Esprit d'escalier: Stairs and Stairways to Heaven, Hell and Somewhere in Between

Markus Sebastian Braun, editor. Stairs: Architectural Details. Translated by Alice Bayandin. [Berlin]: Verlagshaus Braun, 2008. 

Stairs, stairways and stairway wit are among the ten thousand things that fascinate me. The more I see, the more I want to see. This book gives colorful photographic examples from twenty-one European cities. I've been to eleven of these cities so far: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Zurich. I'm planning to see another one in 2018.

Stairs frequently show up in art; if designed and made well, the stairways themselves are art. Here's Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2  / Nu descendant un escalier, no 2 (1912). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Scandalous!

What would Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) be without its grand staircase? (This, by the way, is a favorite movie of both Clint Eastwood and Donald Trump).

Mikio Naruse's When A Woman Ascends The Stairs / 女が階段を上る時 (1960) makes this a central metaphor in a person's life. Fabbles! 

Let's not forget the importance of stairways in William Friedkin's hugely popular film, The Exorcist (1973). 

There are so many good examples of stairs in artscapes, this barely touches the first step. Thanks to esprit d'escalier, I'll think of a dozen more right after posting this -- maybe for another post. 

Do stairways conjure up anything for you?  

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Elizabeth Lunday: 'Secret Lives of Great Artists' (2008)

While at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, picked up a copy of Elizabeth Lunday's wildly entertaining Secret Lives of Great Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Master Painters and Sculptors (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2008), illustrated by Mario Zucca. Finished a first go-through in Amsterdam and will keep it as a gateway to more fun down the road. 

Lunday romps through the arcs and ripples of some thirty-seven artists, ranging from Jan van Eyck (circa 1385-1441) to Andy Warhol (1928-1987).  Most of them, by the middling standards of today's bland social conformity and Trumpian stoogery, come off as right eccentrics. Many were free-wheeling Bohemians at heart, while some -- like Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) -- were downright bizarro. 

On my first reading, I found satisfying every jot and tittle of Secret Lives of Great Artists. Perhaps you will, too. A lot of readers will be familiar with at least some of the art made by these folks, by some of the artists, and by many of both. 

As Lunday notes of Edvard Munch's The Scream (Der Schrei der Natur, 1893): "It's probably a safe bet Munch had no idea this image would live on in popular culture, appearing on coffee mugs, in slasher films, and on episodes of The Simpsons." (page 174). By the way, there are four versions of The Scream. Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Philadelphia in Transit to Amsterdam, June 2017

Philadelphia's Chinatown at Friendship Gate, 10th and Arch Street. About the size of Greektown in Detroit, there's been an Asian core magnet here for something like 150 years. This is close to the Reading Market and the Convention Center. 

Moriarty's Irish Pub & Restaurant, 1116 Walnut Street (at Quince, from which point this side shot was taken). The building is 187 years old (built in 1830). Incidentally, Moriarty is one of my ancestral names. 

Sometime after I moved from my tiny 12th and Spruce garret apartment, Amy Winehouse ducked into Moriarty's for a drink. That would have been something to behold! 

1218 Spruce Street, built in or around 1840. Now the Philadelphia Bridal Company, in the 1990s this was Nga Mai's Café Diva. I lived across the street at 1225 Spruce, drank a lot of coffee here, and also I occasionally covered for Nga, or played chess. Not sure why there's a large "PODS" unit in front -- an alien sleeping unit, perhaps?

Reflecting pool on the grounds of the Barnes Foundation at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This is a stellar art museum. Its holdings were relocated from Lower Merion (a Philadelphia suburb on the Main Line) to here in 2012. 

Note: images taken with a mobile phone, nothing fancy. 

Today's Rune: Initiation.     

'Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary' (2016)

Made a pilgrimage to the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff to see John Scheinfeld's Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (2016). I wanted to see and hear Coltrane on the big screen. Well worth the extra effort.

The film is partly about the man and the musician, whose 1965 album A Love Supreme usually makes it into the top five jazz recordings of all time (that is, since electronic recordings began in earnest around the time of World War I). The film is also about Coltrane's impact on various people and their evolving ways of perceiving the world, plus more specifically his influence on musicians of various genres.

From the first time I listened to a John Coltrane recording, in my mid-teens, I've been hooked. Even now, I've got a framed album cover of Giant Steps in my work office and a framed cover of Blue Train at home. I've got three copies of A Love Supreme. I also dig Alice Coltrane, who continued down his mystical path after John's death in 1967 at the age of forty.

The most interesting surprise to me about Chasing Trane is a side trip to Japan, during Coltrane's last extended tour, and his visit to the Nagasaki atomic bombing memorial, and the enthusiastic Japanese response. 

The Texas Theatre is where Lee Harvey Oswald was nabbed on November 22, 1963, shortly after 1:40 p.m. A strange feeling to be seeing a John Coltrane documentary in this place on John Fitzgerald Kennedy's 100th birthday. But fitting, because Trane's music provides a portal to places far beyond our typical experience of space and time. 

Today's Music: Flow.  

Mystic Chords of Memory

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." ~ US President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. Full text here.

Memory, like dreaming, is often highly emotionally charged. There's the Proustian memory trigger -- a deep memory surfaces due to a scent, a sound, a person who resembles someone from the past (or future, if it's a premonition); or the memory reminder, like a photograph, journal entry, memory-laden discussion, written communication or voice mail. Often just a person's name or thinking about a certain time or place will conjure up a memory, or a slew of them. 

Memories often conflict or prove paradoxical. I recently finished Ian Gibson's Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) and what was made very clear in it is that different people remembered Lorca differently, even from the same event, based partly on how well they knew him, how they felt about him, how much time had elapsed, and what they wanted to remember about him. 

So I thought I'd post a sampling of remembered people, times and places. If the context of a situation is not viscerally recalled, the details seem vaguer. Let's give it a try, shall we?

When I was a teenager, I met Ariana Bracalente at an amusement park in Virginia -- not randomly but through Marc Pinotti, a mutual friend. She was a little older than I was, an exciting development at the time. She was smart, astute and interesting; her mother was a nurse and they were Catholic. We were close for some time, and wrote lots of letters. The last time I saw her was at a football game, also in Virginia, and she was taking pictures with, if I remember correctly, a Nikon with zoom lens. Ah, youth!

In my early twenties, I met a handful of much older German fellows at Normandy, in France. They were celebrating their "alive day." On June 6-7, 1944, then draftees in the Wehrmacht, they rather wisely surrendered to Canadian assault forces as fast as they could and, obviously, survived the war. With some college friends from Chapel Hill, we shared bottles of wine and were all singing by the end of the night. Though we only saw them over a period of two days, they made a lasting impression. Three names stick with me: Willi Wiederstein from near Düsseldorf, Karl and Helmut. Luckily, I'm still excellent friends with one of the American college students who also experienced this exchange firsthand.

When I was living in Philadelphia, while a graduate student at Temple University, I came to know a number of intelligent and fun people from Vietnam, China, India, Germany, Russia, Canada, England, France, Spain, Italy and Thailand, among other places. One of the many, Nga Mai, an edgy (and rather striking in appearance) entrepreneur and restaurateur, hired me occasionally to cover her Diva Café, right across the way from my apartment at 1225 Spruce Street; sometimes we'd play chess and talk about Hannah Arendt or Camille Paglia, who was teaching nearby at the University of the Arts. Nga and her two sisters had come to the USA with their Catholic mother, starting in Omaha, Nebraska; their father remained in Vietnam after the Americans departed. We stayed in touch for a while after I left the city, after she closed Diva and opened up a couple of new places over by Rittenhouse Square. At Diva, she would explain to people how to remember conceptualizing and spelling her first name: "like National Golf Association." (Which in turn reminds me of Stuart Basefsky, a librarian mentor from Duke University, now at Cornell University's School of Industry and Labor Relations, who would say his last name to newcomers and explain, "like Base and Sky with an F in the middle." Like I sometimes say, when people ask, "Erik with a k.")

Also in Philadelphia, I unexpectedly came to know Lu Ping from the People's Republic of China in a history class. She was an English teacher when back in China. Her stories about her father, who was very old by then, and his experiences during the Long March were remarkable. Only later did I realize that her name could be better understood in reverse, as Ping Lu.

When I moved to Detroit, there were additional new waves of people to meet. Like mustard seeds, some took hold and some didn't. I remember early on, upon the first occasion of meeting David J. Thompson, an English instructor then and a wandering poet and photographer now. This is primarily because of the specific context: I was seated at his flimsy card table, slowly sinking into wet clay, enclosed within a Japanese-style courtyard designed in the 1950s by Minoru Yamasaki. Thompson had on the table a 1995 book, which I asked about: Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain, a fascinating memoir about snake-handlers and old time religion in the American South. (Side memory: for some reason Thompson hated Abraham Lincoln). The last time I saw him was at Steve's Back Room, a Middle Eastern Restaurant in Saint Clair Shores. By this time, several years after the first introductions, we both were working on laptops at separate tables, and I was moving to Texas; outside, there was snow on the ground.  

Also in metro Detroit, there was another English instructor (among many) on another occasion -- a regular bar night for artists and educators -- that I recall, from a couple years later. In this case, it was the unusual name that stuck: Carroll Louis Goossen, Jr. I wondered why whoever was in charge of given names in the Goossen clan flipped the name from a literary salute to Lewis Carroll, author of Through the Looking Glass, to such an awful appendage? This to me was as strange as the Lu Ping/Ping Lu flip or Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." Then again, the "real" name of Lewis Carroll was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 

The last time I saw Cal was probably at Macomb Community College, where for a while I taught Writing, English, Poetry and the (International) Novel as an adjunct -- (I was working full time as a librarian elsewhere). 

For now, I'll end with a relevant snippet about people's names from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), Chapter Six:

'"My name is Alice, but — "
"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"
"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.
"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."' Indeed.

Dear reader, how do you remember people and their names? 

Today's Rune: Strength.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Paint the Revolution II

Philadelphia Museum of Art: admission ticket. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: art on a wall. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016. Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato con Traje de Terciopelo / Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926). Wherever you go, she's watching you.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: art on a wall. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016. Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato con Traje de Terciopelo / Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926). Still keeping an eye on you. Are you being naughty or nice?

Philadelphia Museum of Art: art on a wall. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016. Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato en la frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos / Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932). With frame. Hard to believe it's so little: 31 x 35 cm. 

Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato en la frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos / Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932). Without frame, a clearer look. 

Handy map of Center City Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is in the upper left pocket. A wonderful walking city, with plenty of mass transit options included. I lived in the Washington Square area for a year, back in the 1990s. Loved it!

Today's Rune: Joy. 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Paint the Revolution

Philadelphia Museum of Art: the approach. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: the steps. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016. 

Philadelphia Museum of Art: the interior. Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950. November 27, 2016. Information here.

A beautiful exhibition, nicely designed.  It'll be interesting to compare with the new exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art: México 1900–1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde. Information here.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Gerald Horne's 'W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography' (2010)

Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010). Du Bois: in the US, his name is pronounced not as in French, but more like "Doo-Boyz."

"Du Bois [1868-1963] . . . ranks with Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Frederick Douglass as, perhaps, the most important African American of all time . . ." (page xii).

The first serious non-academic conversation I had about W.E.B. Du Bois was with a postal worker in Philadelphia, when a new Du Bois stamp came out in the 1990s. I remember this specifically not only because of his clear knowledge about Du Bois but also because this particular post office (30th Street Station) was open on Sundays -- an ideal reflection of the separation of church and state. Not too many people seemed to know about this, so I often went on Sundays to mail things and occasionally chit chat with whichever postal worker was staffing the service desk; picking up such new insights in person was a true bonus. 

Du Bois, an intellectual, historian, general writer and energetic activist, co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and more. His life arc bridges the gap between the time of Frederick Douglass and the public time of Malcolm X and MLK. His contemporaries included Booker T. Washington, Howard Thurman and Marcus Garvey. 

After World War II as an older man, Du Bois was brought to trial for organizing against the use of atomic weapons and for world peace. As Horne points out: "A familiar nostrum . . . is that with age comes conservatism, a dismissal of past radicalism as so much youthful posturing. This did not hold true for W.E.B. Du Bois" (p. 163). In this and in many other ways, Du Bois endures as an excellent role model.  

Eventually he became so disillusioned with the slow pace of social progress in the United States that he permanently resettled in Ghana, which became independent in 1957. (It was formerly known as the British Gold Coast). Ghana, which is almost never mentioned in the US either in news or in conversation, has about 27 million people. 

W.E.B. Du Bois was a great consciousness raiser. In fact, one of his ideas is that of "double consciousness" -- but more on this, perhaps, in a future post. 

Horne's book provides a straightforward overview of Du Bois' life, times, writings, actions, and social relationships. 

Today's Rune: Movement.

'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life' (2003): Take II

A wee bit more from Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).

Ben Franklin (1705/1706-1790) was a thinker and doer, a writer, a printer, a satirist, a promoter of books, a lover of libraries and postal services and lightning rods. He was fueled by a lifelong "gift of curiosity." He enjoyed solitude as well as social networking. At all ages and in all the places he traveled, he kept engaged with the world around him. He believed in making things better in pragmatic ways, whether postal delivery or air quality in fledgling cities.

Benjamin Franklin also had enemies. "He was on the side of religious tolerance rather than evangelical faith" (page 477); he was both viscerally and rationally opposed to the dogmas of the Puritans and strongly against fanatical poltroons in general. The likes of a Ted Cruz would have disgusted him, but also inspired his biting satire.

Isaacson quotes John Adams' reflections on Mr. Franklin later in life (in 1815): 

"He had a vast imagination . . . He had wit at will . . . He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. . ." (pages 477-478)

Franklin's Reception at the Court of France, 1778. Anton Hohenstein.

If you think of Ben Franklin, what's the first or second or third thing that pops into your mind?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life' (2003): Take I

Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Most if not all people reading these words will have heard at least something about Benjamin Franklin. What Isaacson provides is a coherent overview of Franklin's entire life. 

Ben (1705/1706-1790) was quite a character. Mix a little of Thomas Edison with Voltaire, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, Donald Trump, Gore Vidal and Neil deGrasse Tyson and presto -- one might catch a glimpse of the nine lives of Ben Franklin. Seriously, he was that multifaceted, quite capable of thriving in the year 2016.

Of Franklin, Isaacson notes: "there was joy in his antic 
curiosity. . ." He was not "motivated merely by his quest for the practical . . . In general, he would begin a scientific inquiry driven by pure intellectual curiosity and then seek a practical application for it" (pages 129-130). 

Of Franklin's many social connections: "Franklin only occasionally forged intimate bonds with his male friends, who tended to be either intellectual companions or jovial club colleagues. But he relished being with women, and he formed deep and lasting friendships with many. For him, such relationships were not a sport or trifling amusement, despite how they might appear, but a pleasure to be savored and respected" (page 165). 

Politically, Ben Franklin was most often a pragmatist and a centrist: "Though a populist in many ways, he was wary of the rabble. His outlook, as usual, was from the perspective of a new middle class: distrustful of [both] the unwashed mob and the entrenched elites" (page 212).

Franklin provides an endless font of stories and ideas, many of them very relevant to the 21st century. 

To be continued.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Surrealism and Nella Fontaine Binckley (1860-1877-1951)

Nella Fontaine Binckley (1860-1877-1951), "The Last Analysis. Woman's Rights -- the total sum -- Right man and right income" (1906). Is this satire?  Is this social commentary? Either way, it's in the year 1906.

"A Tongue of Good Report. Tell not your wife of others' sins / Or of yours she'll get a notion; / For you should know that 'Ignorance / Is the mother of Devotion.'"

"Verily. No man, poor slave, can ever save Enough to pay the rent, Howe'er he strive, howe'er he thrive, Without his wife's consent."

"A wife not too clever / Is a joy forever" ~ Nella Fontaine Binckley (1906).

"All is Vanity. . . Of the wise men of Greece and of Gotham we hear, / Bur we know, if we're older than ten, / that since the first woman arrived on the sphere / There haven't been any wise men."

Today's Rune: Strength. 

History and San Francisco: The Artist Nella Fontaine Binckley (1860-1951)

Late in 2014, I started coming across references in biographies to various people living in San Francisco, which got me to thinking about the place after a hiatus of many years. Then, earlier this year (late in June), I was lucky enough to travel there to attend a library conference in the city, which is how I found a beautiful, historic place to stay: the Hotel Majestic, built in 1902 and survivor of the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires. My gratefulness for all of this is boundless.

On the astral plane (as it were), two people in particular led me back to San Francisco: Tina Modotti and Howard Thurman. I've posted about them elsewhere.*

Since my return, I came across a third person specifically connected to the place: the artist Nella (sometimes Ellie, Nellie or Ellen) Fontaine Binckley (1860-1951).  I came across her while researching her grandfather, Harvey Mitchell (1799-1866), who was also an artist.

Even from what little I've discovered about her so far, Nella was quite a character. Born in Washington, D.C., where her father (John Milton Binckley) worked for the U.S. Government, she studied art and eventually moved to San Francisco in the late 1800s, where she sketched and painted in Chinatown, among other places. She worked at a studio at 932 Sutter Street, which is right next to the "Hotel Vertigo" of Alfred Hitchcock fame. The Hotel Majestic is at 1500 Sutter Street, just six hilly blocks away. At the turn of the century, Nella went back to the East Coast and lived in Washington City, Philadelphia and Manhattan. She died at about age ninety-one in a fire in Washington, where she is buried (in Oak Hill Cemetery).

One of the great things about Nella is that, after 1900 or so, she somehow managed to convince people that she was born in 1877 rather than 1860. How fun is that?

Check out her California State Library authority card from 1911. 
Name in full: Nella Fontaine Binckley. 
Present address: "Caramella[?]," 525 Locust Ave., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa.
Place of birth: Washington, D.C.
Date: Too remote to mention.
If married, to whom? No -- spinster.
Years spent in California: From 1898 to 1900. . . San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Santa Barbara.

The illustration at top by Nella Fontaine Binckley is from Smoke and Bubbles (1906). She was 46 at the time -- or was she 29? I love it!

Today's Rune: Wholeness.  
*Tina Modotti and Howard Thurman  links.  

'The Hippest Trip in America: *Soul Train* and the Evolution of Style and Culture'

I picked this up in transit and finished last night: Nelson George's The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Style and Culture (William Morrow, 2015 paperback edition; originally published in 2014).

As its full title lays out, this nifty tome covers the history, context and impact of Soul Train, from its Chicago roots to LA, from Don Cornelius to the singers, from the bands and dancers to the business angles.

Don Cornelius and Soul Train are a trip. I still sporadically catch syndicated episodes and am especially enthralled by the 1970s performances. One of my favorites features a chubby young Al Sharpton giving James Brown some kind of improvised award -- real showmanship at work all around and all the time. This is how it's done, people. Can you dig? 

RIP, Don Cornelius (1936-2012).

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

From Here On Out

I remember one evening in South Philadelphia when my father and I were nearly clipped by a speeding car in the parking lot of a stadium after a football game. Relieved that we'd come away uninjured, my father remarked: "Imagine our lives ebbing out here, in this parking lot . . ." His tone was one of bemusement; I imagine now a twinkle in his eye. The absurdity of life wrapped up in an instant: akin to a statement Winston Churchill made via radio in 1939:  "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key." Churchill was speaking of Russia, but he might just as well have been speaking about life.

My father was very attuned to language and communications. He spent much of his working life in advertising and marketing, so this makes perfect sense. He would hear a word or phrase and repeat it aloud, followed by a little commentary: "that's a good word" or "that's a good phrase," for example.

I remember having elliptical conversations with him about the news and media presentation, advertisements and public relations' "spin." When it came to phrases like "at the end of the day" and "going forward" we both agreed that they were stale and unimaginative. What they are is reflexive -- virtually empty fillers. 

Clichés, Idioms, and euphemisms abound, whether the speaker or writer is aware of them or not.  Phrases like "at the end of the day" support William S. Burroughs' notion of the "word virus" in how quickly they spread and become pandemic, ubiquitous "across" geographic space thanks to global communications. 

"In any case," here is a sampling from some of my recent field notes about language usage and contemporary social activity.

Yesterday, I attended a poetry slam and found it interesting that two speakers read poems using cellphones as platforms for their texts. 

I've seen several patrons using mobile phones to take pictures of books or catalog records, and have found this so clever that I now do the same thing -- handy when I want to make sure to remember my parking space at an airport, for instance.

Marshall McLuhan would have us keep aware of how we communicate, the modes, the methods, the devices, the medium (or plural media) and so on. 

Instead of "going forward," how about the older expression, "from here on out?" 

I like creative mimicry in auditory exchanges or outright conversation: instead of saying "a climate of fear," I heard someone say, "It was a calamity of fear. . ."  Must have been what this person had misheard broadcast(ed) somewhere, and tried to mimic, thereby "coming up with" a creative variation on a stale phrase, letting us see the old phrase in a new way. Can you dig?

OH (an acronym for overheard used via Twitter, etc.): "They really did a number on him." 

"Whatever happened to the charwoman and the ragman?"

My father would sometimes respond to some joker on TV, or in recalling an on the job encounter with one: "What a piece of work that guy is" -- hearkening back to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene 2):

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

There are words that are stale and words that are fresh, words refashioned, words reincarnated, phrases reanimated, and others that are unceremoniously put into suspended animation or exiled, willy-nilly, to some terrible Siberia of forgotten words.

Donald Delbert France (1934-2013), RIP. 

Today's Rune: Flow.   

A Crazy Little Thing Called News

I remember how excited I was as a kid seeing raw news coming off the wires, tick tick tick, well before the internet took hold. The Associated Press (AP) or United Press International (UPI) cabled eclectic updates, sending news items by telegraph, telephone, radio, courier . . . using technology, combined with rail and auto, that had created sports as we know it, ups and downs of stock markets, currency exchange rates and stylized formats for presenting the news that we still recognize and rely on. 

Back then, I often looked at 3D globes and paper maps. From the perspective of the East Coast of the USA, I sometimes wondered what was happening in places like Zanzibar, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia or Ghana. Now -- and for the past two decades, really -- with the internet, it's much easier to find out for oneself -- and fast. 

Multiple language filters are less of a challenge, too, thanks to instant (if still a little clunky) electronic translations served up with the click of a mouse. (They were called "machine translations" when I worked in Public Documents & Maps).

In this so-called 21st century, with even basic curiosity and imagination, anyone with high speed access to the internet and rudimentary information literacy can customize their own approach to "the news." 

What is "the news?"  Even the word "News" is slangish, when you think about it.  That which is new? But not all news is new -- in fact, much of it's old hat. (Usage of  the word "news" is nothing new, either: it goes back more than six hundred years). 

Consider this approach to the news from nearly three hundred years ago. The "tag-line" for The Pennsylvania Gazette pictured above: "Containing the freshest Advices Foreign and Domestic" (spelling modernized -- it's from the year 1729 after all).  This was the first incarnation of The Pennsylvania Gazette as published by Benjamin Franklin.

In the right-hand column, the "editorial" asserts: 

There are many who have long desired to see a good News-Paper in Pennsylvania; and we hope those Gentlemen who are able, will contribute towards making This such. We ask Assistance, because we are fully sensible, that to publish a good News-Paper is not so easy an Undertaking as many People imagine it to be. The Author of a Gazette (in the Opinion of the Learned) ought to be qualified with an extensive Acquaintance with Languages, a great Easiness and Command of Writing and Related Things clearly and intelligibly, and in few Words; he should be able to Speak of War both Land and Sea; be well acquainted with Geography; with the History of the Time . . . and so on. 

"Breaking" news is another strange concept when you think about it. What is it breaking against -- time? Tranquility? Complacency? Boredom? 

In future, I'd like to spend a little more time considering language differences in concepts and names regarding "the news." 

Isn't it funny how many quirky names there are for various "news" publications?  Like the names of ships, storms and sports teams, naming conventions are bizarrely universal.

How do you gather or receive "news?" Have you changed your approach through time?   

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.