The American Holiday Known As Thanksgiving

I never knew that it was the woman who wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb", Sarah Josepha Hale, who campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. Or, as the wikipedia elegantly puts it: "She famously campaigned for the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving." I love the stiff prose of wikiworld. Hale was also an advocate for eating the American bird known as turkey. Turkeys are found in the American continent known as North America. Here's your wikipedia history lesson of the day:

Hale is credited as the individual most responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the United States; it had previously been celebrated only in New England. Each state scheduled its own holiday, some as early as October and others as late as January; it was largely unknown in the American South. Her advocacy for the national holiday began in 1846 and lasted 17 years before it was successful. In support of the proposed national holiday, she wrote letters to five Presidents of the United States -- Zachary Taylor, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. Her initial letters failed to persuade, but the letter she wrote to Lincoln did convince him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863.

Impressive. What a legacy! Both "Mary Had a Little Lamb" & Thanksgiving? That's like being credited with creating both smiles & kittens. I need to start writing repeated letters to as many presidents as possible to advocate for McGonagall Supper to become official. (McGonagall Supper is a dinner in honor of bad poetry held on September 29th, the day William McGonagall, the English language's worst poet, died. Mark your calendars! Write to your representative!) In the meantime, happy thanksgiving, & I leave you with the subtly secular Walt Whitman quote I read as our prayer before our family's thanksgiving dinner every year:

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are.

-Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road (1892)

More William Topaz McGonagall & also The Royal Thibaw Min, Golden-footed Lord of the White Elephant, Master of a Thousand Gold Umbrellas...

Mr Mary & I were doing some research for our William McGonagall project today, & happened upon some interesting history. First of all, it turns out our idea of throwing a McGonagall supper is already a tradition in Dundee. "The William Topaz McGonagall Appreciation Society held a McGonagall Supper on board the frigate Unicorn on 12 June 1997, during which the courses were allegedly served in reverse order, starting with the coffee and ending with the starters. A short play was performed by local actors."

Sadly the William Topaz McGonagall Appreciation Society's website is down, but I sent an e-mail to the person responsible, asking a few questions about the itineraries & rituals for a McGonagall Supper, & what the significance of June 12th is - I think September 28th, the day of McGonagall's death, might be as good of a night as any. If anyone out there reading this knows anything, please contact me! o [[at]] itwaslost.org.

Then, there are some amazing bits in McGonagall's wiki-biography (the whole thing is worth reading here.) My favorite was his production of Macbeth where "McGonagall believed that the actor playing Macduff was trying to upstage him, and so refused to die."

Then there's this mysterious tidbit:

In 1892, following the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he walked from Dundee to Balmoral, a distance of about 60 miles over mountainous terrain and through a violent thunderstorm, "wet to the skin", to ask Queen Victoria if he might be considered for the post of Poet Laureate. Unfortunately, he was informed the Queen was not in residence, and returned home. In 1894, representatives of King Thibaw Min of Burma knighted him as Sir Topaz, Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah, a title he used in his advertising.

We looked up Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma, where it says his full name is The Royal Thibaw Min, Golden-footed Lord of the White Elephant, Master of a Thousand Gold Umbrellas, Owner of the Royal Peacocks, Lord of the Sea and of the World, Whose face is like the Sun. In his own words, the reason he fell from the throne is:

My late father, the Royal Mindon Min, the golden-footed lord of the white elephant, master of a thousand gold umbrellas, owner of the Royal peacocks, lord of the sea and of the world, whose face was like the sun, always smoked the Esoof cheroot while meditating on his treatment of the bull-faced, earthswallowing English. Had I done the same I should never have lost my throne, but I used the opium-drugged cheroots from Manila and the trash which was sent to me from San Francisco, and I fell.

Our hip-hop rendering of An Address to the New Tay Bridge is below.

The Sad Narrative of the Big-Ass Beard on that Rutherford B. Hayes

Happy Presidents' Day! It is too infrequently noted that we pay too too little attention to our leaders in this country. How about a little reverence for our great presidents once & awhile! The slick new whitehouse.gov website has a fancy feature with a SLIDESHOW of the 44 presidents, they are even kind enough to crop off the tops of their foreheads for our convenience. I wanted to combine all of the things we love on this blog - Lizard People, Presidents, Beards, Fashion, & History - into one spectacular historical doggerel poem in honor of bearded lizard presidents. Kowtow to us, & spend a few moments this Presidents' Day to learn about democratic leadership.

The Sad Narrative of the Big-Ass Beard on that Rutherford B. Hayes

There once was a man named Rutherford Hayes,
A metrosexual, he shaved three times a days,
Like a baby's butt, soft as a vagina,
You could ride that wave from California to Carolina,
And he knew if he rubbed it in just the right place,
He would grow up to be elected the President of the United States.

Now one day he was walking thru the amber maize,
That gay savant known as Rudy Be Hayes,
And he came across a humble wasp called Twitty van Titt,
Let me tell you about this Twitty, he was full of monkey shit,
A bumble in appearance, but inside an evil sorcerer.
All yellow & fuzzy, he was envious of Rutherford's virgin face,
The type of chihuahua pate, if you rubbed in just the right place,
It could be stamped on the currency of the United States.

That jealous Twitty van Titt, summoned all the spirits of the days,
And placed a huge curse on the face of Rutherford B. Hayes,
He could shave it twenty times with the sharpest of razors,
But his beard would grow thicker than a NASA space shuttle.
You need a 4-D map to get out of the jungle on that lengthy face,
And you'll never grow up to be elected the President of the United States.

But Rudy Be Hayes was a gay little turnip,
And had saved for the fates a few gay little tricks,
So when he ran against Sam Tilden in 1876,
The New York Governor, with his feminine cheeks,
Won the popular vote, but was caught in the lady's lavatory huffing a whippet,
And despite the buzzing voodoo of Twitty Van Titt,
Rutherford ushered in an age of wild bearded Presidents,
Garfield & Cleveland & Arthur & Harrison,
Men of action & courage, history written bold across their pates,
Bearded & handsome, & honored forever as Presidents of the United States.

Special Political Editorial: Our Endorsement for President of the United States

Good Morning, It Was Lost Nation. Many of you, our loyal readers, will know that in previous years, we have stayed quiet thru elections, perhaps subtly hinting at things to undermine candidates like Richard Pombo, but never wishing to alienate a portion of our diverse demographic by going all hippy-lefty & outright suggesting to vote for the Democrats. In breaking with tradition, the Editors at Itwaslost.org, after not sleeping for most of October & chain-smoking cigarettes on black & white 35mm film, have collaborated on this short argument for the difficult choice you must make on November 4th. It is a close election, with the Democratic Challenger running a mere 14-points ahead in the opinion polls, & conservative pundits acting like albino wallaroos, dabbing their bleached rhinariums with their handkerchiefs & wishing they were kangaroos.

We like Barack Obama’s compelling candidacy because we believe that he reads books. He has shown himself to be a human being of exemplary intelligence in a nation & an era where intelligence is considered suspect. Is it some mistake that Senator Obama reads? That he urges us to read? That he reads to his children & urges us to read to our children? What does reading have to do with future generations (beyond ensuring that they will know which bus they are riding on)? Senator Obama has repeatedly, in his writings & in interviews, emphasized the importance of empathy. Didn’t Charles Dickens spread empathy to the British people by writing intimately of the lives of London’s poor & then selling his writings to the middle & upper classes. Literacy is a gateway to the empathetic capacity. Thus, true intelligence, & the preservation of our nation’s promise, depend upon the literacy of the people. In one of Norman Mailer’s old letters published in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, he mourned the loss of JFK because “Kennedy was giving a great boost to the arts, not because Jackie Kennedy was inviting Richard Wilbur to the White House, but somehow the lid was off, & now I fear it’s going to be clamped on tight again.” Has it really now been on for forty-five years?

We're picking our own president in our own election. We need to listen to ourselves. Maybe if we met ourselves today, we wouldn't like ourselves. Weigh up the presidential tasks, calculate their impact, throw in Abu Ghraib photographs, affix an occupation of Iraq, add Gitmo, append oratory skills or complete lack thereof, & you'll see the sum of presidential decision-making is a part of our own self-image in that old modernist way, the imagined community called nation, or Nation. Two-hundred thousand people turned up in Berlin to tell us they know we used to be better, nicer, & smarter. They want to friend us on Facebook. They'd like to share a pitcher at pub quiz sometime. They want to cat-sit when we're out-of-town. So they held an intervention.

It is true that we fly several large American flags outside of the itwaslost.org hq in Imaginary America, & that our pet interventionist eagle is named Woodrow, but these are mere superficial displays of our love of American iconography. We are patriots but not nationalists. Nationalism & the Fascism it spawns shadow the horizons of America today. The line between Patriotism & Nationalism is drawn by intelligence, which acts as safeguard against Fascism in it’s many manifestations. We are almost certainly elitists of course, but abundant, generous elitists with ties to our community, both our Hood & our Imaginary Community.

Community is Not a Word. Community is a life force, like a plant or an ant or a little boy, or yogurt. I know that recently words & communities have been reduced to punch lines of the scornful & lonely, the desperate & angry, those in the shadow of the current sunshine we will call Barack Obama. Well we am here to tell you that what Barack "Sunshine" O'bama cares about are communities, not words. If he had a choice, he would certainly leave words where they belong: pinned up under Karl Rove's dark cloak of infinite meaning, not within the public sphere or even in casual conversation.

Obama is not a wordologist, as some may have us believe. He is a community man & as I have pointed out "Community" isn't even a word, it simply is. Words do not even exist until some foolish wordy wordsmith forces them into our comfortable word-free living rooms, & we am talking about things that exist, like Barack Obama & America's Democracy &c. Community is a natural phenomenon, a constant. Barack does not actually speak or write, he believes in communities & the operating functionaries of these systems - me! you! your mother! your plants & your goddamned brother & all those people who live very close to you but who you would never dare speaking to. Senator Obama just believes & suddenly so do other people. Nobody talks, Nobody recites, Nobody tells jokes, Nobody mistakes Muslims for terrorists, or Christians for Muslims, or critical thinking for anti-americanism, or being sexy for irresponsibility and naïveté. No! Nobody uses words. Words use us.

So, what creates a robust new economy? Communities! What is ever more important in this rapidly expanding network of lives? The smallest of those networks: Communities! (& fungus) What will make us happy & teach us what to remind ourselves of? Communities! What will it take to understand that we are not our own terribly misunderstood joke? Barack Obama! Senator Obama is a flower on the dubious fruit that’s come from centuries of Western thought. He is the marvelous crystal left in the track of colonial & imperial histories (his Kenyan grandfather, a cook to the British nobleman)- these histories which proved to be mighty perversions of the bejeweled & transformative potential of Western thought.

We want to tell you why you should vote Obama-Biden using the only physical word in the English language: because. Because Barack, like you, has moved around a lot & doesn't like the sound of his own name. Because Barack has what all Americans increasingly have: multiple origins, fluid identities, the arduous state of being many things while never wholly one thing. Because Barack Obama reads books.

Vote for Barack because of the Obama-Biden ticket. Because Joe Biden commutes to work on the train, which means Joe is clever & reads a lot, because when you commute in a car or bus, you can't read without crashing or getting motion sickness. Because Joe reads. Because Joe's son is on the board at Amtrak. Because Joe doesn't just appreciate public transit, he depends on it to get to work & back. Sure, trains are rarely profitable, but highways have never been profitable & they waste a lot more money than trains & they ugly up our cities. The average interstate junction costs thirty million dollars per year to maintain, which is far more than it costs to run those tiny platforms that Amtrak calls a station. Have you ever communicated with your neighbor driving next to you on the freeway? No! You can’t! So when you walk to your polling center on Tuesday, November 4th, think of your children’s futures, think of the Imaginary America, & most of all, think the words you have memorized in this essay & this inexorable argument.

-The Editors

Photos: Comparison of a Kraftwerk Album Cover (1973) & me at my Sophomore Prom

For Your Consideration!

Here is an image of the 1973 LP "Ralf und Florian", the album from Germany's groundbreaking electronic musicians, Kraftwerk. Pay close attention to the general look of Ralf Hütter (pictured left), who on this recording is credited as performing "vocals, keyboards, electronics, stringed instruments, drums & percussion."


Now, here is an image of me at my Sophomore Prom, which we cleverly called "Morp", 1998.


And another with my date, Miss Debbi Scop of Miami, Florida.

Purple Flags?

Last night, we were telling some late night house-callers about an all purple meal we had prepared Friday Night. It was baked purple potatoes (sliced thin in oil with lemon-thyme & purple garlic-onions, delicious), & buckwheat pasta in a white-wine/butter sauce with purple cauliflower, purple carrots, purple garlic-onions, portabella mushrooms, purple olives & capers. The result was a symphony of flavors, but only one color! This was a test-run & idea gathering mission for a whole purple meal, with aubergines & lavender things & beets tied up in strings. Our guests last night suggested either the cuisines of states that are half-red-state & half-blue-states. (Missouri cuisine? Florida cuisine?) Or cuisines from countries with purple flags.

Which leads us to the mystery. If you scan thru the flags of the world, none of them have purple in them! Why not? Internet searches to find purple flags found some alternate flags - like the Purple Flag of Chuvasia - & some sports flags - like the Sacramento Kings. "Purple Flag" is also slang for a person of gay persuasions, apparently. Still, why wouldn't any country anywhere have purple in it's flag? It's the royal color, the color of Christ on Easter, & a pretty strong hue all around. Luckily, there's a Wikipedia page with lists of flags by color - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flags_by_color - very useful for just such situations. I'll post some of the purple flags here:


This is from the Balearic Islands, an autonomous region of Spain off of the Iberian Peninsula. It may win for general classy color combination, & their groovy castle.


This one is also from Spain, from the port city of Málalga.


And this one was from the Spanish Second Republic. I suppose that could explain the color scheme of the Balearic Islands.

Other flags with purple in them were: 1) Montreal Flag has a Scottish thistle as one of its four flowers; 2) Gay Pride flag has a purple stripe; 3) Dominican Flag has a purple parrot in the center. Did you know the Gay Pride Flag employs the golden ratio?

I suppose, as far as cuisine, we could lean towards 1930's Tapas.

Any additional information on Purple Flags would be EXTREMELY HELPFUL. Or, if anyone knows why there is a dearth of them. It does seem a terrible loss. Or suggestions about purple foods or purple cuisine.

PURPLE FLAGS: THE SEQUEL

If you enjoyed this essay on purple flags, then, for no particular reason, I have reason to believe you will also enjoy the album "Stuck Home Syndrome" by Friends Around the Campfire. It's well worth the $5.99!

Please "like" our band The Manna Tease on facebooks:


___________________________________
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S. Sandrigon - Prophecy and Doggerel 2009

The Relationship between the Distant Past & the Present

Date:	Fri, 1 Feb 2008 17:06:00 -0800
From:	"James Eliot Quill" <________@gmail.com>
To:	"James Henry Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>, "Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden" <_____@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: Writing Assignment #2

You guys are rapidly losing credit. It's kind of like the arcade Gauntlet: Legends. Better find some chicken or something.

On Jan 21, 2008 5:45 PM, James Eliot Quill <____@gmail.com> wrote:

due: 1/31/08
250 words or more

James: The relationship between the distant past & the present
Liam: The relationship between the distant future & the present

______________________________________________________

“The Relationship between the Present & the Distant Past”

by Jonny Greenwood, age 16, future guitarist of the rock & roll band, Radio Head.

Mark Twain famously wrote, “They told the youth to bring their new ideas to the vast, empty land out West. That gave the Easterners some breathing space to preform their old ideas, until such time as the youth's ideas grew hoary likewise.” Such a statement could have been written today, with the cartography mixed up a bit. There have always been young people & old people, the former dying young & the latter already dead.

Ever scholar – by which I mean, stoned student – imagines the prehistoric past differently. Often, one will re-create primitive man to affirm some personal or political agenda. For instance, if I am trying to vindicate vegetarianism, I will point to Jane Goodall's theory that early man probably had a similar diet to modern chimpanzees, our closest relative: eating only a mere 2% meat, only occasionally motivated off of our cuddly posteriors to hunt, otherwise surviving deliciously on the ample gatherables, fruit, salads, & insects. Eventually, Homo sapiens co-evolved with the crop vegetables & domesticated animals, changing slowly into the first agricultural communities. At that time, slaughter was rare & sacred, man worked far harder than chimpanzees, & Jesus Christ was still an intergalactic sperm. Nevertheless, none of these ancient scenarios supposes a lifestyle radically different from the modern urban or rural human. I will lie around most of the day with my harem, only motivated to go shopping about once a week, & favor gathering over the rigors of the hunt. Elsewhere, people are farming & running monstrous CAFOs, but I avoid thinking of that at all costs. Alternately, omnivores, blind to the sufferings of industrialized livestock, will re-imagine primitive man spending all day long clubbing mastodons.

What about war? Winston Churchill remarked that it is “a thundering evanescence, the intensity of which no Indian god can diminish.” Sure, there were wars in the distant past, but what can equal the horrors which Lincoln, Churchill, & Lyndon Johnson managed? Two percent of the 1861 population died in the American Civil War, the equivalent of which would be unthinkable today. Even the amount of people who have died in car accidents – highways & freeways being a sort of postmodern ("po-mo") civil war – in the past five years, barely scrapes the one percent bracket. The Civil War was an awesome combination of the old fashion field outing & a modern shoot-fest. The magnitude of Second Millennium horrors is unqualifiable. In conclusion, we have nothing in common with the distant past, except for the size of our imaginations.

Special Report: Is Michael Jackson a Castrato?

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Castrato is a male soprano whose larynx was never transformed by puberty (i.e. lowered into Tenor or Bass range). Occasionally, this is the result of an endocrinological condition (as the Wikipedia tells me), but it was semi-common practice throughout the Catholic Middle Ages & Renaissance to castrate great boy singers to preserve their pristine upper ranges. (Countertenors are male altos with testicles who have perfected their falsetto, & were also commonly used in church music for centuries, & still sing modern & ancient music today. The last proper Italian operatic Castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. There are a few scratchy old recordings of him.)



I do not know that much about Michael Jackson or his music, but I watched the premier of his controversial interview with Martin Bashir, Living with Michael Jackson, while I was in England in 2003/04. I was fascinated by his behavior on that program, & I tossed off the theory that maybe he was castrated before he reached puberty, thus explaining many of his quirks at once. I was just thinking about it again recently, & I asked my friend Danny Holt to bring up an old VHS tape of Living with Michael Jackson, from his collection, when he visited last night. (It's not commercially available.) Danny's friend Shirley suggested I should write down my theory, so, if in twenty years, I'm proved correct, I can say "look when I guessed it!" I'm sure others have suggested this before, but here's my talking points, all based on Martin Bashir's interview.



-HIStory: Jackson was an inspired child singer. His father was controlling, abusive, violent, & obsessed with the success of his children's act. Michael describes repeated beatings, & also his extreme desire to fulfill his father's expectations. With the international fame, & stressful schedule, Michael more or less did not get a childhood. He also refers to his emotional turmoil at puberty, not wanting to grow up or lose his child star qualities, being embarrassed at his zitty pubescent face. If he, his father, or someone else, ever had the crazy idea that they could prolong his child fame & soprano voice by castrating young Michael, I do not want to speculate the actual events. Or maybe he developed an endocrinological condition possibly related to his phoney skin disease.

-His Voice: His singing range is very high, with some seriously difficult-to-reach upper notes which he hits with no strain. Stranger, tho, is the apparent lack of any low tones. I'm not that familiar with his complete cannon, but if anyone is aware of a moment when he throws in a masculine phrase or Elvis impersonation, where is it, & are we sure that he sang it? More interestingly, his speaking voice is pretty high without sounding affected - it doesn't sound like, say, a stereotypical movie transvestite speaking in falsetto with the occasional break away from head voice.

-Eternal Youth: It is obvious that Jackson has deep psychological issues with age. I'm sure these can't be chalked up to any specific thing, his abnormal childhood or his celebrity isolation - and if you castrated a normal small-town boy, he could conceivably have a normal adult life or musical career without building a fantasy Neverland with a private zoo. Jackson claims to have the soul of a child, & some of his regular 12-year-old friends that are interviewed say that he acts & plays like just one of the kids. But as sociopathic behavior isn't evidence of anything physical, I'll leave this issue to the forensic psychologists.

-Virginity: Jackson tells several anecdotes to Bashir about how he was scandalized by sex as a boy. Once when his brother was having sex with girls in the same hotel room. The second story is far stranger, when he is older, at a time when normal teen stars couldn't be happier that girls follow them everywhere, he describes a groupie trying to seduce him & he wasn't "tempted." I should discuss that castrati historically are not asexual, with famous examples like Farinelli, the 18th Century playboy opera-singer. Eunuchs of Antiquity were castrated men employed to accompany & protect the many wives of a patriarch, but their roles also were not asexual - they were often needed to pleasure neglected women of a harem without the threat of impregnation. Michael Jackson is almost certainly not a virgin; but in my subjective opinion, there is something very non-sexual about his relationship with women, & there is something very pure about his obsession with toys & desire to hang out with kids his mental age. I'll return to this thought below.

-His Children Are White: The unalterable nature of genetics & recessive genes were not subjects that his private tutors (most likely Jehovah's Witnesses) ever taught in much detail, because he has a Bush-ian ignorance that he can just tell the world whatever fantasy he believes, like that he is the father of his children. Prince Michael I, Paris, & Prince Michael II ("Blanket") are Caucasian, visibly not half nor fully African-American - (Jackson claims the secret mother of Blanket is black). Whether he has convinced himself that his phoney degenerative skin disease has affected what color his children's skin will be, or if he has been lied to, or simply doesn't get that the rest of the world understands genetics better than he does, is a mystery. But on the interview he unblinkingly describes the conception of his children with their contractual mothers, & rhapsodizes lovingly about their family resemblance to other Jacksons. I feel I can say without much controversy that Joe Jackson is not their genetic grandfather. Whether this is because Michael Jackson does not possess the biological capabilities to create sperm may never be known. But at some point in his late thirties, he expressed the obsession to become a father (he says he would carry around baby dolls), & rather than going about the fairly conventional process of impregnating his wife with his own DNA (& celebrities with large egos are even more prone to want to sire replicas - like baseball player Manny Ramirez, who also named both his first two sons Manny, Jr.), Jackson somehow brought into this world three white children.

-Michael Jackson His Sexuality: Again, we may never know for sure if he is actually a sexual predator who has a history of ogling adolescents. He has been determined, thru several decades, to have sleepovers with kids, & it is even his naive & earnest desire is to admit it openly. This doesn't seem like the behavior of a pervert, who usually has some self-awareness of indiscretion. When I think of Humbert Humbert's caution & paranoia, Jackson comes off as much more of a foot-in-the-mouth putz. He is just so oblivious that, in his mind, kids aren't allowed to sleep in the same bed as other "kids". A better historical parallel may be Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics professor & Anglican clergyman, who wrote Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Although Dodgson had many consecutive relationships with young girls, & even photographed some of them semi-nude, Carrollians are in general agreement that his relationships were "platonic". As an adult, Dodgson was a shy, nervous stuttering man, & he only ever felt comfortable around his child friends. It's more complicated than that of course, & one interesting aspect is that the age of Dodgson's girlfriends increased as he did, so that by the time he was an old man, he had several female friends who were in their twenties. As for any Victorian appreciation for the beauty of children, without the creepy sexual overtones always inflicted by our modern minds, we may never be able to see his photography-hobby as not suspect. I'll tell you what I think is creepy: the oil painting in Michael Jackson's house, shown behind him in the interviews, of a mostly-naked Michael in Renaissance style, surrounded by a dozen floating naked cherubs. The point is, even if he naively doesn't see the harm in this aestetic, can't he realize how twisted that seems to the rest of us! Dodgson's photographs have long since been salvaged from suspicion by art critics & biographers - (Go ahead! you can enjoy the beauty of Alice Liddell without feeling non-Catholic guilt or receiving a subpoena) - but there's something fundamentally disturbing about Jackson's tacky taste. I'm on the fence about what's actually going on in his psyche, why or how he is the way he is, what he actually did, & whether history will vindicate him.



If it ever comes out that Michael Jackson is a castrato, that would certainly add an interesting dimension to the discussions about his sexuality & psychology. I recall that in one of the court cases, there was some talk about the victim identifying something unusual about the defendant's genitalia, & there was going to be a photograph of the King of Pop's privates exhibited as corroborative evidence. Any revelation of that magnitude would have been explosive, impossible to keep away from the press. But could it have been....?

Read more from our fantastic weblog: www.itwaslost.org
UPDATE: I've posted some of the comments from this post in two new separate posts: here & here.
←─╥╜╞╬╝More updates: Follow SSandrigon on twitter.

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A Theory of Gayness

I was just reading today's article about the genes of romance, in the New York Times ("Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes" by Nicolas Wade), & I had a few thoughts to add to it inspired by some of the BBC nature documentaries I've watched in the past months. (Alastair Fothergill's Planet Earth, sadly lacking David Attenborough, is playing for the next two sundays on the Discovery Channel. It's beautiful - watch it!) Neurologists now believe that the wires attracting a male brain to females or to other males have probably been connected before birth. (This is not true in women, who seem to always be attracted to both sexes, & any specific sexualities come from an innate pickiness for mates & for reproduction.) Now comes the big clue, that two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, "have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared." This is because of a "a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies."

Obviously this is a mother's genetic response to the type of family she is creating, &, in a larger sense, the type of society she is living in. Having more males in your tribe means more fighting for females when the next generation comes to want to start families.

How males in different mammal species fight for mates varies greatly in levels of violence. A common trend in all animals, however, is what Richard Dawkins calls the "gloved fist", meaning that, no matter how dangerous the tusks or horns, there are civil rules of conduct, the duelers never fight to the kill, and the loser retreats as soon as he knows he's inferior. In the most violent of mammals, like Elephant Seals, whose males are huge & keep humongous harems of females numbering in the hundreds, the loser males band together in gangs & roam the waters, biding time until one can challenge a reigning king. This male bonding occurs in large mammals the world wide, from elephants to deer.

Now humans have many examples of the "gloved fist" romantic warfare, despite what Western movies make us believe. We also have many examples of gangs of males who haven't chosen a mate & settled down in a family to breed yet. But we are the most violent species that has ever lived on this planet. We regularly use our most advanced technologies to murder large numbers of other humans for ambiguous genetic benefits, sacrificing thousands of young males in the process. I could be easily led to believe that that "maternal immune response" that makes some sons homosexual only crops up in a species when that species evolves to be sufficiently violent enough to warrant any benefits from gayness. Some scientists have written that homosexuality increases fertility in other family members, & studies have shown that gay people on average have more relatives than straight people. Also, obviously, gay males are less prone to fighting. Historically, some societies with infamous rampant homosexuality are: Athens during the Greek Empire, Berlin after WWI, & America today: three exceptionally bellicose empires. (The arts and philosophy have also flourished in those places, with many gay men among their most prominent thinkers.) Is creating gay children a biological response to war?

E-mail: Communicating with Danny Curley Holt, & some highschool news archives

Date:	Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:20:29 -0800 (PST)
From:	"James Welsch" <______@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	Little Miss
To:	"Danny Curley Holt" <________@yahoo.com>

D.C.

I'm sitting at work, googling, & I just found something crazy. Put this into google:

"Danny Holt" site:http://listserv.american.edu/

It's quite an artform, Google, like mining, but for treasures more mysterious.

You know, they're getting in trouble with publishers & copyright hawks, because they're scanning every book. They want to make every book ever published searchable.

I was thinking how impossible that would be with music. How could you scan an audio recording & make it searchable? Like googling for "L'homme arme".

I'm sorry we never spoke on the phone when you called months ago. I'm very flakey with my cellphone, but not flakey with other mediums, like talking to someone in person, or even electronic mail. What's the address to your new house? Is you piano white, black, or pink? I know you zip around at 90 miles per hour while talking on your cellphone, but I try & keep mine as far from my reproductive organs as possible. You know 200,000 Americans have died in car crashes since the invasion of Iraq, where, relatively, 3,000 Americans have died.

I keep my iPod on "random album" at work, & then skip the album if it's inappropriate. Bela Fleck playing classical music is playing right now, he's playing The Moonlight Sonata with Edgar Meyer. Who knew? Have you recorded "Wed"? I wish you'd send your latest recordings to 1985 Ashby Ave, Berkeley, CA 94703.

Well, I long to attend one of your salons. There are complicated issues involving why I never go South anymore.

Watch closely the new Alarm Will Sound DVD of live Reich. Yours truly is in the front row the audience, sometimes right under Caleb's armpit.

Speaking of whom, Alarm Will Sound plays Berkeley this weekend. I think it's all Nancarrow.

I live in this beautiful apartment. We have a guest futon & another couch, so you could theoretically arrive with a vanload of hippies & I could accommodate - so, if you're ever near the bay area with a vanload of hippies, they have a place to stay.

I was just ten feet from John Adams's butt the other day, conducting his new opera. I reviewed it here.

Why don't you play that first interlude from that sonata? It's so beautiful, & the world has no idea. I have issues with closure, which my therapist advizes me to get the fuck over. Actually, my therapist never swears, except when I'm [doing something offensive to] her from behind. I don't have a therapist, but if I did, she'd be a [derogatory slang for attractive female human].

Stravinsky's Symphony in C just came on now. Who knew?

Who's your girlfriend?

Love,
James

______________________________________________________________________

In regards to the above suggestion for Mr Holt to google himself in that listserv website: Someone has posted some selected archives of the E-NEWS from my high-school, the Interlochen Arts Academy. O, some fond memories can be found, mostly the listings for concerts we gave, during our young creative salad days. For instance, from March 10, 1999:

Composers Forum:  Thursday, March 11, 8:30 p.m., in the Chapel.

Featuring **world premieres** of works by Ayaka "Kew" Nishina,

Danny Holt, James Welsch, Steve Whipple, and faculty member Elaine

Broad.

From February 16, 2000:

CONGRATULATIONS: Seven Academy students were named finalists in the Arts Recognition and Talent Search (ARTS) program and received additional awards following a week of workshops and presentations in Florida. Writing student Onnesha Roychoudhuri, who received a level II award, was also invited to compete for a Presidential Scholar in the Arts Award. Other awardees include: Jaren Philleo (oboe) Level II; Shea Scruggs (oboe) Level I; James Welsch (composition) Level II; Bonnie Whiting (percussion) Level II; Jamie Polychronis, IAA '99, (flute) Level III; and Jessie Iott (writing) Level II. In addition, Academy students received seven Honorable Mentions and 15 Merit Awards prior to the January event. ARTS is a national program designed to identify, recognize, and encourage talented high school seniors who demonstrate excellence in dance, photography, theater, jazz, music, voice, visual arts, or writing.

From February 11^th, 1999:

Composers' Forum:  Friday, February 12, 8:00 p.m. in the Chapel.

Will feature works by Danny Holt, James Welsch, Ashley Fure, David

Stinson, Levi Taylor, Mr. Joe DeFazio, and special guest Dr. Doy

Baker.  If you always wanted to know what a THEREMIN was, this is

your chance to find out (and hear it played!).

I believe I was playing the theremin in an improvised improvisation with Nicole DeLaittre.

Is this boring for you yet? I’m still having a blast. From November 11^th, 1999:

COMPOSERS' FORUM: The first student Composers' Forum of the year is on Saturday, November 13, at 8:00pm in the Chapel. Come hear new music written by Ashley Fure, Steven Whipple, David Stinson, Jonathan Shapiro, Victor Giraldo, James Welsch, and faculty member John Boyle.

MISSING GLASSES: Kelly Greenfield is missing a pair of glasses in a green Lenscrafter soft case. If you find them, please return them to Kelly in Counseling Services, or contact her by email (greenfieldkk) and she will come to you. "The computer screen is much more difficult to read without them!" Kelly says.

MISSING NOTEBOOKS: Cassidy Barnes is missing two notebooks. His lab notebook is a dark green spiral and has his name on the inside, with Physics and Chemistry written on the first page. His chem binder is a lighter shade of green and has the Interlochen logo on the front and his name on the inside. If found, please contact Cassidy in Hemingway.

[…]

ROAD TO WELLNESS THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Someone asked the other day, "Where is the music we used to hear in the cafeteria?" The inquiry prompted an interest in what actually led to the practice of music being played over meals. Research indicates that it all started a long time ago...in England. When he wasn't beheading wives, Henry VIII kept a court band of 79 musicians on hand for his royal entertainment. Meanwhile, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, made popular the whole idea of dinner music. Word has it that she could not eat supper unless she was being serenaded. So, there you go. While not answering the original question, it is interesting. One should also note that more Thoughts For The Day are needed! Email your ideas to Michael Haynes (haynesma).

TODAY'S MENU: Lunch - beef barley soup, plain and flavored wing dings, vegan chop suey, brown rice, snow pea pods, deli. Dinner - vegetarian vegetable soup, pork chops, vegan stew, scalloped potatoes, baby carrots, hot cinnamon applesauce, deli.

E-mails: Responses & Corrections to the Andrew Jackson Grayson Society

From: "Richard R Grayson, MD" <____@doctorgrayson.com>
To: "Sue Welsch" <_____@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Andrew Jackson Grayson
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:53:14 -0600

Sue, it was good to hear from you. Your son's blog is well done and I appreciated the link to my biography of Andrew Jackson Grayson. Truth be known, I harbor a secret fantasy that I am Andrew reincarnated, for I took to writing as if I had known it before. I became editor of my college newspaper. I have attached the beginning of a book called Teshuva, which are memoirs, for James to read. Also a photo of an old painting I found on the web of a clipper ship, the Orpheus, which in 1856 carried my other great grandfather, Aaron Mandelbaum age 18 and his brother Moses to America from Germany. Note that in the bible Aaron and Moses went to the Promised Land. James should know that he is eligible to join his ancestral organizations for the Mayflower, the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. I tell people I own this country and they should pay me rent. Be sure to read everything on my office web site and on my blog for further essays. I am happy James and Scott are interested in our genealogy. My son Dan and I have done a lot of the genealogy jointly since he was in college, so he has a lot of the records also. I have been collecting our genealogy since I was 15 and have mountains of notebooks and old photographs. I have the Grayson line on Ancestral Quest with about 3,500 names starting with Benjamin Grayson of 1778 in North Carolina. So Happy New Year to all, Love Dick

Date:	Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:11:42 +0000 (GMT)
From:	"Rachel Eley" <_______@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject:	Re: O it was lost for ever! and we found it not: The Andrew Jackson Grayson Society
To:	"James Welsch" <______@yahoo.com>

Guess so! Only that DJB has finally been staged, if a little abstractly, in 2003 at the NASSR conference. There's a review of it by Mike Bradshaw online but my Athens account isn't fancy enough to give me access to it. (It was published in the European Romantic Review.) This is seems to be the only accessible reference I can find to it. Also, a fact I didn't mention in the map, it wasn't speaking of Mike that possibly helped my case, but of H W Donner, Beddoes' biographer, whom my interview and subsequent tutor Bernard O'Donoghue studied under (I think in Uppsala) and remembered fondly from his student days. I thought about adding another line to my map but it seemed a little... something. I don't know. Mike might be a bit confused by that particular reference to him if he ever stumbled across it though. I like your relative.

r

Date:	Thu, 11 Jan 2007 7:23:40 -0800 (PST)
From:	"Michael Aarons" <______@yahoo.com>
Subject:	No!
To:	"Sandy James" <________@yahoo.com>

james,

not to be confused with andrew jackson grayson, the 19th century naturalist

mike

"There's no absolutes in life; only in vodka."
-Homicide: Life on the street

The Andrew Jackson Grayson Society

My friend from Wadham College, Oxford, Miss Rachel Eley, may have gotten into the English Literature department at the famous University because of her connection to an obscure late-Romantic poet. Her induction into the halls of scholarship was meeting a friend of her grandfather's, one Michael Bradshaw, both fellows of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society. Her grandfather, Ron Beddoes, was “a descendent of the family of Thomas Lovell Beddoes”. Thomas Lovell Beddoes was a Gothic late-Romantic who experimented in weird abstract neo-Jacobean theater – mostly, one death-obsessed play, Death's Jest-Book, which he obsessively re-wrote for decades until his suicide. It has been called a fore-runner of Absurdist Drama, & hovers hauntingly beside the standard cannon of Romantic Poetry. The TLBS is part drinking club, part dead poet's society. The play has still never been properly staged. It's great, read it! Anyway, talking about her excitement at meeting Mr Bradshaw & holding certain Beddoes relics may have been the greasy rubbing at her college interview.

Well, for years, I've kept that envious dream, of finding an obscure poet in my ancestry. Yesterday, my brother Scott told my mother to google her maternal great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Grayson, & there's an essay about him from 1975 by her cousin Dick, who did the genealogy for that side of the family. (Apparently, my brother spends his time at work googling his dead relatives.) The full article is here if anyone's interested.

He enlisted “as a Sergeant in E company and as Lieutenant in D company 6th Regiment, Indiana Volunteers ” in 1861, & he fought in the bloody battle of Shiloh. Afterward, he worked as a writer for the Madison Courier & Madison Herald, & published several books on his experiences in the Civil War. It seems that many men in that family - his brother Salathiel & their sons - were in the printing trade in Madison from the '60s thru '80s.

Dick Grayson writes he found four books (in 1975) in the Indiana State Library – an early work, two books on the American Civil War, & a collection of essays for the Madison papers. Dick also selected some excerpts from his writing. Hardly proto-Absurdist verse:

"I never hear that bell ring but what I think of the Whedon boys and Andy McManaman, the old time railroaders in Madison's palmy days. When the new regime came about, the old time ways were wiped out and you had to carry a watch or get left if you didn't keep a hand or an eye on it."

"Where are the billions of passenger pigeons that in the early fifties annually passed over Madison?...Immense flocks would pass over Madison like a rain-cloud in their migrations, darkening the sun for hours, and breaking down trees by their weight in their roosting places."

I'll tell you where the passenger pigeons went – the last one, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1st, 1914, fourteen months after Jack Grayson died. Remember that things which seem ubiquitous can disappear forever; Melville may have been the first environmentalist to wonder this, in his chapter “Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish?” A friend of Grayson wrote rhapsodically in his obituary about the death of the sunshine optimist, a humble man who lived long, gave his money away, & ended his days with his family. (This of all things should contrast him to the legacy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I propose an Andrew Jackson Grayson drinking society – for mediocre writers who wrote about life, were pawns in major conflicts, & lived to old age.)

"Dear old Jack; his lips are dumb, but his spirit will linger long in the hearts of those who knew and loved him, and will ever bring memories, sweet with hours and days of good cheer and joy, He never searched for the unpleasant things in life, nor recalled sad and sorrowful hours of man's existence. His motto was that of the sun dial; he recorded only the days of sunshine. His friends were legions and their faces that were once wreathed in smiles at the mention of his name were tinged with sorrow and regret when told of his death.

"It may be that his life was not a success as the world views it, for he filled not his coffers with silver and gold to be cast on the threshold of eternity, nor strove for power that passes away like perfume of early dawn; he built no monument of brick and mortar to perpetuate his name, as if to mock the living God, but leaves an inheritance rich with good humor and full of sunshine which neither summer's sun nor winter's blast can decay."

Two things on Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon

For all of those taking the same journey as Mr Quill & me, there is a very rough, incomplete Wiki on Pynchon's pre-postcolonialist epic: http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page.

Also, the below-referenced Mr Darren Southworth gave me a stack of cds six months ago, several of which finally made it into my computer. Among them was Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia, a 2000 solo album from the Dire Straits singer. Lo, the titular song is based on Pynchon's characters. I'll quote the lyrics in full here - the argumentative tone is appropriate, even if when sung in the song it is sweet & complacent. (James Taylor plays Mason).

I am Jeremiah Dixon
I am a Geordie boy
A glass of wine with you, sir
And the ladies I'll enjoy
All Durham and Northumberland
Is measured up by my own hand
It was my fate from birth
To make my mark upon the earth...

He calls me Charlie Mason
A stargazer am I
It seems that I was born
To chart the evening sky
They'd cut me out for baking bread
But I had other dreams instead
This baker's boy from the west country
Would join the Royal Society...

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line

Now you're a good surveyor, Dixon
But I swear you'll make me mad
The West will kill us both
You gullible Geordie lad
You talk of liberty
How can America be free
A Geordie and a baker's boy
In the forests of the Iroquois...

Now hold your head up, Mason
See America lies there
The morning tide has raised
The capes of Delaware
Come up and feel the sun
A new morning has begun
Another day will make it clear
Why your stars should guide us here...

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line