Life: "The Day Kennedy Died"

Life Magazine has another historical coffee table book, “The Day Kennedy Died”, Nov. 22, 1963, edited by Robert Sullivan, 112 pages.

The  coverage of the day of the assassination doesn’t start until page 38, “That Day in Dallas”. The preceding pages cover the Camelot “royal” family and then the events like Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall (ironic now for the US), and Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy was making the trip to shore up his shaky political base, and Dallas was said to be a “city of hate”.  The Kennedys had stayed in a hotel in Fort Worth and made the very short flight to Love Field.

The book starts its frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film on p 88 with the most critical probablt being 262 and 313. The book does not come to a definitive conclusion as to whether Oswald was the only shooter.





This all happened in a troubling period of my own life.  The Kennedy assassination occurred slightly less than two full years after my own William and Mary expulsion. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred while I was a “patient” at NIH, about 13 months before the assassination.

I had started my first wage-earning job at the National Bureau of Standards on the old Federal City college on Van Ness St, in the oil viscosity (rheology) lab.  My boss came into the lab at about 1:50 PM EST (one hour ahead of Dallas) and announced the shootings and turned on the radio. Within about 45 minutes we heard that the president was dead, and we were dismissed for the day. The announcement didn’t come until 1:38 CST even though he was pronounced at 1:00 PM CST.

The CBS video above was from the soap “As the World Turns” and the soap as allowed to run for a while after the first announcement. News was slow then.

I can recall the classical station WGMS playing the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, on the old Zenith radio in the basement where I had heard the Washington Senators lose a lot of baseball games (1963 was a particularly bad year, although the MLK March had happened in August).

On Sunday, we were at the First Baptist Church at 16^th and O, and leaving and I was riding down 17^th St with my father driving, with radio coverage of the transfer of Oswald.  I literally heard the shooting over the car radio.  “He’s been shot”.

The wound to Kennedy’s head from the second shot was particularly gruesome.  There is no way it could or should have been survivable.

Atlantic offers big article on animal consciousness

Ross Anderson, in the March issue of the Atlantic, explores what consciousness is. “Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition”.   He talks about the intelligence of crows in solving problems in getting at food (dropping nuts at stoplights). Crow brain structures are complex but very different from mammalian; there is no cerebral cortex. Crows also seem to recognize people in their environments and will revisit them (so do mockingbirds) to “check up on them”. I had a crow scream at me to get inside the day of Hurricane Sandy.





Later he gets into the consciousness of fish and even social insects, and possibly one-celled organisms. But he doesn’t get into integrated information theory as have some other articles.

One thing of interest to me is when wild animals do make friends with people (bobcats, foxes).

Back in 1993, Time Magazine had an article, “Do Animals Think?”

In January 2017. Geoffrey Smith had written about research in the consciousness of the octopus, which is considerable, even if the brain is distributed through the body.  It may resemble wavering among dream-like states.

Life Magazine redux: "The 1960s: The Decade Where Everything Changed"

Life (as part of Time) is offering a supermarket coffee-table paperback, 112 pages, “The 1960s: The Decade Where Everything Changed”, edited by Robert Sullivan.

In January 1960 I was a junior in high school, and in history class we were just about to cover the War Between the States.  At the time, “negro” was an acceptable word, even in class.

During the summer we would hear the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and Kennedy would start out with the “Ask Not” inauguration speech on a day after a sudden thunderstormy blizzard in Washington.





As I’ve documented elsewhere, the early 60s were still quite homophobic, as would continue into the middle 60s with Dean Rusk’s firing people from the State Department and CBS’s 1967 documentary “The Homosexuals” with Mike Wallace.  But it would start to change fairly suddenly with Stonewall.

But the pivotal years were 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis), 1963 (Kennedy Assassination) and 1968, when I was drafted.  I was in BCT when I heard Johnson’s non-acceptance speech on March 31.

There would be a Poor People's March on Washington in May 1968, just as a major even in 1963 with MLK.  When MLK was assassinated we were on "red alert" at Fort Jackson.

"Asylumist" blog recommends some children's books on immigration

“The Asylumist” is a blog run by Washington DC attorney Jason Dzubow, and today he has an unusual and inviting post, “Some Great Immigration and Refugee Books for Kids”, link. 

A couple of the books are actually in the format of graphic novels.

I’ll mention maybe three of them.

“Two White Rabbits” (2015), by Jairo Buitrago, illustrated by Rafael Yochteng, translated by Elisa Amado. 32 pages, Groundwood books, tells the story of a migrant journey through Central America from the viewpoint of the kids, sometimes riding on top of trains, facing the border, wall or not.

“Illegal” (2018) , by Eoin Coffer and Andrew Donkin, and Giovanni Rigano, 144 pages. Sourcebook Jannerwocky tells about a journey to Europe from Niger across the Sahara.

  

“An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yosuf Omar” (2015), by Reinhardt Kleist, by Self-Made Hero, 152 pages, represented Somalia in the 2008 Olympics on Beijing, and lost her life on her journey home.  This graphic novel is based on a true story.

"Kids These Days" by Malcolm Harris, explains why millennials act the way they do -- because "capitalism" has exploited them and disposed of many of them

Sean Illing gives a preview, in an interview, of a new book from Little Brown by Malcolm Harris, “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials”, 272 pages.

The Vox article that does the review is called “Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism”.  This sounds so much like Umair Haque. 

Harris seems to feel that there is something morally corrupt about turning labor into capital. The article leads back to an earlier article about Steven Pearlstein, who wants to save capitalism from its excessive shareholder-driven form. Managerial capitalism isn’t so bad – but it comes down to keeping individuals socialized and getting too deep into their own fantasies about meritocracy. That’s supposed to happen in the families, but you have to get individualized out from under that into intermittent periods of national or community service, he thinks.

Harris admits the influence of Marxism, and seems to think you can’t save neo-liberalism because it is too lost in its own idea of self-concept.  Like people need to join up. 

John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, "The Lifespan of a Fact"

Authors: John D’Agata (essay author), Jim Fingal (fact checker)

Title: “The Lifespan of a Fact”

Publication:  New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2012, 124 pages, paper, 9 chapters, ISBN 978-0-393-34073-0

This is a most unusual book, another innovation like Thomas Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” (Dec. 2, 2013), a meta-book.

On 2003 Harper’s magazine approached author John D’Agata (“Halls of Fame”) to write a lengthy piece motivated by the suicide of a teenager (Levi Presley) by jumping in Las Vegas. It was not accepted, but another periodical, “The Believer” assigned a fact-checker, Jim Fingal, to examine the piece.  The piece (“What Happens There”) would eventually morph into D’Agata’s “About a Mountain” (concerning the storing of radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain).  The latter topic actually fits into an early incident in my novel “Angel’s Brother”.

So this new compendium book presents the essay, with continuous fragments centered on each page, surrounded by Fingal’s extensive fact checking remarks.  So this is a “book about a book” or a “book about an essay”.  Imagine this being done to one of my longer blog postings.  Harvard undergrad John Fish (previous post) should find this interesting to read.

The meta-book has become a Broadway Play, at Studio 54 (with Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale), but the show has closed.  I was in New York Jan 7-9 but to go to another event and didn’t have time to see it.  I wonder if it will become an arthouse film.  Actually, we need a documentary on Yucca Mountain, too.

  

The New York Times has an analysis (2012) by Jennifer B. McDonald, "In the Details". And Alice Gregory writes "Truth and Consequences" for NPR in 2012. 

Baseball player Bryce Harper has a home near Las Vegas.  We’re wondering where he will sign for 2019.

John Fish: Growth Book

This post will be very simple.

After watching a few of Harvard undergraduate John Fish’s videos, I took him up on his offer of a notebook, his Growth Book.

Each page has space for a schedule, to-do, goals, motivation, happiness.

You have to put in the date yourself.  I didn’t see a preprinted calendar with holidays and days of the week in each month (perpetual calendar, which is an easy java method).

The cover has a growth tree on it.

I've noticed teenagers raised in Canada (around Toronto) seem to do much better in life than American kids.  Look at actor Richard Harmon now.   Maybe the system really does matter. 

   

I got the book “free” as an Amazon Prime reward.