http://www.recollectionbooks.
Excerpts:
AUGUST 9 -- CHARLES FORT
Investigator of the paranormal, Poet of the damned.
______________________________
1593 -- Izaak Walton lives to fish.
"His landscapes are enameled like the meadows about the
feet of Medieval saints. His innkeepers are both gentle &
jovial. His barmaids are as wholesome as the ale they serve."
— Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited
http://www.bopsecrets.org/
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1779 -- General Clinton & 1,500 American troops break dam
to flood Iroquois towns & fields in upstate New York; troops
then burn & ravage settlements for 12 days. Called
"civilizing the savages..."
1848 -- US: Barnburners party merges with the Free Soil
Party, forming the Scorched Earth party...
1849 -- Hungarian Republic crushed by Austria & Russia.
The coach blames his team citing lack of motivation: "No
fire in the belly, they just weren't hungarian enough..."
1874 -- American paranormal chronicler Charles Fort lives.
Father of the modern study of strange phenomena, had
many views about blood falls which he discussed at length...
he wrote the following bizarrely lyrical passage about red rains:
"Or that our whole solar system is a living thing: that
showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages --
Or vast living things in the sky, as there are vast living things in
the oceans — Or some one especial thing: an especial time; an
especial place. A thing the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's
alive in outer space — something the size of Central Park
kills it — It drips."
1889 -- Charles Cros dies. French poet, inventor of the phonograph.
"... & his poems spoke for a way of life completely
unassimilable by the money-crazy, hypocritical,
debauched, & puritanical society of Louis Napoleon's
gimcrack Second Empire.
It is out of people like Charles Cros, simple, sensuous,
lyrical, & sarcastic, that poets like Verlaine come, &
all of those that he, Verlaine, first called "poètes maudits,"
the cursed, the outcast poets, Germain Nouveau, Arthur
Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Tristan Corbière, Jean Richepin.
All of these poets are still sung."
— Kenneth Rexroth,
Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs
http://recollectionbooks.com/
http://www.bopsecrets.org/
1892 -- Germany: Free Eats! Living mussels rain down, Paderhorn.
1898 -- Bulgaria: Vassil Ikonomov lives (1898-1925), Aïtos.
Anti-fascist anarchist guerrilla fighter & an important
figure in the Bulgarian movement. Organized partisan
groups which included anarchists, Communists, &
members of the peasants' party.
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1930 -- Betty Boop lives! Boop-Boop-de-doo!
1936 -- Lincoln Steffens dies...
1942 -- Poland: 10,000 Jews are sent from Boryslaw ghetto (now
Borislav, Ukraine) to Belsen extermination camp (the first mass
deportation of Jews to the gas chambers). Of course any good
conservative can tell you the Holocaust never happened, much
less any gassing.
Meanwhile, over in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine,
Dynamo beats Flakelf in soccer — in retaliation the Nazis
execute all the winning players.
For the Nazis, too, soccer was a matter of state.
A monument in the Ukraine commemorates the
players of the 1942 Kiev Dynamo team. During
the German occupation they committed the insane
act of defeating Hitler's squad in the local stadium.
Having been warned, "If you win, you die," they
started out resigned to losing, trembling with fear
& hunger, but in the end they could not resist the
temptation of dignity. When the game was over
all eleven were shot with their shirts on at the
edge of a cliff.
— Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun & Shadow
1945 -- Coffee, Tea or Me?: American "Fat Boy" drops in,
Nagasaki, Japan.
About 70,000 civilians die immediately.
Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Harry Truman
drops the bomb to prove to Russia he's the Big Kahuna,
& gets the Cold War arms race off to a healthy start.
Richard Feynman was only 24 when he started working at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. Feynman had written that
there were four main questions that needed to be answered
before the work could progress...
"The worst was when electrical & telephone wires got
twisted around people's legs & they couldn't escape ...
& they died in that position, fallen to their knees."
— Yosuke Yamahata
In 1999 a New Mexico Museum reports their
bestselling curios are the Fat Boy Bomb earrings.
1962 --Hermann Hesse dies...
Maybe death's hour too
will send us out new-born
towards undreamed-lands,
maybe life's call to us
will never find an end
Courage my heart,
take leave & fare thee well.
There is a scene in Herman Hesse's novel, Steppenwolf,
where protagonist Harry Haller is invited to attend an
"Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre
For Madmen Only
Price of Admission Your Mind"
The dadaist & Daily Bleed Saint Hugo Ball (February 22)
wrote an early critical biography
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1966 -- US: 200 stage sit-in at New York City offices of
Dow Chemical to protest use of napalm in Vietnam.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his
country against his government.
— Edward Abbey
http://recollectionbooks.com/
1974 -- Tricky Dick quits.
"We should carve his tombstone
right now, with the epitaph,
HE WAS A QUITTER."
1995 -- Grateful Dead singer, guitarist & spiritual leader
Cherry Garcia dies.
1995 -- Australian Heritage Commission accepts the
Tent Embassy.
2003 -- Canada: Clayoquot Ten Year Anniversary Gathering.
Hundreds of arrestees return to the ancient rainforests of
Clayoquot Sound to mark the 10-year anniversary of the largest
act of peaceful civil disobedience in Canadian history.
http://www.focs.ca/logging/
=========================
National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" show
commissioned Martín Espada to compose a poem as part
of NPR's 1997 April observance of National Poetry Month.
NPR gave him carte blanche subject matter, suggesting
a poem focusing on a news story in one of
the cities he was visiting during a reading tour.
Espada chose Philadelphia, & submitted it.
NPR continues to refuse to air the poem.
Excerpt, "Another Nameless Prostitute
Says the Man Is Innocent":
The board-blinded windows knew what happened;
the pavement sleepers of Philadelphia, groaning
in their ghost-infested sleep, knew what happened;
every black man blessed
with the gashed eyebrow of nightsticks
knew what happened;
even Walt Whitman knew what happened,
poet a century dead, keeping vigil
from the tomb on the other side of the bridge.
— Martín Espada
"If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are
so many powerful people trying to shut him up?"
— John Edgar Wideman
=========================
— @nti-CopRite 2010
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