Born Yesterday

You will eat, bye and bye,

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

—Joe Hill

The empyrean is a realm of fire,

Where God and His purported angels dwell,

Your shrinking heart’s secret desire;

What you in deep confusion debit, hell.

We were all of us born yesterday,

And cogitating draw our own conclusions.

Informing knowledge has too brief a stay;

Believing what it pleases one to think: delusions.

We’re not all that wrong, though, I'd say,

To deny the earthly terrors

Spelled out by what many've thought before

Fleeing this Comedy of Errors:

Tom Fools, harkening to the quire/choir,

We see only what we're meant to see,

Claiming the inheritance we require;

Hoping the end's not soon to be.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you or me.

“They shot you, Joe,” says I.

“Takes more than guns to kill a man.

“I never died,” says he.

Believe that, too, if it's what you wish.

We Wobblies can't survive time's organizing fire,

And guns kill men. How could they not?

Millions have died here, on this very spot.

Framed for murders he almost certainly did not commit, the Swedish American songwriter and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; aka"the Wobblies") militant Joe Hill (aka Joseph Hillström) was executed by firing squad in a prison at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1915.

Friday, July 25, 2025

Palimpsest: A Brief Chrestomathy* of the 1960s

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.—Max Beerbohm

• General de Gaulle escaped assassination, but two other noted leaders, H. F. Verwoerd and JFK, did not.

• In Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard transplanted a human heart for the first time, then met with Gina Lollobrigida and the Pope (who wondered if it might not also be possible to transplant human souls).

• Mao Zedong launched a Cultural Revolution, successfully eliminating large sections of Chinese culture.

• The USSR launched a cosmonaut called Little Laika into earth orbit, who reported back that Earth from that perspective "looked a lot like a blue dog ball."

• Men walked on the moon, glimpsing its landfill potential for the first time.

• Elvis Presley met with US President Richard Nixon to discuss how best to get rid of the hippy "Counterculture," which they both loathed.

• Poets frequently saw their muse in actual women—but only from afar, and she invariably turned out to be someone else.

• In their last third, according to French existentialist philosophers, the "thirty glorious years"† were already running out of gloire.

* A selection of useful notes. Latin chrestomathia, from Greek chrēstomatheia, from chrēstos useful + manthanein to learn.—Merriam Webster.

† See Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 ["The Glorious Thirty, or the Invisible Revolution from 1946 to 1975"] (Paris: Fayard, 1979).

Animadversion

A steel engraving of Mary Shelley’s 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Even if I should indiscreetly

write the perfect sentence, it isn’t English—

I go to bed Lord Byron, and wake up bald.

—Lowell, “Fever”

I go to bed effete and wake up Frankenstein.

The critter must be whipped and kept in line,

a task that troubles me the livelong day—

but this is got departing from the way

stretched out before me studying our time,

which tells me not to keep the beast at bay,

but to write English lying on my bed

or any other tongue that shows up instead

(no matter what I write, we’ll soon be dead),

amusing my mad self, and perhaps some friends of mine.

Note: "Animadversion comes ultimately from the Latin phrase animum advertere, meaning 'to turn the mind to.'"—Merriam Webster.

Monday, 21 July, 2025