Hot takes on the trial plus more chaos at the "Times," Springsteen in trouble, a song for Audrey Hepburn, and 50th anniversary tunes from The Band and Carly Simon.
Every time I read your blog I end up pulling out my guitar and relearning, or learning a song. The acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a great example. I've played that for years, but hearing that wonderful approach/take inspires a new approach. I don't know how you find the time and energy to keep cranking out these writings...keep it up, and thanks.
Can't explain why I don't open the newsletter everyday - because I open it every day. I love the mix of the current and historical, and especially a reminders of what was going on in the late 60's - I was in High School, but marched in Boston and RI. And you even give us tastes of music and film. Don't stop!
Re: Marches. Yeah, I was in that march carrying a name too, Greg. Mine was Vietnamese. I think the march ran all weekend. I forget where you picked up your name (Arlington Cemetery, maybe?) but I know you walked across Memorial Bridge, wound your way past up to the White House, went up the mall again and dropped off your card in a coffin parked in front of the Capitol Building. On that Friday, I walked into a tent on the mall to interview one of the march organizers for a story I was doing. A Labor Dept friend set up the meeting and came along for the ride. The organizer was almost regal in his fatigues--tall, patrician, focused. He was the kind of soldier who could afford to be soft-spoken because there was an obvious mountain of strength supporting every word he chose. Two hours later, my friend and I came out of that tent and I turned to him and said, "I feel like we just met a future president of the United States." He agreed. That soldier was John Kerry. I took hundreds of photos of marchers carrying names that weekend. Maybe you're in the pile. It was very moving experience. I participated in or observed many of those marches and remember how much they frightened those watching them. I'm sure the potential for violence carried by vast numbers of energetic young people scared the bejesus out of our parents and their generation. Understandable. But I don't remember seeing anything violent at any of them. Do you? In fact, I can't imagine ANY of those marches turning into what we saw on Jan 6, even though the anger in the crowd over the war was palpable. After all, the crowd was filled with young guys facing the draft. As for storming the Capitol, I guess it could have happened then, but the radical left was just not that big or powerful. It wasn't the rads who organized those marches, but the Flower Children. It may be hard for the GOP to stomach this but there were far more people in front of the Capitol for that march than Trump could ever muster. I think the estimates were around 500,000. And I can't imagine anti-war peaceniks going after Members of Congress, except maybe in their dreams. Thanks for the memories.
Also just in case you missed this, J. Hillis Miller, whom the American academic world lost this week to Covid, was such an incredibly important voice in teaching humanities students to think critically. I read this passage to my students every term: “Literature is also training in how to resist lies and distortions by way of the skill it gives in understanding the way the rhetoric of tropes and the rhetoric of persuasion works. Such expertise as literary study gives might be translated to a savvy resistance to the lies and ideological distortions politicians and talk show hosts promulgate. . . . One can only have the audacity of hope and believe that some people who study literature and literary theory might be led to the habit of unmasking ideological aberrations.” J. Hillis Miller, “Should We Read or Teach Literature Now” (2011). Here's his department's in memoriam: https://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/calendar/story_details.php?recid=2401
Reposting with correx. link on the *Lancet* article here—paywalled, sorry: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext ; guardian summary here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/10/us-coronavirus-response-donald-trump-health-policy (I agree, that's bizarrely low). This might be a good time to give some space to people of color in country music. The mainstream media has given more column inches to the huffing and puffing of MW's fans than to making space for alternatives. Links to those who are doing a better job on this as well as to music recommended by you and the great Rhiannon Giddens (whose Spotify Our Roots list is a gem: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWWTyhpyCExup )
Every time I read your blog I end up pulling out my guitar and relearning, or learning a song. The acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a great example. I've played that for years, but hearing that wonderful approach/take inspires a new approach. I don't know how you find the time and energy to keep cranking out these writings...keep it up, and thanks.
Greg - Re: Bruce’s troubles. You did say he was a bad driver.
Can't explain why I don't open the newsletter everyday - because I open it every day. I love the mix of the current and historical, and especially a reminders of what was going on in the late 60's - I was in High School, but marched in Boston and RI. And you even give us tastes of music and film. Don't stop!
Re: Marches. Yeah, I was in that march carrying a name too, Greg. Mine was Vietnamese. I think the march ran all weekend. I forget where you picked up your name (Arlington Cemetery, maybe?) but I know you walked across Memorial Bridge, wound your way past up to the White House, went up the mall again and dropped off your card in a coffin parked in front of the Capitol Building. On that Friday, I walked into a tent on the mall to interview one of the march organizers for a story I was doing. A Labor Dept friend set up the meeting and came along for the ride. The organizer was almost regal in his fatigues--tall, patrician, focused. He was the kind of soldier who could afford to be soft-spoken because there was an obvious mountain of strength supporting every word he chose. Two hours later, my friend and I came out of that tent and I turned to him and said, "I feel like we just met a future president of the United States." He agreed. That soldier was John Kerry. I took hundreds of photos of marchers carrying names that weekend. Maybe you're in the pile. It was very moving experience. I participated in or observed many of those marches and remember how much they frightened those watching them. I'm sure the potential for violence carried by vast numbers of energetic young people scared the bejesus out of our parents and their generation. Understandable. But I don't remember seeing anything violent at any of them. Do you? In fact, I can't imagine ANY of those marches turning into what we saw on Jan 6, even though the anger in the crowd over the war was palpable. After all, the crowd was filled with young guys facing the draft. As for storming the Capitol, I guess it could have happened then, but the radical left was just not that big or powerful. It wasn't the rads who organized those marches, but the Flower Children. It may be hard for the GOP to stomach this but there were far more people in front of the Capitol for that march than Trump could ever muster. I think the estimates were around 500,000. And I can't imagine anti-war peaceniks going after Members of Congress, except maybe in their dreams. Thanks for the memories.
Also just in case you missed this, J. Hillis Miller, whom the American academic world lost this week to Covid, was such an incredibly important voice in teaching humanities students to think critically. I read this passage to my students every term: “Literature is also training in how to resist lies and distortions by way of the skill it gives in understanding the way the rhetoric of tropes and the rhetoric of persuasion works. Such expertise as literary study gives might be translated to a savvy resistance to the lies and ideological distortions politicians and talk show hosts promulgate. . . . One can only have the audacity of hope and believe that some people who study literature and literary theory might be led to the habit of unmasking ideological aberrations.” J. Hillis Miller, “Should We Read or Teach Literature Now” (2011). Here's his department's in memoriam: https://www.humanities.uci.edu/SOH/calendar/story_details.php?recid=2401