In my life I've had two friends and a brother-in-law commit suicide. In the first quarter of my life, I worked on a suicide hotline and have since thought about the act itself a great deal. Judas, Hitler, Dan White, and a few others, I could understand. But most often I am shocked. I was stunned to hear that Owen Wilson attempted suicide this weekend. And I wish him and his family the best, and hope he is able to cure or salve whatever drove him to such a desperate act. Of course, he doesn't fit the profile we expect. He's on top of his career, and always seemed happy. Little do we know what lurks in his heart, or what demons Mr. Wilson was battling.
The National Enquirer reported details on the attempted suicide today. Yeah,. I know...the Enquirer. . .but this story appears real, no matter who first published it. The Enquirer and Star have this story exclusive for the time being, although it is naturally being reported all over the web and in the blogs.
The United Press also reported the story, although it is not clear what they used for corroboration (if anything).
Click the illustration to see a detail of the void
Astronomers at the University of Minnesota have found a gigantic void in the universe, a billion light-years across, and they have no idea why it is there [ed's s note: and needless to say, no idea Who put it there]. The void itself is utterly devoid of galaxies, stars and even dark matter. There is not even a puff of smoke! "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one..." according to professor Lawrence Rudnick.
"What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe," one of the discovering scientists said in a statement.
The astronomers said the region even appeared to lack dark matter, which cannot be seen directly but is usually detected by measuring gravitational forces. The void is in a region of the constellation Eridanussky, southwest of Orion.
[Editor's note]I don't know anything about the provenance of this video, nor who the director Scott Quigley is, or if he committed this short to the public domain. Scott, if you're out there. . .let me know. I found the video on Atom films, with no info about the director. —o0o—
. . .and Keelin Curran appears to have had 1.5 glasses of wine—exactly half a glass past her limit. I am trying to test out the new Blogger video upload feature (and figure out how I can spoof it in order to upload audio files).
A troop of vervet monkeys are "running ape" in a Kenyan village. 300 monkeys are daily invading farms at dawn. They eat the village's corn, potatoes, beans and other crops. Women do the farming in Kenya, and have become the monkeys' targets as they try to guard their crops.
"The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts" - Villager Lucy Njeri
Some of the monkeys throw stones to chase the women from their farms. Women in the village of Nachu wear their husbands' clothes to make the monkeys think they are men. No cigar: "The monkeys can tell the difference and they don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops." The women also say the monkeys make sexually explicit gestures."The monkeys grabtheir breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Mrs Njeri.
The Kenyan Wildlife Service told the BBC that it was not unusual for monkeys to harass women and be less afraid of them than men, but they had never heard of monkeys in Kenya making sexually explicit gestures before when communicating with humans.
Things are so messed up that the farming community is now receiving famine relief food. The residents report that the monkeys have killed livestock and guard dogs, which leaves them spooked about their children also becoming targets. "The troop has scouts which keep a lookout from a vantage point, and when they see us coming, they give warning signals to the ones in the farms to get away," said another area resident, Jacinta Wandaga.
The Kenya Wildlife Service has ordered residents not to harm or kill any of the monkeys--it is a criminal offence. Some residents have lost hope and abandoned their homes and farms, but those who have stayed behind, like 80-year-old James Ndungu, are making a desperate plea for assistance. "I beg you, please come and take these animals away from here so that we can farm in peace."
Pandering to the masses once again, who arrive looking for Jeri Kehn Thompson images, here are a few more. As a bonus, you can also catch a glimpse of her in the video below, where Jeri Kehn and her two children make a cameo appearance in a video Fred Thompson created for a right to life conference:
Jeri Ken Thompson and the Senator sometime, somewhere...
This is decidedly neither Jeri Kehn Thompson, nor any of the power brokers, singers, starlets, or businesswomen former Senator Thompson has dated.
We have no evidence that this swine was not an object of the Senator's attentions. Legend says that when Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress, he wanted to spread rumors that his opponent was a pig-f***er. Johnson's campaign manager said, "Lyndon, you know he doesn't do that!" Johnson replied, "I know. I just want to make him deny it."
My Uncle and my mother's twin brother Bill Jones, died Monday afternoon. He suffered a major stroke some years ago, and had been in a nursing home for years. We visited him every week or two ever since. Last Saturday, when we visited to celebrate their birthday 84 years ago, he was still able to make a joke and extracted a promise from us to return soon, and "bring the keys to my car!"
Bill and Betty, August 18, 2007 - click to enlarge
Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published nearly fifty years ago (on September 5). It is still taught in college, and it has spoken to several generations of readers now as well as being one of the seminal texts of both the 60's counterculture and the 50's beat subculture.
I devoured this book when I was in high school, and many times afterwards. It led me to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (who we bumped into off and on in our NYC days), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (the last man standing among the beats), Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Diane DiPrima, John Clellon Holmes, Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and, of course, Neal Cassady, and the next generation of Ken Kesey, Jean Shepherd, Ed Sanders, Jim Carroll, and others.
The hero of some of Jack's novels, Neal Cassady, was a link between the beats and the next generation; he "starred" in several of Kerouac's novels, but also went on to pilot the bus Furthur for Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters (detailed in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test), as well as rap as a performer at the infamous Acid Tests. [Note: I use the word rap here as it was used in the 60's, meaning to speak in an extended improvisatory mode]. What many of us learned from the book was that you could write about America and not necessarily have to wear the straightjacket of our European antecedents. And that you could write a book patterned on the actual America around us. . .a book that found the rhythms of the road, and detailed what we now know were just the beginnings of being connected. They connected by routes and highways; we have found new, but not better ways to make that connection.
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (a/k/a Dean Moriarty)
What I have enjoyed about this 50th anniversary is reading the critical acclaim for Kerouac, and in particular for On The Road. The New York Times fell all over itself this weekend, detailing Kerouac's enormous cultural influence, but also not ignoring his impact on literature. His influence on rock and roll (interestingly, he wasn't a fan) has been enormous. In many ways, Jack Kerouac was the first modern "indy" writer (I would have to put William Blake and Walt Whitman as the first). All these years later, On The Road still sells 100,000 copies a year (although I suspect it will outstrip that this year).
My favorite works from Kerouac, the beats, their disciples and offshoots:
Kerouac: On The Road, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Neal, Scattered Poems, Book of Dreams, Big Sur, Maggie Cassidy Neal Cassady: The First Third (memoir), Selected Letters Allen Ginsberg: Planet News, Howl Lawrence Ferlinghetti: All the poetry Phillip Whalen: On Bear's Head William Burroughs: Naked Lunch, Junky, Exterminator, The Yage Letters, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine Hunter S. Thompson: The Gonzo Papers, Volumes 1,2,3, The curse of Lono, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diaries, The Hells Angels Lew Welch: Ring of Bone Ed Sanders: The Family, Tales of Beatnik Glory, 1968: A History in verse, Love and Fame in New York Diane DiPrima: Memoirs of a Beatnik , Pieces of a song, Loba, Denise Levertov: Selected Poems ---o0o---
Ezra Pound, friend and supporter of Hemingway, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and many more, wrote an incredibly beautiful, maddeningly convoluted, tantalizingly allusive, and frustratingly obscure poem over the course of his lifetime. The final Canto was the shortest in the entire book, undoubtedly the most accessible and was published posthumously in the collected edition of the work:
______________________________
Notes for Canto CXX by Ezra Pound
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. ______________________________
A decent summing up of Ezra Pound's life, and The Cantos (although skipping his conviction and incarceration for treason following World War II):
From Project Muse: "No major work of modernist literature reveals so intensely conflicted a relation to the public, simultaneously spurning and courting it, as Ezra Pound's Cantos. At the age of twenty, when he was captivated by the exclusionary poetics of the coterie, Pound nonetheless declared his ambition to write a "forty-year epic," a poem, he would claim later, "containing history"--a people's history, "the tale of the tribe." As the poem evolved over the last fifty-five years of Pound's life, however, it grew ever more erudite, ever more removed from its public aspirations, until it confronted even the most devoted scholars with a mass of obscure references, cryptic "facts," and fractured narratives. As Pound himself lamented in 1919, only two years after the first three cantos had appeared in Poetry: "I suspect my 'Cantos' are getting too too too abstruse and obscure for human consumption." Despite moments of assurance and bravado, this suspicion would haunt Pound increasingly throughout his career." ---o0o---
The LORD called Jonah out one day To head to Nineveh where "wickedness is on the rise" Instead of going Jonah hit the bricks
And sailed to Tarshish and hoped the LORD Wouldn't notice his insubordination But the LORD sent down a three alarm
Blast of a mighty wind that sucked up Everything in its path like a King-hell vacuum And left behind mud rubble and ashes
And roiled a tempest in the sea So the ship groaned and creaked Tossed to the top of waves and into the trough
Parts of the boat broke off The mariners were sorely spooked And prayed to their gods
They hurled cargo and ballast over the side So they wouldn't have to fight the boat itself Jonah was hiding in a closet
And was sleeping when the captain found him What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise and call upon thy God, if you have one
So God will think kindly and we might not perish The sailors said let us cast lots so that we know Who did what to bring this evil down around our heads
And when they cast lots the lot fell upon Jonah Tell us they asked why this evil has befallen us? Who are you what do you do?
And from what people do you hail? Jonah said I am a Hebrew and I fear the LORD Who made the sea and the land And the men were petrified now and said What have you done? They knew he had scampered off
Ducking He who cannot be ducked What do we do for you to calm the sea for us? He said toss me into the water
And the sea will be calmed This typhoon is here because of me The men rowed like madmen to land the boat
But the sea fought back We beseech you LORD save us Why should we go down with the ship
Because Jonah burned you? They grabbed Jonah and hucked him into the sea The wind stopped and the water stilled
Until it was as calm as a painted boat On a painted sea A great big fish breached the calm waterline
And sucked Jonah into its maw And Jonah was in the belly of the beast Three days and nights and prayed to God from the belly
You cast me deep in the midst of the seas And the water flooded around me And the billows and Your waves passed over me
My soul fainted within me and I remembered you LORD I sent out prayers to you The LORD sent down some celestial Ipecac
And the great big fish vomited Jonah And he fell upon a sandy beach And the LORD said one more time
Go to Nineveh that great city And testify like I told you Jonah trudged three days to Ninevah
And became the town crier In forty days he said Nineveh shall be overthrown So the people of Nineveh took the LORD at his word
From the lowest to the highest They fasted and put on sackcloth And tried to make amends
The king of Nineveh rose from his throne Put on sackcloth quit shaving and and sat in ashes And he said let neither man nor beast herd nor flock
Taste anything not food or water Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth And cry mightily unto God
And turn away from evil In hopes God will turn away from his fierce anger And God saw they turned from their evil ways
And God Himself repented of the evil He said he would do unto them But it displeased Jonah and he was very angry
When I fled to Tarshish I thought you a gracious God O LORD take my life from me For it is better for me to die than to live
The LORD said doest thou well to be angry? Jonah left the city and sat on the east side of the city And built a hut so he could see what would become of the city.
The LORD God prepared a gourd And sent it over Jonah like a shadow to deliver him from grief And Jonah was glad for the gourd's presence
But the next morning the LORD smote the gourd and it withered And when the sun did arise God called up an east wind And the sun beat upon the head of Jonah
And he fainted and wished to die and said It is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah are you angry about the gourd?
You have pity on the gourd which you did not make or labor for and the gourd grew in a night And perished in a night
And should not I spare the great city Nineveh, Where there are 120,000 people That cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand ---o0o---
In my life I've had two friends and a brother-in-law commit suicide. In the first quarter of my life, I worked on a suicide hotline and have since thought about the act itself a great deal. Judas, Hitler, Dan White, and a few others, I could understand. But most often I am shocked. I was stunned to hear that Owen Wilson attempted suicide this weekend. And I wish him and his family the best, and hope he is able to cure or salve whatever drove him to such a desperate act. Of course, he doesn't fit the profile we expect. He's on top of his career, and always seemed happy. Little do we know what lurks in his heart, or what demons Mr. Wilson was battling.
Jeri Kehn