in scope, true or false to the world. I did not know which.  Think Michael, whispered the voice, is it true or is it false?

As I packed my bags, I knew that I was going into a dangerous place with my body and my words.  I had turned this thing with Washington – no I shall call him Elijah – over and over in my mind thousands of times.  What place had I in his life?  What was he to me and America?  Did I need him to go on with his preaching? How extraordinary that they would allow his preaching, this black man, in this age of fury.  It is January, 1921, and the world still reels from the death of millions in a war that served no purpose. Was Elijah real to them? Had they forsaken their own sins to let him speak, a black child, no a black man, saying that He has spoken to Him? Believable? Or just some sideshow freak fit for Ringlingtown. Elijah was the first person who had truly softened my heart, whose life had brought tears to my eyes.  He had changed my life, was the rod that sparked me to move or die.  How could I not go to him?

America, here is your black prophet on a fiery cross!

*

The train ticket I’d purchased with a light feeling brought me to Memphis, Tennessee.  I had to make my

 http://www.amazon.com/Beatitudes-New-Orleans-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B004DI7KHQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1304785150&sr=1-3

                                                I

                                                      THE PURE OF HEART

                                           To course across more kindly waters now

                                                             My talent’s little vessel lifts her sails,

                                                             leaving behind herself a sea so   cruel;                                             

                                               Dante, Purgatorio                                        

My best friend Pinch was murdered while I slept. The police reported that she was caught off guard, snuck up on, as Pinch would have said. I don’t believe that for one blasted minute. I know she looked her killer in the eye, sized him up, laughed, then spit in his face. It all happened before my very eyes; I had dreamed about her death over the past year. The first dream came the morning after the murder of the first foster child.  Marisa was found fully clothed, wrapped in a pink swaddling blanket, as though dreaming of many tomorrows and games and parties and toys; and then eight more dreams, eight more foster children murdered, all left on the trolleys of New Orleans; then again the same dream after the presumed murderer had been arrested; and finally the last one, after I had lost my job, accused of negligence in the care of two of the slain children under my charge.  And when Pinch was butchered, my dream coming horrifyingly true, my life spinning out of control, I had, for the second time in my life, lost everything, lost control, was unwittingly blown away by the winds of a dispassionate fate.  Or so I thought at the time.

     Pinch, born Earline Washington, had been my friend and colleague in the social work department located in Greater New Orleans for almost five years. In a bureaucracy that seemed always under siege, its employees ceaselessly dispirited, Earline was one of the few welcoming faces I encountered when I started my first day as a social worker. I had the feeling that I had walked into a hive of Sisyphean slaves; but this woman’s splendid, dark face, embellished with green eyes and an earnest smile, captivated me immediately. My innate and all-consuming reticence vanished. It seemed a natural coming together, our early fraternity, as though we were soul mates.  She called me Hannah love, and then our relationship grew to perfect friendship. We read each others’ thoughts, knew when the melancholy clouds of sorrow from our pasts had suddenly descended upon us, even as the bright nimbus of southern nights beckoned. All of my life I had experienced Sundowner’s Syndrome, but with Pinch the carmine shadows of evening became an event not without hope. We shared our failures as potential social saviors, but never allowed each other to give up. 

          She had grown up in a New Orleans housing project shamefully named Desire. Desire had been constructed in an isolated area northwest of greater New Orleans, bordered by industrial canals and railroad tracks. Pinch often recounted her nights as a young child lying on the floor under a matted blanket listening to gunshots in the night.   Desire had been built in the late 40s over the Hideaway Club where Fats Domino had played his first gigs.  Pinch swore she could hear Fats sing “My Blue Heaven” just for her.  As Pinch’s childhood tumbled forward, she learned survival skills.  By the age of twelve, she had tried just about every street drug going and stole to keep from going hungry, acquiring the nickname Pinch.  She would have been doomed to a child’s death but for the help of an aged aunt. Pinch pulled herself up, finished high school, and made it through college by working sometimes two shifts as a housekeeper in seedy hotels that bordered the Ninth Ward.  A city auditor once asked her why she hadn’t worked in the Lafayette Square District or the famous 625 St. Charles suites. “You could have paid for a Ph.D. with the tips alone.” And she replied: “Well, I guess ‘dis sista just feeling mo’ secure wid da brothers.  Ozanam Inn be my place, homeless peoples and all.” Then she rubbed his arm. The poor guy broke out in a sweat, brushed his thinning hair back with an aged-spotted trembling hand, and looked at me for intervention.  Later I asked Pinch why she’d stuck it to the auditor; she shrugged her shoulders and replied: “I guess just every once and a while I have to remind myself where I come from.  Pride has many forms, love.” Pinch had overcome. She was the bravest person I ever knew.

          My name is Hannah DuBois. I grew up on the banks of the bayous that run between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.  This area was once God’s breeding ground, for it held the muck and stuff from which life evolved.  But by the end of the Reagan Administration, fouled by oil, gas, and the rapacious march of progress, it came to be called Cancer Alley. My grandparents did not speak English, and my mother stopped talking altogether the night my father went to town for a beer and never came back. Like Pinch, I grew up poor; I was sixteen before I ate pizza, and saved almost every dime I made. I moved to New Orleans soon after my mother died, leaving the only home I had ever known; I exchanged the precious land for the urban jungle. My grandparents had left me a little money and a small monthly income from the Standard Gas Company, so I kept my promise to my long-gone father and enrolled in college. All of my money went to school and rent, and it seemed my hunger was unending. You can eat well in New Orleans if you find the right places, places where food was cheap, good and abundant. But I also loved junk food. I guess any food. My pockets were stuffed with crackers and sugar, mustard, and ketchup packets from fast food joints. “Want not” was my motto. So Pinch nicknamed me Scrimp. We made quite a pair.   

                                           ^^

In May of 2005, the New Orleans Social Services Department finally got divine guidance and mandated that all social workers had to have a partner. The division called it “the buddy system.” The new directive came as a result of what the Times-Picayune dubbed The Foster Child Murders. Nine children had been murdered in the last year; “suffocated tenderly,” said the Medical Examiner, “their baby bodies placed in the back seat of the city’s trolleys.” He continued in his clinically obtuse, yet lyrical, way, for which he was famous: “Fragile spirits fluttering into the moss latticed oaks, riding to God on the St. Charles line.” The children had already endured endless and unexplainable pain during their short time among brutal adults.  Sexual abuse, torture, starvation, all criminal in their lack of connection with life. One of the trolley drivers, a black man who had worked the St. Charles Line for over forty years and had witnessed life on the mean streets, broke down in front of the cameras and wept. He said he saw a fine mist swirl around the child he had found, a little black girl of eight years old, the “dancing fog” vanishing into popping fireflies as he approached her.  The same Medical Examiner, always around for public events, used the word “reposed,” saying that in all his years of working on the most vicious murders, this was the first time he was truly terrified. “When I cut them open,” he told a reporter, “I saw their little souls rise up, and then I heard a child giggle.” His name was Harlan Boudreaux and he retired after autopsying the ninth child.

To read reviews and purchase book as print or Kindle o to:

www.amazon.com   

, Lyn LeJeune, The Beatitudes – other books also available

I love dystopian novels about future societies.  These are novels that point to humankind’s failures at creating a sustainable and happy world.   Authors represent their worlds as, shall we say, rather unpleasant. But in each novel I present here, there are great lessons to us on how we should conduct our personal and common humanity.

The Handmaids tale represents fascist-type society in which a centralized theocracy controls all aspects of day-to-day life, and is especially
oppressive in the restrictions it imposes on women.

The Republic of the Future: or, Socialism a Reality by the American writer Anna Bowman Dodd, first published in 1887 The book is a dystopia written in response to the utopian literature that was a dramatic feature of the second half of the nineteenth century. read it online here: http://www.archive.org/details/republicoffuture00dodd

We (Russian: Мы)^[1] is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin completed in 1921.^[2] It was written in response to the author’s personal experiences during the Russian revolution of 1905, the Russian revolution of 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, and work in the Tyne shipyards during the First World War. It was on Tyneside that he observed the rationalization of labour on a large scale. Zamyatin was a trained marine engineer, hence his dispatch to Newcastle to oversee ice-breaker construction for the Imperial Russian navy. (wiki)

In Wyndham’s dystopied, the people practice a form of Christian fundamentalism. n order to follow God’s word and prevent another “Tribulation,  absolute normality must be preserved among the surviving humans, plants and animals. Humans with even minor mutations are considered “Blasphemies” and the work of the Devil.

  Brunner’s Hugo-winning 1968 novel about individual responsibility and the dangerous consequences of social apathy returns to print at an excellent time.

  Well, if you haven’t read Philip K. Dick, you are missing something special.  Many of his books have been made into movies like Minority Report.

Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King

 ON New Year’s Day, 2021, “the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl.” He was 25. It has been 25 years since a global disease rendered all human sperm infertile, 25 years, therefore, since any baby has been born to bear the future of humankind. The same day marks the 50th birthday of Theodore Faron, doctor of philosophy. On this day he begins to keep a journal as a “small additional defense against personal accidie.”

 I recently finished the trilogy.  Although it is classified as young adult, I think anyone would benefit from reading this enchanting series.

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QUOTES FROM DYSTOPIA

 ”Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
— Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

“And what would they be scared of? There’s nothing to fear in a perfect world, is there?”
— Catherine Fisher

 ”They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn’t like to look at them. They were the walking dead.”
— Stephen King (The Long Walk)

The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom

Books that Have Been Banned in the Twenty-First Century

 ”And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

“Every burned book enlightens the world.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for an opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.”
— Joseph Lewis (Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel)

“Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.”
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. ”
— Sigmund Freud

“Rivers of fire. Even the rocks burn.
An island rises from the sea.
Dark magic in an errant phrase.
The people bow to the lord of error.
”
— Rand Miller (The Book of D’ni)

“We all know that books burn – yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed be fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory…In this war, we know, books are weapons.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

“Oh Senor” said the niece. “Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it’s very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.”
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

“I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed –
and one of them hadn’t even been colored in yet.”
— John Dawkins

“They that begin by burning books, end by burning men.”
— Heinrich Heine

“THOMASINA: ….the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library!….How can we sleep for grief?
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, A Play

 ”Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a
Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk, burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We’re all such products.”
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters

 

 http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html

 

Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It’s almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they’re accessible to others is unquestioned, or it’s not America.

—Dwight David Eisenhower

From the remarks of the President of the United States at the Dartmouth College Commencement, June 14, 1953. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

PASS THIS ON HERE ON OS AND OUTSIDE.    Part 2 later. 

ADD YOUR OWN FAVORITES AND KEEP THE CYCLE OF BOOKS GOING

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Dear author LeJeune.  I bought your book The Beatitudes thinking it might be something about God and those beatitudes and maybe Jesus.  Come to find out it is all about some guy named Dante and two people called Pinch and Scrimp who are trying to do the right things the world.  And about the city of sin called New Orleans.  There’s something about purgatory in this book too.  What is this about redemption and The White Army and murder.  Shame of you! This book should be banned.

 

Print and Kindle @ amazon.  All royalties for the print edition go directly to the New Orleans Public Library Association

 Newly found papers of Walt Whitman @

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/walt-whitman-the-poet-as-federal-worker/2011/04/12/AFdWdDSD_story.html?hpid=z8

At first I was going to post some Whitman here, but his works are available to you at bookstores, libraries, and here on the internet since Whitman’s work is in the public domain (project gutenberg site).  When this new find will be added, who knows. 

But!!!!!!FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, AN EXCERT FROM MY COMPLETED WORK  WHITMAN RECALLED TO LIFE. 

(opinions please, should I ebook/kindle this book?) 

                from WHITMAN RECALLED TO LIFE: A *COMEDY

                     Chapter V SPARKS OF THE SUPERSOLAR BLAZE

They have allowed the great man’s tomb to amass the detritus of the modern age. I cry for your benign neglect, humanity.  Ash crumbling, green mold, black soot from the machinery that spews into the skies as the thumb of Thor had pressed the button to release all of the pains of the world.  Centuries and centuries of pain.  But still he is in there.               

So tell me, reader; why must we Vampires always do good deeds in the dead of night? You know it is not so that we fear the sun.  Whitman has told you time and time again that the sun is to be praised, be it yellow with clean air or orange from the broken ozone.  I will tell you why; because humankind is blind as the Pallid Bat (antrozous Pallidus).  Yes indeed, pallid meaning white, devoid of blood and hair that bat is almost as white as the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro.  That is where the myth about Vampires hails.  That we are bloodless, that we are waxen as sallow as a starving beggar. We revel in the sunshine when you are not looking, simply because it is my myth that we survive; we are, so to speak, undercover redeemers of humankind.  And do not think that everyday I doubt that our work is deserved.  Greed, greed, greed. Read more and all will be right with the world.          

              I stand before his grave and it is midnight.  Lucky I am as strong as ten men and the digging will be done within ten minutes.  Listen, he calls again.  He knows I am here.  

  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.   To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes; I see the elder-hand, pressing, receiving, supporting; I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors, And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.1290  And as to you, Corpse, I think you are good manure—but that does not offend me; I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips—I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.   And as to you Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths; (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)1295  I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven; O suns! O grass of graves! O perpetual transfers and promotions! If you do not say anything, how can I say anything?   Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,1300Toss, sparkles of day and dusk! toss on the black stems that decay in the muck! Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.   I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night; I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected; And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small

                I come friend, I say, I come old friend. I misted through the iron gates and into the mausoleum. It took me less than ten minutes.  I dug and pulled and the blood-sweat covered my cheeks.  And I started to cry for the excitement of seeing him again.  And then, piles of stone surrounding me, I came upon coffin.  I stood near the coffin and wished with all my beating heart that I could take a several deep breaths in succession. I genuflected toward him and opened the top of the wooden box.  And there he was, reader, bones dem bones, dem Walt Whitman.  I took out my cooler and carefully place his bones into the bag, careful not to knick a piece off  here or there.  And then finally, I had all of him that I needed.

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*Note:It’s a very short novella …111 pages, and I have a series like this on some great writers.  I follow this definition of “Comedy” Old Comic dramatist is Aristophanes, whose works, with their pungent political satire and abundance of sexual and scatological innuendo, define the true comedy today.

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Elijah Rising

Lyn LeJeune

The story of the Ishmael-like friendship between two young men: a wealthy white New Yorker, Michael Cooke Holt, and a black tent-fundamentalist preacher, Elijah Broom, set in that period of turmoil and crisis in American history in which scientific marvels, social unrest, economic disasters, and the First World War, created new vistas about the individual and the nation. Coming soon.