Daily Bleed for May 6th

would she have said it was the wrong time if I had found her then
i don't want too much a field across the road & a few good friends
she used to come & see me but she was always there & gone
even the very longest love does not last too long
she'd stand there in my doorway smoothing out her dress
& say "this life is a thump-ripe melon-so sweet & such a mess"

& I'm looking for rexroth's daughter here on my own side street...
& i'm looking for rexroth's daughter & i guess i always will be...

— Songster Greg Brown

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/20000122/ra_files/000122_rexrawlsdaughter_28.ram
http://www.gregbrown.org/

Web in the woods:
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0506.htm

MAY 6

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Celebrant of uncomplicated natural life, the future primitive.

______________________________


FEAST OF THE FIERY FLYING ROLL.

NURSES DAY.
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1626 -- Wanna Buy A Bridge?: In North America, Dutchman Peter Minuit "buys"
Manhattan Island from the Manahatta Indians (Shinnecock Indians?) who
live in Brooklyn, for trinkets valued at $24. The joke is on Pete — as
Ayn Rand would have it — since the locals didn't have a legal title to the land.

1812 -- Black emancipationist Martin Robinson Delany lives, Virginia.
Spiller of the beans on the Seven Finger High Glister, HooDoo Master of
the Great Dismal Swamp.

1856 -- Sigmund Freud lives to tie knots & issue pink slips. Primary themes:
Sex & drugs (sorry kids, there is no rock'n'roll yet).

1862 -- US: Death of Henry David Thoreau, back-to-the-land advocate, war tax
resister, jailbird & author of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
His last words?: "Moose. Indian."

Where's Waldo?

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/waldo

1916 -- US: Alexander Berkman starts the No Conscription League & notes
the meetings attract crowds by the thousands.

On one occasion, "there were fully 35,000 that tried to gain
admission," wrote Berkman. At the same time, Beloved & Respected
Comrade Leader Liberal President Woody Wilson, elected on the
promise that he would keep America out of the war, is actively
preparing the country to enter the European conflict.

1940 -- John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath wins the Pulitzer Prize as most
distinguished novel of 1939. He gets the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Banned in 1980 in two Iowa high school sophomore classes after a
parent complains the book is "profane, vulgar, & obscene."

The head of the school board defends the action, noting the US is
"going pell mell downhill" morally & they were reversing the trend.

Inspires "reverse logic".

1944 -- India: Twenty Three Strikes or So & You're Out? Mohandas Gandhi
released from his last imprisonment. No 3 strikes law here.

1949 -- Nobel Prize-winner, Maurice Maeterlinck, dies. Belgian poet, playwright.
His Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) is considered a masterpiece of Symbolist drama,
&, in composer Claude Debussy's sensitive musical setting (1902), remains popular
in the public eye. He was praised by anarchist critics, such as Octave Mirbeau
(whose review first made Maeterlinck famous), & Emma Goldman, who included him
in her famed drama lectures.

1960 -- US: Years of agitation result in Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader JFK
signing Civil Rights Act so the South can ignore & violate it.

1965 -- Light at the End of the Tunnels?: First two Marine divisions arrive in Vietnam.

1968 -- France: Parisian Universities are closed, & new demonstrations of solidarity
with those rounded up & jailed May 3 ends in violent confrontations with the forces
of repression. Barricades are drawn up.

The students tear up paving stones & overturn cars to form barricades.
Police pump Tear Gas into the air & cry for reinforcements. The Boulevard
St Germain becomes a bloody battleground.

The result is staggering: over 900 wounded & 422 arrests.

1970 -- US: Between today & about the 20th, student strikes disrupt 448 colleges,
involving 1 million+ students (possibly as many as "4 million students"; Todd
Gitlin believes 750+ campuses (of 2500 nationwide), with demonstrations at 1200+
demonstrations against sending troops to Cambodia) Stanford University experiences
"worst riots in its history." 75 campuses stay closed thru rest of the school year.

1982 -- US: Don't Choke On This?: Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates explains
how a disproportionate number of blacks have been injured or killed by police choke
holds "because in some blacks . . . the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as
they do in normal people."

1993 -- US: The "NY Times" reveals Walt Disney was an FBI informer
on Hollywood "subversives."

2002 -- US: Free Admission? The Bush administration "unsigns" the UN treaty for an
International Criminal Court, fearing that it would prosecute US war crimes.

2002 -- Burma: Government releases opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi after 19
months of house arrest.

2012 -- Transit of Venus.


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"Arbeit mach das leben suesse, aber
faulheit staerkt die gliederung."

— motto on a turn-of-the-century postcard

Anti-Dave's new translation, after much
(over)due consideration:

"Work makes life bitter sweet,
but foolishness keeps us Fat & Happy."

_____________________________________________


— Anti-thump-ripe melons 2011