Author: L.E. Hansen

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In History—February 19

On this date in history FDR ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps. Two-thirds of those imprisoned were American born. This took place from 1942 to 1946.

The government began arresting and incarcerating Italian Americans also, and this before we had even joined the war, and long before February 19. Then Italian Americans came to fight in the war while at home their families were arrested, jailed or beaten. 

Growing up in that Catholic school called Blessed Sacrament we learned to call Italians Wops, Japanese Japs, and Germans Krauts. Long after 1941.

And on this day in 2002, 22 years ago, Joel Lawrence Pinker died. At some point in the evening it occurred. I felt some monstrous grasp reaching into my body and tearing my heart out through my chest. And that was it. Done. I didn’t learn until the following day that he was gone but I was not surprised. The evening before I wondered what I would wear to work the next day. On the day when they would tell me that my son had died.

Joel with dinosaur

This is a photo of a card that the girl sent to me for one of the boy’s birthdays after he was here no longer. It looks exactly like him. And he loved dinosaurs in those days. The days when he was young.

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The Kid’s Visit

The kid was here so we did a swap of items for her to take with her move to Portugal and for me to have here until my days wind further down. Down and out. Of course most of the things I am passing on are actually from my mother and father or from the children’s childhoods. I didn’t think to take a photo of the books we had from the 1892 copyright edition of Character Sketches from Romance Fiction and Drama, so I’ll copy from the internet. They look much the same as ours do, all being quite old and from the same publisher, Hess.

Some samples from the books are on a slide, above. These are published on the internet and are available from various sellers, some of them quite expensive, likely dependent on the condition. (One always hopes for virtuous reasons.) In any case, mine were obtained free of charge from a friend’s uncle Herman when he died many years ago.

Throughout their childhoods the girl and the boy enjoyed looking through the volumes with me, oohing and aahing at the photos and the stories. Although antiquated and attic do come to mind. Memories of youth and enjoyment are measured through the pages along with pressed flowers left behind by the two old men who once knew the pages fresh. We found an old playbill from the early 1900s written in German, a directive on how to properly open a book, and the crumbling leaves from an iris to name a few of the treasures therein. We had as much enjoyment from the written language of the stories and descriptions as from the photos. It was so easy to enter into that past, that time, both theirs and ours. The books now left with her, to travel to another country with memories safely enclosed.

Amongst the treasures returned to me to stay behind is the baby dish from the World War II era that had been mine. There was no reason for the kid to keep it, hence its return. While this too is loaded with memories—they are mine—of no consequence to others. Perhaps there is a monetary

value but that is not the point of the articles being exchanged. Hence the dilemma spoken of earlier in a blog writing about my mother’s dishes. It’s just a thing. It’s just a thing that sparks memories and love. But only with certain people. And that is its real value.

So where do these things go, where do they go from those of us who want to travel lightly, to empty our suitcases before we take our last breaths? Or best of all, spend as many years as possible unencumbered, free from baggage to travel lightly with Spirit rather than weighted by possessions that possess? I don’t think our possessions define us, but maybe they do.

In the end it was a lovely visit but did I end up with more possessions than I gave away? Did she?

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Jimmy Dean

Happy Birthday! And another repeat performance. Yet another loss. How we might have enj0yed him through the years. Not to be.

“The acting of James Dean is more animal than human. For this reason, it is unpredictable: what will happen next?” Francois Truffaut, Cahier du Cinema

“Jimmy may have had crabs, but he also had durable charisma.” Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon II

Born on this day: cinema’s bongo drum-playing quintessential doomed 1950s bad boy, James Byron Dean (8 February 1931 – 30 September 1955) – one of the most lusciously photogenic actors of all time. Pictured: portrait of Dean by Roy Schatt, 1954.

Posted by Lobotomy Room.

Someone once said that Dean was not at all the same person off camera. You would not know what you had until the camera made love to him. And indeed it did. It made him larger than life. Someone else once said upon meeting him you knew he was doomed. He was just plain too much and too small for this world. It was impossible to sustain.

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George

Again with our love for George Eliot.

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

“George Eliot, orig. Mary Ann Evans later Marian Evans, (born Nov. 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, Eng.—died Dec. 22, 1880, London), British novelist. Eliot was raised with a strong evangelical piety but broke with religious orthodoxy in her 20s. She worked as a translator, a critic, and a subeditor of the Westminster Review (1851–54). Later she turned to fiction. Adopting a masculine pseudonym to evade prejudice against women novelists, she first brought out Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). This was followed by such classic works as Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), provides a thorough study of every class of provincial society. The method of psychological analysis she developed would become characteristic of modern fiction. With the journalist, philosopher, and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78), a married man, she enjoyed a long and happy, though scandalous, liaison; their Sunday-afternoon salons were a brilliant feature of Victorian life.”

Impressions of Theophrastus Such/Chapter IV chapter 4 (1879)

Posted by AsAboveSoBelow.

They still taught her books when I was in highschool. And about her name, or the changing of it anyway. I always thought my true name was George and would have changed it to that were it not for both my brother and father named George. I felt rather cheated. It’s not too late now and I could embrace that much easier than as a child, but it would be worse than changing your phone number. Just consider the number of contacts involved. To say nothing of the explanations.

The subject of “Naming Things” itself would be several posts. There’s the biblical “As a man is called, so is he.” Or something like that. And children! The children who want to change their names. Do they all? Do they still? My brother wanted to be called Jim. Just because he liked it. Were I his mother I would have called him Jim. Not a sight or sound for my mother of course.

And this is, too, The Way Things Are. At least for today.

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Prattling

There are times I like to Prattle. As in “she prattled on and on and never said anything.” You know, like “Now I’d like to prattle and so nothing counts and nothing is for keeps.” [As of right now nothing counts.] See, there are rules for everything, even prattling. You know I never learned what horror would befall us if we broke neighborhood-gaming rules. Because I never broke them. No one did.

This painting below looks like a Basquiat to me but apparently it isn’t. Maybe it just looks like a Basquiat to me as that’s the only one I know who does this.

retroavangarda

On the other hand, I could firmly embrace the truth of the things here and now as they are here and now and maybe that’s how it is. Now. Here.

So I’m going to go and prattle on elsewhere as if I weren’t leaving the prattling behind.