Please see attached document.
I keep looking words up — always do so as I read.
And I copy the definitions as I go.
My English teacher, Mr. Tighe, would approve.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
September 18, 2021
new vocabulary words
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Tag Archives: Roger Smith
a lynching
1 LYNCHERS_IN_SALISBURY_HAD_RIGH
2 EYE_WITNESS_TO_LYNCHING_TELLS_
3 Fellow_Worker_of_Lynched_Man_S 4 Gov._Ritchie,_Possible_Preside
4 Gov._Ritchie,_Possible_Preside
If you can bear it, read the news item, “Negro Worker Lynched for Demanding Pay,” in the Southern Worker, December 12, 1931, pp. 1-2.
There is an editorial on page 4.
Plus, I am posting a few other news stories from the time. The mainstream media gave the lynching only glancing notice. The Baltimore Afro-American was the only newspaper to give it serious coverage.
This is how blacks were treated then.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
December 2021
“Don’t you ever forget that name.”
‘Don’t you ever forget that name’ – Washington Post 8-30-2021
President Biden made his way on Sunday around a quiet room at Dover Air Force Base, … with dignitaries and grieving families huddling together as the president came to speak to them privately, one family at a time.
Mark Schmitz had told a military officer the night before that he wasn’t much interested in speaking to a president he did not vote for, one whose execution of the Afghan pullout he disdains — and one he now blames for the death of his 20-year-old son Jared.
But overnight, … Schmitz changed his mind. So on that dreary morning he and his ex-wife were approached by Biden after he’d talked to all the other families. … Schmitz glared hard at the president. …. Eventually, the parents took out a photo to show to Biden. I said, “Don’t you ever forget that name. Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12,” Schmitz said. “And take some time to learn their stories.”
Biden did not seem to like that, Schmitz recalled, and he bristled, offering a blunt response: “I do know their stories.”
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Re:
‘Don’t you ever forget that name’: Biden’s tough meeting with grieving relatives
By Matt Viser
The Washington Post
August 30, 2021
President Biden did not deserve this. It is the grieving father who, in my opinion, is wrong here.
Wrong to say what he did in the way he said it.
Biden did not, obviously, desire this tragic occurrence, and he is not responsible for it.
Admittedly, policies he recently implemented were an indirect cause for an airport attack in Kabul, Afghanistan last week that resulted in the deaths of thirteen U.S. Marines and service members. But Biden is not personally responsible. The suicide bomber and gunmen were.
Putting this aside, let’s focus on what’s appropriate, what is called for here.
You experience a death in your family. The mourners at the funeral or a wake make an effort to convey their grief and empathy, as do those officiating (a minister or priest, speakers at the service).
One should appreciate that they are there. That perhaps it wasn’t easy for them, that it evokes painful memories in them (such as President Biden’s own) of deaths they have experienced, that they are doing their best to be empathic and to express condolences.
That is all one can expect of others in such circumstances, whether the “others” are officials, family members, or friends. No one can ever share fully — experience fully — the grief of a grieving spouse or parent. To expect them to is self-serving and self-centered.
Everyone experiences in their lifetime moments of bereavement and personal grief. Others can recognize and empathize with yours, but they will never quite experience it (your grief) fully — which is to say, not the way you do.
Was it right to berate President Biden for not being sufficiently sorry (which was assumed with there being no basis for thinking so)?
No.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 31, 2021
a society in which “the individual … must be degraded,” “organized according to a reasoned scheme in the interests of the group”
Avrahm Yarmolinsky, foreword – Dostovesky, ‘The Possessed’
The PDF file posted here contains the text of the foreword by Avrahm Yarmolinsky to the Modern Library edition of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed.
[The Possessed] is book begotten of fear and wrath. Dostoyevsky had drawn indiscriminately on his memories of the Fourierist dreamers with whom he had associated in his youth, and on more recent phases of social and political insurgency, and he freely intermingled these elements. The result was an exaggerated, distorted, anachronistic picture of .gullible fools and fiends with a mania for destruction. And yet The Possessed testifies to the fact that Dostoyevsky was not without some insight into the nature of the upheaval from which he was separated by nearly half a century. It was to be such “an upset as the world has never seen before,” a transformation ruled by a violent intransigent spirit, and going beyond mere political and economic change. In the midst of the stormy events of 1905-06, [Dmitry] Merezhkovsky, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dostoyevsky’s death, spoke of him as “the prophet of the Russian revolution.” More recently, opponents of the Bolshevik regime have seen in The Possessed a prophetic anticipation of the events of 1917. But if he was a prophet, he was one whose vision was clouded by horror. At bottom what he feared was that the individual, whose needs, he felt, are of a spiritual and irrational order, must be degraded in a Socialist society organized according to a reasoned scheme in the interests of the group. [italics added]
— Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Foreword (excerpt), The Possessed, By Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated by Constance Garnett (The Modern Library, 1930)
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Reading works such as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Pitirim A. Sorokin’s The Sociology of Revolution has gotten me thinking about observations such as those made in the passage above; and so have recent developments in the US, where supposedly correct thinking people are being driven mad by abstractions to impose their “ideologically correct” edicts and sanctions.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2021
morning thoughts
An email to my brothers and sister, yesterday morning:
Pete, Ralph, and Carol,
Listening to Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music — on my iPhone, on the bus – this morning evoked sentimental, grave thoughts and feelings.
about Bill Dalzell
Grammy Handy
Mom and Dad
What they meant to me, how I appreciate some things about them in retrospect keenly.
What death means. My own. That of loved ones. Its inevitability. How death is a poignant part of life, as Walt Whitman said.
Roger
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addendum:
Another email to my siblings (August 15):
Probably platitudes
But
Is it because of Mozart that I am thinking thusly?
When I am enjoying life keenly, partaking of it, appreciate the most, it seems, being alive.
People … the day as felt (sun, breeze, grass, water, the elements) … books, thoughts, and music … the active life of the mind.
I think of those departed.
Real people who loved and appreciated those same things (and people) purely for them own sake; and enjoyed and partook of them the same … who lived in the moment…. those moments as they experienced them are sharp and indelible in my memory.
We got this from Mom and Dad; and I did from people like Bill who cared not a whit for externals.
Then I think to myself, at such times, that Mom and Dad aren’t here to enjoy these things; and friends like Bill, or Dr. Colp: and I can’t share my enjoyment and appreciation with them.
Then I feel their absence keenly, and feel the poignancy of it all.
Roger
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I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
— Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry “
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 15, 2021
music from Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Nusic from the film:
Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Gloria, Missa Luba
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”
performed by Odetta
Bach, St. Matthew Passion
Erbarme Dich (musical introduction)
Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder
Bach
Adagio, Concerto for violin and oboe in D minor, BWV 1060
Bach, Fuga Ricercata, No. 2; arranged by Anton von Webern
Bach
Agnus Dei
Dona nobis pacem
B Minor Mass (BWV 232)
Mozart, Maurerische Trauermusik (Masonic Funeral Music)
Thanks to my departed friend William S. (Bill) Dalzell for his spiritual awareness and the knowledge of such films which he bequeathed to me.
And, I wish to add, this film inspires me to think of all those suffering state-sanctioned cruelty here in the present, including all the souls locked up in our prisons for sins and misdeeds of which, if they repent, it is not acknowledged or allowed; and for which they know no Christian forgiveness.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2021
“I should have stuck to fiction!”
My older brother was the starting third baseman for our high school baseball team.
According to a story he told me, our English teacher, Robert W. Tighe, was in the stands watching a game one day in which my brother was playing, with an acquaintance of his (the teacher’s, that is), a New York Yankees scout. Mr. Tighe was, despite growing up in Massachusetts and attending college there, a diehard Yankees fan.
Mr. Tighe, according to my brother’s story — as Mr. Tighe told him afterwards — asked the scout, so what do you think of the third baseman? He is one of my best students. (I am paraphrasing.)
“Tell him to stick to his books,” the scout replied.
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The following is a passage from one of many politically oriented articles by Theodore Dreiser in the 1930s and 40s:
“Life is and ever must be an equation between all sorts of contending forces—in a fair and maintainable balance. Neither chemically nor physically nor socially nor financially can it be workably run off into unbalance. In chemistry and physics explosions follow—disastrous and frightful to behold. And of humanity, collectively and socially assembled under forms of government the same thing is true. Where financial or social unbalance sets in and a few, because of their extorted wealth, set themselves apart and above the many and fail to see how necessarily interrelated they are either for good or for ill, you have either (1) revolution and so a restoration of balance or (2) where equity is defeated and inequity prevails you have death of that land or nation. If you do not believe this, consider Rome that declined and fell with the arrival of the Caesars; Italy that plundered up to the days of Mussolini; France, the monarchical France that ended with the French Revolution; Autocratic Russia that ended with the Russian Revolution; completely Autocratic England that ended (for a time) with King John and Magna Charta [sic]; the Roman religious autocracy that ended with Martin Luther; Autocratic China that ended with the Boxer Rebellion. No equity or social balance—no peace and finally no government.’
from “Theodore Dreiser Condemns War,” by Theodore Dreiser, People’s World, April 6, 1940
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Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle: “You are no Jack Kennedy.”
Roger W. Smith (posthumously) to Theodore Dreiser: “You were no Aristotle, no Cicero, no Edward Gibbon. You should have stuck to fiction.”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2021
“the hope of humanity”
‘The Hope of Humanity’ (Stalin, Lenin) – Daily Worker 11-8-1937
From the Daily Worker
November 8, 1937
pg. 1
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2021
a memory
I sent the following email to my brothers and my sister this afternoon:
to my siblings
I am in a favorite bar near Carnegie Hall. The waitresses are so nice to me.
A guy just walked in with a little kid under five. They are sitting in a booth right next to me.
It triggered a memory which made me feel very sentimental. I have not thought about it for years.
I wound up at a bar with Dad, probably in Cambridge, when I was around six or seven.
I sat on a barstool. Everyone — the bartender and everyone else — was so nice to me. They treated me like an honored guest.
The bartender gave me a bowl of potato chips …. how I enjoyed them!
I was bathed in warmth and kindness.
miss Dad terribly
ROGER
— Roger W. Smith
July 31, 2021
Walden Pond, Concord, Mass., early 50’s. My father, me, and my two brothers. I am the furthest to the left.
why New York is one of the greatest (in my opinion, the greatest) cities in the world
The water has a lot to do with it. It is a city surrounded and bathed by water: the Hudson and East rivers, the Atlantic Ocean. New York Harbor is one of the largest and most beautiful natural harbors in the world.
All five boroughs have shorelines and ocean or river views.
Having river and ocean boundaries prevents urban sprawl. It makes the City, as big as it is, contained.
It is a city made for walking. Sidewalks are wide, and pedestrians are seen everywhere at all hours of the day. Cars do not dominate. Many streets are clogged with traffic, notably at the bridge and tunnel crossings and on cross streets in Manhattan. But, elsewhere traffic is relatively moderate. This is true on major thoroughfares such as Fifth and Park Avenues.
It has a world class transit system that runs 24 hours a day, every day.
It is a city seemingly devoid of nature, one where nature doesn’t matter, where a rain or snow storm is a nuisance. This is true. And yet, there are ample parks everywhere; and some of them are magnificent. No other city has a park to match Central Park.
It is a city of neighborhoods: the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, Soho, Inwood, Astoria, Ridgewood, Williamsburg, Park Slope.
The admixture of races and ethnicities (in a polyglot city), the visibility and importance of the immigrant population, the concentration of people of varying educational and income levels who have many opportunities to interact continually is notable.
Show me a city that has richer cultural offerings. Take music. Several major concert halls (not just one, as is the case in most American cities), and this doesn’t count concert venues in museums, churches, etc. Splendid concerts almost daily by the best musicians.
And art museums and galleries — I can’t keep track of them.
— posted by Roger W Smith
July 2021