'the whole "PC" thing'

   Is that a thing??  Someone asked.

  A mix of crowd in pressed fancy clothes and blue jeans mingled around more listening than in conversations.  An eddy between generations where

  As in "PC" standing for or representing the term "politically correct"

  People had taken stands too, held ground, lost ground, chosen tribe within nation, donned political team colors

  Red, Blue, or Purple?

  Red and blue together as primary colors make the color purple so the designation of "purple state" had crept into the jargon of election year. 

Peanut Gallery: we don't care, we just want

  Andrew Dice Clay would not stop cursing in his comedy show; Eddie Murphy worked the how hard it is to change, to stop using the "f-curse", into a routine; Jerry Seinfeld proved hysterical without using the controversial cussing.  Radio commentators brought up the issue of comedians and swearing as a real life example of larger, more complex social-mixing issues in America.  Unsaid?  Everybody knows in one of those election years "all about the economy" things are/are not just about personal moral choice(s).

  There were some with outrageous lifestyle and fashion and of these, some sparked trends, some legend, some developed "cult" followings.  Old words used to settle/rile the masses to voting opinion on the matters were disrupted as buzz and used more liberally and lazily than the letters of the Law.

 While "lifestyle" was finding venue on the fringe to beltway, the hallowed halls of academia was not surprised but sometimes acted surprised to find

  Exiles?

  Are these people still alive?

  The very questions coming out of the mouths of teenagers in higher education had some drawing in a breath and not exhaling.  Had it been that thirty-year cycle thing?  Was the next generation already grown up?

Let's not do that here

   A lot of non-profits start out with a seriously critical eye that goes with "ideal".  From food (Did you see what they did to those chickens?) to cults people with freedom to develop ideas and group-up have come up with a wide-range of cause and ceremony in the form of not for profits.

  In my young adulthood we learned how to form such groups and worked on them, especially when there was pilitucal threat of being disappeared, and/or the cause was a longer term issue, and/or paid work was dominating time.  Some non-profits started as like storage.  And a way to preservehonor the people and place of streams of movement.

  Sometimes non-profits help people sort cause, sort concerns, and put focus with energies and efforts.  Sometimes they are dormant until needed like a skill or a trade out of season.

People cry and cuss

 in our country.  I wouldn't trade that not even for rumors of bigger armies, better space pods, some sort of lulling world leader with promises.

  This time of year always feels like....

  Like people are more like squirrels.  It's the traditional hungriest time, before summer and harvest.  People and animals scrounge and clean to maybe find.  Something edible, sumpin' worth keeping.

  At the very end of kindegarden I got on the bus and had one of those full on cries.  I was sad to leave the venue where...

  In college, 1991, '92 it was intense.  At the end of year semester not just one, but teachers and staff were like: GO AWAY.

  Of course I cried; not sad, but overwhelmed and worn out.

  I think that was around the time we all came up with "red flags" and people needed to

  Sure there's some different words because like the mass incarceration of Covid, individual people still need to have individualized response to the world.  Differences between people were heightened; so-and-so never needs to sleep, but I do; a roomful of people clubbing up, uh, I, um, didn't even know this was a debate or debate-over or

  In Hartford, CT we hadn't had all the resources to change the world back into or into a compassionate place, but we'd done a lot of work.  People in the city assured that there were other people in other cities who were, who'd felt inspired with at least a little hope.  A man in a wheelchair took off a leg and chucked it onto a cot that people had made out of dumpster trash, ain't gonnah change

  My own parents were cold to me when I first went home.  It was a process we went through over and over.  Might be a frenemy, the Grandma Pearl in my mama pulled the little kid siblings towards her.  Nothing like your own mother making your skin tougher.  Dad and the boys harped on we don't want to change.

  I spent alone time at the Sound where some "we," those who'd shown up, had changed the trash situation clogging the water.  It wasn't like a world buffet, I mumbled to my mother's tough-gentle way of should I define it, you, for you?!  I didn't eat anyone.  Didn't become a political animal.  Had gotten good grades, stopped saying I can't do it--instead, I can do this better.  I had to settle with being like a ocean's inlet.  Having felt like being part of the whole ocean, but finding, no: making some sort of harbor.  The truce with folks came in agreeing to not share studies with younger kids, and Mom rocking a day open with coffee and asking me my theme.  

Theme?  

I might find something in my travels to add to your journals.  

Okay.

  I spent summers working and reading and organizing the porridge of the world in my head.  And this became applying self and studies.  It didn't matter can't make a living.  And working people affirmed, can't make a living doing this either.

  That was something not to discuss with younger or older people.  But friends of the same generation got it, and we were off on the journey of contending as capitalists.

  My folks set up a hotline on the landline.  Mom took a piece of masking tape and sharpied HOTLINE on it.  There were six of us, all trying to grasp the cost of stuff and earning.  And running into the workday problems.  One brother took off with all the Chinese food on top of the car and paycheck that might've been was summed up in a photo of strewn noodles and squashed egg rolls.  Speeding tickets.  Mom was the Judge.  We'd explain procedure and what had happened.  Own up to not keeping mouths shut and nose to the grind.  Or have workplace abuse carefully weighed against money.  Some behaviors by others was just not okay.  So our parents would help us come up with least-tense reason(s) for leaving.  It was only rarely that there was true cause to say-- that's not okay.

  Mostly I met dozens of decent people with different tastes for American grit(s), but all working to have the country function.  The best taught something, or had a kindness in situation that might have tipped into contention.  Sometimes there was no way to salve rowdy, or keep people focused on purpose: here

  Like grade-learning building on grade learning, we developed skills.  "People skills".  Trade skills.  Education skills.  Faith skills.  Nation skills.

  As a family who knew eachother inside out, we had points of reference, associations that made sense, networking, humor, shared stories!

  Daddy did the best he could to listen.  Problem-detection guru.  Not always the most decisive though, so we relied on each other to develop decision-making skills.  Even then, some years the big picture wasn't hardly navigate-able.  Family friends reminded, Be unique anyway, a kid screamed a noise and slammed a door.  Reassurances at the wall, Don't worry, we're ALL in the same rodeo.

  And it was like that some years more than others.

  Mom and Dad had fought their own battles in the high tides.  We'd had to learn about the in-between, something.  Something about not being the bully, but not backing down.

  Hell yeah, a brother assured a tee-shirt man.  Dad did a quick glance from dollars adding up to buying more to see if his swearing excitement was bothering anyone.  The ones with These Colors Don't Run, were selling.  The sisters felt compelled to buy flashback to care bears.  We'd briefly discussed why some slogans have more weight than others over pizza and sodas.  And stuck together on getting over the awkward of not being active military in that generational moment, because????  Because some jobs are done for everybody.

  That was how we found out one of us was having to clean the toilet at work with an actual toothbrush.  Mom helped keep a job by finding out from the manager that they couldn't afford a toilet brush.  Dad bought one and brought it to the workplace.  The manager dubbed the sister like a knight with the unspoiled King Neptune scepter.  She didn't mind cleaning the bathroom then, and the team worked up to taking turns!  Not all "change" is "bad".

  At a carpentry worksite, a girlfriend showed up at fifteen minutes late, plucked cigarettes from mouths and drained warm "hair on the dogs" and crushed with sneakered foot "attitude adjusters" and that was routine for a couple weeks until we got on time.

  Like at AA Meetings, people ya take a shining to are really on their own paths with chance and discipline, just like you.  People are differently-abled in skills and trying.  Here and purpose gets worked on by workers just as much as product, sales, and services.  People have good days and not so good.

Ears to hear it, eyes to see it

 Ears to hear it, eyes to see it

  We could.  Imagine it.  An etch-faced nun who'd traveled to Italy had taken us on a walkabout.  We'd stood in the sunshine and recounted putting fresh flowers on the Mary statue for May Day.  We'd shown her that we'd kept the Church's stained glass windows from being broken, and patched the chainlink fence hole where somebody'd cut through.  We'd rounded all the grades' playgrounds.  She was giving us a sense of "retreat".  By the time we left the sun outside and were crouching into a small room that would someday be a reading room, we really could imagine.

  For the early Christians there came a phase of silenced worship.  What had been experienced as get-together, maybe sharing food, maybe sharing fabrics and special mementos and candle wax/oil, was at a mixed pace of change.  In the face of arrests, beatings/torture, deaths related to persecution word was spreading, be careful.  Others were missing.  Most were confused as to what exactly was the wrong-doing.  Witnesses of the realism of persecution shuddered.

  The small whole of Christianity as yet undefined in religious terms and practices like Mass and Sacraments, was in a gradual-swift swing into, not resistance, not hiding, but

  we could imagine the intensity; imagine the conviction that something is really important; imagine the sorrows of sheltering love and good times; we could imagine how powerful then--to light a candle, to shake a hand, to find the remnant of somebody else's belief.

  For many of us that ability to understand, even without knowing all the details, was stoked in college.  Some of our most precious relationships were forged as we were leaving.  I mean, the whole time we are in college, we are also leaving.  There's that "space" that is similar for me to Catholic school basketball.  Your team practices and practices, prays together, gets all teamy-feely and then comes time to entreat with opponent.  Inevitably, the opponent is thug or enemy to the pal-spirit of your team.  On the court players are challenged to be best self and to strategize, execute, follow through for team.  As we got closer to graduations and other moving-ons from college, we'd glimpsed each other, we'd heard about each others' realities, we'd teamed in learning, and we were intensely near each other.

  There was a mix of emotions for everyone.

 

 

   Some people are late to craze.  So we rehash salient points.  At this point there's still novelty to slime.  And specialty slime with little mass-produced nuggets in it apparently.  At the height of the craze it took a conservative-minded person to get word out, into that drifting space between kids and guardians:. This is a lot of money to spend on

  Some considerate-minded people countered.

  We think a lot of these kids really need not just year after year of war in response to September 11th...they are craving tactile experience....everything is so

  At the time artists and thinkers were mostly awkwardly juxtaposing images of warfare with

  Nowadays there's antennae feeling way too.  It's graduation talk time again.  How to barrier and cross barrier on the realities young people face without necessarily having a political rally?!

  Painters brush "thin peace".  Literary folk are all over the place as ever.  Do we come up with metaphor or

 

  I'll find the piece I wrote about Sherry as artist.  I'd taken it down because in it I wrote that her artwork would be showing during April in NC, but Dad wasn't ready yet to organize that.

  Re-posted.  Mt Shadows blog, 'Cloudboat of good spirit & art'.

We don't have to, but we are

   Was talking with someone recently who recalls that Carry On spirit of her mother.  The kind of strong person who has surgery in her nineties and is up and at 'em even on days off.  Some mornings the daughter would be like, Do we have to?  Take that walk; go to town; send that Thank You note.  And her mom would respond, We don't have to, but we are.

  There's a lot of America that gets done that way.  I know for myself, all through Covid, I made it a point to carefully community.  I purposefully varied up my shopping habits to spread the spending money.  I made it a point to share my "back up" with my family, so they wouldn't have to go out as much.  As an essential worker, I'd let non-essentials with reduced hours and not-paid-for time off know about gas deals and which convenience stores still had....

  The businessperson spirit was similar to how years ago there was only Black Friday; then BF + Cyber Monday; then BF + CM + Small Business Saturdays, etc.  Like playing Bridge or Rummy during the black outs of World War II, there are countless ways we serve our country, serve each other.

  When I was studying the Great Depression I came across one of those pictures that sticks with you for life.  People say of those kinds of images, It spoke to me, hip academics combining psychology with everything textual along their study-journies introduced the phrase, That resonates with me.  The old black and white that resonated with me may have been taken by one of James Agee's traveling companions as NYC sent trape-sers to scope out the reh-al of Stock Market Crash.

  Camera is looking over the shoulder of a man shaving in a car side mirror.  Dignity of self even in the worst of times.

Locally, recent news

https://www.wvlt.tv/2024/04/22/pigeon-forge-police-responded-over-1000-calls-made-36-arrests-during-rod-run/

 

 

Using literary theories became

 Very important at university.  There was so much infirmation on the market, educational, by the mid-1980's, we needed a filter.  Literary people have always been both sponge and filter for sifting.

  I remember it all very well looking back

  But it's difficult to explain like McLuhen's work, sometimes a weaving point, othertimes a dance--dash to the firepit, now coordinated back up.

  Keith Haring and Baudrillard.  We needed a way past nausea.  

  It was a mad dash from never-ending threat of nuclear war.  We dug deep, cats in hats, eighty-four, a kaleidoscope of randomly relevant.  Vietnam had taught us all no matter where a person is standing in relation to the hill, the broader pitcher loads and empties of detail.  People have commentary and opinion.  Instantaneous, unfiltered allowed.

  One of the hardest pre-earth day lessons to learn in coming up was the wait and gather between hypothesis and theory.

  Thesis statements can be like that too.  Not time yet.

  'Twas slow going to find French thinking about culture not titled things like Doing nuthin' but being Anti.  Anti-Marxist got hung up in the taverns of England.  A stall of ideology, stale bread, chunks of home carried in sachels and rucksacks.  Suicides (see The Golden Notebook) in literary terms had long been metaphoric in fiction.  Denoting loss to great to bear as same old self; too brokenhearted to go on; Spirit Self without body politic, without, without, without....like a freight train pounding out beat on track.

  Flower pots and fashion rags, seeds planted in tins chucked out window holes.  It was hard at college to dial down on the exact origins of the political point of reference term:. Socialism.  It wasn't a sphere on a map.

  And it wasn't supposed to be a sphere of influence, not to a flying fortress nor to a two-party system since it's birth nation.  And yet way down in the darkness and depths of communist tyranny in places like Latin America, the first steps towards something besides persecution were to pierce the ironclad isolationism.

  People can debate the finer points of word getting out--What nuking humans does to humans--but to 1950's people in a bell jar, anything "different" from decimated was Safe.  People got re-stern like pilgrims and puritans after an Indian raid.  Whole webs of social interaction had been carved into classified and caves.  One of the first interests that "counter-culture" had in the arts was archeology and the primitive because socializing and studying had been flatlined into the American Flag in black and white.

More?!?

Well, you know what they say; someone in hell needs a cup of icewater.

  I will tell you that the amount of fieldwork being applied into theory-writing was amassing fast.  So academics needed to differentiate between general knowledge and specialized.  Some theory was classified "critical" and some thinkers and theory/theiry were labeled linchpins (even when they didn't think so or want to be).

 

Feels a little like S2udioLiminal again, but way better to be feeling more home than travel.

All kindsah stories

  We always reminisce the best when we run into new.

  It made my mom kindah petrified to travel alone.

  At this point at the endo' cycle...

  We got stuck behind a car at a traffic light while several people waiting for a bus gave donation (a word that is only English by the way) to the person in the car.  Posterboard in back window: Need kidney.

  A young-looking older person recounted, In line; I wet my diaper which was a styrofoam cup in line, Down your pants?  While some damned fool was'n havin' a hissy fit 'stead of The cup was in your pants right? Just ringing peoples purchases up.

  WHO pay dat? A man frankly asked after another man zipped a finger across two and a half pages of microscopic print on a contract.

Sittin'

   Around.  Poking and stabbing with stylus at life in a digital screen.  Waiting to go to work.

  Would rather be bumper stickers seem to have turned into electronica fantasies.

  In mood I'm so Idgy right now.  Tossing up the mud outside the preachers' house on a Sunday morning, no brunch in sight.  But, for me, that's after saying prayers and having feelings 'bout just another work day, no mountain trekking t'day.

  Beautiful sight of the day...

  Somewhere between the bulldozing of the planet and the IAEA's "no damage" people go muddin'.

  Afterwards, I pick through mudclumps and real-ize what learned for the outing.

  I mudded through BBC News for a bit, and stickystuck mud reveals more and more language for shit falling out of skies--missile boosters (debris/motors); burn mark resolution; one million dollars at the nanosecond = abt. 850,000 pounds.

  Bowen cites/d some 'strangeness' to "story" in revisiting initial "reports" re: this round of retaliatory.  Everybody pitching in their versions of events.  Long-short-- state tvs r describing infiltrating projectiles as being launched by infiltrators; and an important echo from past diplomatic confusion...argument about labeling of premises.

  That motif came up for colonials a lot too.  My own ancestors carved out "squares" and "meeting" from grassy spots previously un-property-owned.  Some of the most intense battling in history has been for an inch of claiming.  Lobbing shit at each other doesn't stake a claim.  That's another difference from what was classically considered "land warfare".  And space stuff from precision strikes to sun spots is def diff from the naval warring of the Greatest Generation.

  Bowen assures, "If the attack on Isfahan is not followed up with more attacks, then the immediate tensions will ease" ("Israel's strike on Iran: Crisis shows how badly Iran and Israel understand each other").

Yeah, I agree, our space anthem could use some Beyonce bandsound umph

 

   One of the biggest and best reasons to keep news news has to do with the power of factual material.

  That's a keynote and a running key, really in all of our lives since our nation upholds freedom of the press.

  There are very good and sound reasons, for example, to keep a Hamill (sp?) tone: NEWS IS A VERB

  Part of what that means is that, words can describe action; action has "tense"...whether something happened already or is speculated to be happening soon or is happening is as important as...I want to say, the crucifixion of Christ.  Let me explain.

  During the Sorrowful Mysteries, Jesus Christ as human went step-by-step through moments of trial.  Sentenced to death in a mob rule affirmation to a world leader, each moment of his life left on earth was moment-to-moment.  And what God let unfold didn't have brakes, or reversals of fortune for the gossip about what was happening, or for the washing of the hands of this-- the machinery was in motion, in tense: present.

  Throughout history since that old serpent changed the status of humans from paradise-living to hard scrabble, there have been innumerable instances of ugly, unfolding.  Information systems which telegram STOP, and inform readers/other professionals/still others not only describe action, "they" are part of the action.  This gives a country that has other infrastructure, safety measures, and checks/balances on "official" the chance to stem entropy and chaos!

Nobody prevented it.

  The Russian state news channel was depicting some people as grassroots activists, fascist fighters, defenders of freedom; there was little coverage of Russian soldiers because, Miller cooled "too hot to print" with time and a fleshed-in depiction of situation in the book The War Came To Us (2023), "Because, officially, they weren't there" (158).

  People were angry.  Tony Blair sort of pursed his lips together and the analysts watching with camera and crew didn't speak loudly that his "gesture" could have meant, this is what we should, could, might DO.  The actual violence that had been steeping since tribal viking days and parish pastoral, gone citified, and still springing up in religious terms was not just sore subject; so Statespeople couldn't just slap a bandaid with a peace sign on it into festering wound.  Blair had the sort of manners in the situation that people attributed to Tsar Nicholas.  Both Statesmen also professed a humility in self's absolute-ability to control over-all in times of multi-faceted turbulence.

  In our country we've gotten through a lot of turbulence measure by measure, step by step.  

  I'm older than young, but in good spirits.  One of the most enjoyable things about being such is being able to compare turbulence(s), and to have experienced the changes that prevented violence.  In the scary, dark economic times of the 1970's, for instance, Daddy's face'd get pitch white sometimes at what group was doing just up ahead.

  One time all the union/no union highway work came to gnarly.  And even though transportation people assured that THE COUNTRY OWNS the highway, I guess one failure after another in "talks" led some to kinda take cover in group.  Well, between the on-purpose potholes, and the undone signage, and the debris left all over the place, we'd barely made it through a life-and-death obstacle course.  Mama blew the breaths out like the journey was the labor.  And just before we could actually get to Cape Cod, truckers were "bending knee" (wheeling side to side like skiers to warm up being able to maneuver, and check for parts tight) on ramps, some were getting far right to impede harmlessly the speeders, others were steadfasts in convoys--not stopping, so...

  A brother wanted to see somebody smash thru.  Just be quiet, mama cautioned.  The rumormill had lofted the potential for dumpers blocking, and the hot winds also rose tensions to past--let's have a cold one and see what we can come up with--pretty much right into shin kicking and fist fighting; and that was the glossy magazine version of how at each others's throats people really were.

  Turned out on that spit of road before we got to flip a bicentennial quarter for smashing through, State Troopers and Forest Rangers made way through us people creeping towards our coupon-vacation, well, by the time, a few hours later, we got to a hot spot, we went through a receiving line of dump trucks and pavement rollers and gloppy tar trailers!  I felt like a Kennedy kid at a ceremony.  They stopped the commotion.  We saluted to them just the same we would've to an astronaut or colonel.

  Dad pulled up to a circle traffic cop all weak from hunger and not using a restroom and stress, and asked, Where's the rock and the boat?

  To hear tell, Blair was angry too.  That's usually a catchall word for any and all emotion.  He did not prefer to not be candid with people asking him questions, but negotiations had to go step-for-step with neighborhood activity.

  But why they call that peace-prevailed agreement, I think, had more to do with...hard to explain...at that time the U.S. was getting into what seemed a necessary war mode in regards events that had been happening in the Middle East.  Any talk of "peace" is a three-legged stool in such times.  Decisions have to be made.  That particular agreement was a shimmering salmon swimming upstream to advance, or not.

Alright, I'll tell you a Kay Boyle

   I was sitting up straight and not chomping my gum, working on Obits.

  Our newspaper was an independent.  Our editor was fit to be tied, slightly hot under the collar but more of the red was blooming all over his face.  As if by some silent doorbell or having taken a cultural cue from post-punk-music, a wave of reportorial types were submitting a rash of story.  Some of the old-schoolers' whispering got barky about think, the nerve, and waltz.  So, the editor reiterated fact from fiction to the choir; repeatedly advised people not to try and hide politics and points of view; then rearranged all the filing containers.  The newsroom people then acted like a giant carbon filter to the water pouring in as anything goes.

  Over Reuben Sandwiches later in those days, the drifting and sneaky would be pegged.  Having been told to put it in sports, but a piece was found in the lifestyle area didn't get an at-large "fired" but it got the correspondent audience with, whisper, old Maggie.  She was sure to pick apart a pie crust until objective news points could be differentiated from political hooliganism.

  Some of the people dashing in to file same old, same old were only briefly flummuxed by the recategorizing in that year.

  Nobody in the networks was making headlines out of already confusing information like in a professional landscape where all business has the same rank as equals (except in competition); your national defense and your housekeeping aren't categorized like the GDP Stamp makes it seem especially in an already increased socialism.  There's added pressure to our politics...public/private, bidding, timing...sort it or don't, the power of the nation is a lot more than words on paper.

  And, the power of our nation is not in an obituary yet.  I once had an older person tell me his vote was his bid, he was bidding on future Americans to uphold the power of our nation.

  That editor was exhibiting his integrity to the professionalism of journalism.  He'd also been living and working in a college town for quite a while, and was taking a professor approach.  He told some if us after we'd gotten through the fierce fight of "re-org" that he'd been aware that most of the wave of submissions would be top quality work.  And that he was contributing as much to the development of people as actual news.  How so? Maggie asked.  He humbly and so not definitively explained good judge of character; young people nervous to pursue the very subjects they might be best at writing.

Gottah go to work, yikes, the time.

More postcards

 

 

Tilling the soil

 "In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin." --Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

  I remember being like eight years old and having a tea party with some of my neighborhood's grannies.  It was going well until a next door teenager got home from school and propped a stereo speaker in the window sill, stripped to "Daisy Duke" shorts even though he was a boy, and one of the grannie-dad's hearing aids did that thing that causes a person to fling such electronica AWAY.  It smacked against a set of Brittanica and bounced in front of a napping dog who sniffed it, then gave it a few licks.  For me, the whole contraption of events, a few seconds of culture unfolding, spurred my inner-campaigner.  Something in me rose up out of my mini-mama-rocking-chair, didn't even think about what confrontation could bring, and propelled me to stomp over to that teenager and yell

How long before every grandmother has been exposed to the Rolling Stones?????

  The boundary of wires for a long time forestalled the forces of moral decline and entropy.  The notion of "crusade" seemed to have been what was steeped into us even as the Baptism sprinkles evaporated.  Although we couldn't always speak plainly or clearly about what was going on, we sensed the epic proportions of balance and imbalance; we knew, even as children, maybe especially as children, that the ancient fights of good versus evil; conviction v vacated; sinner v sin were roiling around us.  And we were just little in these Seas.

  Years and years later; some of us were covering various aspects of the wars, two of us were sleeping for about five days.  Sleeping only to wake clutching eachother, acjnowledging that, stuffing wads of white bread into mouths, gulping water, rearranging blankets between us, sleeping.  I checked, two Good Morning America's ago, we've only had three days off.  And what's his face sent in that note, he didn't lift arm off pillow, just pointed toward what seemed a hundred miles away for the exhaustion.

  Luke 11:17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.

  The note read: 

  in messy writing, but real big

  U got to stand for something

Or YOU will fall for anything

  Is it for the magazine?  I asked.

  He snore-sound garbled, think its for me.

  Often happens in a surge, America's workforce is a mix of the preoccupied and the professional.  Sometimes even business-owners pitch fits about deadlines, grown-looking-people have tantrums and meltdowns, someone issues a "time out".

  It's part of what is making the cease fire negotiations in the Middle East "delicate" right now.  Exhaustion v entropy.

  Back when Nascar was just starting up, Mohammed Ali was still boxing, health crazes were beginning to rival real estate as investment, and elements of generic "counter-culture" were trapsing around the country, all in a tidal pool between boomandbust, some journalists endeavored to better capture what's going on in newswriting.

  The arguments then were bound by literary tradition and Press licensing.  As in the college-age arts and in fashion, those first style-innovations and envelope-pushings were temporarily stickered: new

  Some critics clucked and waggled a finger.  Braids of writing took place in category-proper.  While culture, ours

  Repeatedly gets defined as having been one thing

  Repeatedly gets accused of changes, detected

  Tom Wolfe blew breath out between lips trying to spell the roar of an engine.  Had spent longer than usual under the editors' microscope, his talentDNA almost crushed between glass on the slide.  While newspapers have audience, it's editorial which must be pleased or the billygoats getcha and no crossing that bridge to byline.

  He later wrote an intro for a book about that iteration of new journalism.  Then in the later 1980's or early '90's a person named Kramer put out a similar collection with the more academic term literary journalism employed.  There'd been a wave of David Lee Roth's going into "journalism" academically.  It was still the Cold War.  While academic institutions could train that age people who showed up, historically "print media" was already post-apocalyptic.  As with a lot of topics and categories for files, sometimes buzzwords are avant garde, the carrot for the workhorse; sometimes just a sound amongst sounds in the static; and sometimes just an echo like a bunny running hole to hole re-iterating.

          

Good day off from work

 

 

  Super cool

 Aerosmith's coming!

                           

  Sometimes it feels like Where is everyone?

  Othertimes, a CLUSTERFUCK, an old-time friend would define IMMINENT.  I'd shush on the swearing loudly, she'd blow out a breath and follow the shush with a fuck off on judging.  All growing up, whether in class-proper or on the loose we'd be "training" for the future; for who we'd be someday.

  I fondly recall high school age Christian retreats.  Safe.  Going beyond Mass, into the field of the world, but with tribe/unit.  We'd encounter--people, place, thing and still be able to quickly locate ourselves amongst fellows even in shifting boundary zones.  For me, a sort of spiritual/physical alignment happens.  Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Jesus, ME.  In the walking beside, sometimes Jesus has us ride piggy back; sometimes we hold hands, or hang on to Holy robes; sometimes we rest and sometimes we run.  When I had occasion to study how someone like Sheila Walsh did journalism, I knew that, or it seemed to me, that was how she was doing the journalism, aligned.

  That's the same way Michelle Martin moderates discussions for broadcast on the radio.  And the way Christian Amanpour delegates and takes the lead on international culling for topics that are at once highly concentrated and have shallow narrows where ruckus really has an impact in disturbing "talks".

  In a media landscape really democratic in some parts of the world and non-existent in others, the overarching metaphor/image that comes to mind for me was on a National Geographic DVD I saw, about Planet Earth, and involved hippo-pat-emus, scarred backs, submarining through marshy foodgrounds.

  Looks like Edward Gorey's doubtful guest, on the move or looking for an urn.

Nothing too outrageous

  Another year, another birthday.  For most people not every year is the celebration going to be over-the-top princessing out in a Disney castle, or sitting inside a Nascar.  Nor do moderate people imbibe cases of champagne to celebrate or eat an entire pig if it's a pigroast.

  This part of an election year cycle almost always pits extreme-life-controllers v people with varying degrees of opinion about being contolled.  Almost always brings up issues regarding some reversal of policy (land-sharing, over).  Pretty much hauls the same old broad topics "to the table" where commentators and analysts tell: 

  What is slightly different some years is what's publicized and what is going on behind-the-scenes.  What people are obviously unifying about/around and the old elephants under the rug.  Who in what party is wearing the cocktail apron and who the tuxedo.

  Thinkers note degrees.  Deep cultural phenomena that pairs up with current trends.  Differences in opinion, action.

  Most "reporting" on the world falls into categories of weight, it seems.  An event, person, place is on a spectrum or coming from/in "left field".  Onto some "scales" issues and happenings are dumped and

  Hawks prefer engagement; What good is an enemy not engaged?  How can a battle be decisive if there's just a nebulous cloud of ruckus?

  Doves marvel; big brew-ha-ha's sometimes dissipate.  Magic wands?  Weather conditions?  Was it even real?

  I def see correlation between our youth not feeling safe; feeling need to self-protect (sometimes with excuses for feeling lamed, sometimes with guns) and the nation-at-large needing to get îts shit together.  Cha, def

  Well, it's been more of a pandemic economically.  Sometimes, hard times hit some particular group harder than it e-viscer-ates the whole damn thing, the whole economy.  Yeah, me still working, poor, but decent person.  The ability to earn a dollar, is at the very heart of how this country can and does "save" itself everytime other issues froth up.

  Seems quit full circle to our own youth in terms of all the factors.  We did have some encouragement to go ahead and know, everybody's "different" while sharing love of nation; and we did "bond" on vibes and "tribe" which was confidence-building and, even inspired people as individuals.  Every generation keeps on defining itself--not always battles.

  That right there is why my most best fave movie is, well in that category, SMALLFOOT

Five-five-three

  Was a carefully adopted ratio in WWII.  With the U.S. needing to "occupy" countries that had been taken in order to gain "joiners" to the Allies, the armed forces were in constant flux in terms of teaming up with counterparts and compatriots.

  Foreign-to-each other allies formalized strategy and planned for giving control to the military in actual fighting matters.  In 1922 and 1930 London and Washington organized certain ideas, people, and equipment with eyes towards "security" (speaking broadly before needing to sculpt detail per developments) for less than Great Powers.  The strategists looked at many factors to come up with baseline proportions of ballast to wider war.

  By 1939 thinkers and editors were tasked with popularizing the big picture with enough general information so that a scattered nation of individuals could still have unity.  The Time-Life-Fortune group was pressed to research and bring up-to-date information to families, professionals, and the generation coming of the age when they were making plans for their lives.  At that point in the big picture it was less choice about participating in international affairs than it was mounting definitive response to hot poker events of ongoing conflict of interest.

  Nations make decisions like people.  The choices that nations made during the heated conflicts and in the interwar periods were no less consequential than what people are doing in the 21st century.  We've tended to read the epics and honor people who were involved in small ways, ceremony and statue.  That disguises that the big wars, world wars, were many, many days of bleak and challenge for every man, woman, and child.  And much of the trial of wartime isn't always billboarded as WW.

  1990, '91, '92, etc.

  All through that time period terrorist groups were active--locally and combining selves with organized crime.  But partly because of money and a hierarchy of media, actual news got Max Hedrom'd.  It added to the division amongst citizens all involved.  And, it was luxury to see national defense and overseas conflict as a choice.  We also had Greatest Generation counseled and groomed take-the-leads to hold the line in the tug of war.  And we did not have places like Iran hot pokering with active firepower.

  Sometimes we wonder if they had tornados before social media was there to see it.  For most people in America, we've lived with surviving in some way, and a world at warring is like that...individual decisions about survival and what to "support" with time, energy, ability, money.

  Just hang in there.  This is six months of refining who we actually are as a nation.

 Freewrite.

  Only my emotions need a handler.

For Russia, the road to WWI

   For Russia, the road to WWI was pocky with big democratic fights.  This is said to have undermined the 'power-over' of Authoritarian iron clad.  Like our Bill of Rights to the initial Constitution, the matter of "concessions" came up in the midst of revolution pangs.  And the young Tsar was dealing with states inside the empire.  Plus critical homeland security issues like refurbishing the armed forces.

Pop songs; some sappy now, like oooooooo oooooooooo one more night, when the daylight comes I will lhave to go whoa ooooooooo oh

Prado's Black Ops is a strong read for an account of shadow warrior life.

For kids?

Some are series.  Interesting....Barron, Rena Maya and The Lord of The Shadows; Shadows Reel by C.J. Box, and Ron Rash's The Cove

 

Cleaning cars and making up country music, perfect Sunday.

The ones I write have more to do with carpentry.  'Cuttin board' never made a hit list but it rivaled "My old pick up is dead".

  Sittin' on the blocks in the shed

Well, what isn't a hobby these days?

  Yeah, Reba's my kind of mainstream.  In the social history of our country we get in the whitewater spots, raft of a nation we are.  As real musicians country music people often lead the way on bridging that great divide between haves and have nots.  Broke down and redemption.

Impersonal forces v

 

  Suddenly, the deadlock was broken; Perry: " it was now a war of movement" // dateline 21st March 1918

  There were two weeks of taking 1250 square miles.

  There was astonishing British resistance.

  And, German exhaustion

           shortages

                       Food

                       Ammunition

before a 2nd German offensive in April of that same year, the year that the Germans launched an attack.

  There had been twenty years of surge in authoritarianism and democracy collapsing in many places like Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany.

  "Darwinism ultimately...."

  "Darwinism contributed to the waning of religious belief and to a growing secular attitude, which dismissed or paid scant attention to the Christian view of a universe designed by God and a soul that rises to heaven.  For many, the conclusion seemed inescapable; nature contained no divine design or purpose, and the human species itself was a chance product of impersonal forces" (398).

U say you want a revolution

  "The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had given people a new conception of space; Darwin radically altered our conception of time" (396, Perry, West Civ).

"The world began experiencing a media revolution unparalleled since the introduction of the Guttenberg printing press" (34, Rearview).

From Amanpour & Co., "AI Could Actually Help Rebuild the Middle Class, Says MIT Economist": "As artificial intelligence [AI] catches on in America, fears of general unemployment are growing.  Elin Musk called AI 'the most disruptive force in history' and 75% of U.S. adults believe it will lead to job losses, according to a recent Gallup pole."

Not to mention revolutionizing from workforce to retirement, for the biggest generation we had in the workfierce engine of the nation.  For a few years now, they've been reporting on hundreds a day moving on to other interests.  Revolutions are not always prompted by people waving signs and wearing colors.  And for much of history there was no such thing as such a thing without bloodshed.

  Big discoveries, big innovations, big changes seem to be some sort of changing of the guard very often, on a spectrum of blurt-words we use for complex processes of happening--war, social concerns, "work".

  Well, to hear tell, a lot of the baby boomers are set with retirement plans and pensions, etc.  Though some are trying to keep a sense of humor about living not hand-to-mouth but piggy bank to piggy bank.  Dyed in the wool conservatives I guess, won't spend $3 on a cup o'jo in order to save up the five and change for a junior burger.

  People are all over the place out this way, so mainstream trends more bulldoze than listen.

  I guess.  Better start roasting the boomers Sam Walter.  You shouldah heard my mama snicker when Betty White put out off their rockers.  A brother asked in between gulps of cereal with milk, You think it's funny ma?  Don't call me ma.  Wait 'til you see Ours, Our Old People Funnies.

  Intellectually, Perry's encapsulation of "Darwinism", especially to an early 1990's bunch of scholars, resparked long-quiet talks about eugenics, and us readers were treated to opening of discussions like the truly genius, ______________;  Menand's work that helped us see how traveling science salesmen took a bunch of skulls around the world and told people how to classify people as types-- like closer to neanderthal than Victorian.

Are there Chinese asians in America???

I'm sure of it.

But their asian-cy doesn't have the same weight as our law enforcement here.

"...a crucial advantage in the struggle for food..." Reading....

About mid-19th century Europe or what all was influencing all of those turn of the century immigrants who flooded Ellis Island in the late late 1800's during the tater famine.

  Perry says Newton's law of "universal gravitation" and Darwin's "theory of evolution" "had revolutionary consequences in areas other than science" (397), and, that EVOLUTION challenged traditional Christian belief.  Why?  "To some, it undermined the infallibility of scripture and the conviction that the Bible was indeed the word of God" (396 Western Civilization:  A Brief History).

  Darwin's theory squiggled up religious controversy.  Like any word besides the Word taps into existing and ongoing argumenting like determinism v free will.

  All that round of debate pitched fundamentalists against (v or versus) advocates of the new biology.

  "In time," Perry writes, "Religious thinkers tried to reconcile evolution with the Christian view": There was a creation and that it had a purpose (398).  "These Christian thinkers held that God was the creator and the director of the evolutionary processes" (Perry, 398).

  Talks about changes in the practice of relying on the Bible as an authority in questions of science.

  Perry cites Galileo as initiating a trend; but I think Galileo fits more squarely into the "heretic tradition" or that element of the Catholic Christian Church tradition that claimed the authority to assert itself as court, jury, and law that "burned people at the stake" for non-submission to a kind of religious totalitarianism.  And so, deemed some heretical or deviant to acceptable per dominating.

  As "positivists" had rejected Plato's tradition which had spawned talk of "metaphysics", very often history is the story of particular and large-scale argument.  And when argumentation is attached to reward and punishment, like money and life/death, the risks of outlaying beliefs can be very serious.

 

 

Everything gets all over everytjhing in war-climate.  The news of 4000 Haitian prisoners by escaped and airports in other countries not on alert for that kind of fast breaking critical information....

  People take stances and talk in parking lots, I see it as a matter of mental health, I've not been in prison so work as prison is....voices fall off as a rain-soaked lump of cart and human melds with the gloaming.  Day's gleaming brings forms to "life" if life is the senses.

  Satellite blips and feet shuffling cross the same spaces, Where are you dawn?

  in a store an elderly woman stands behind a had been panicked, so cried child and motions workers over, carefully, a lost one, she's not performing but live action demonstrating--what to do.

  Years and years ago business people had to not-team-up-to-team-up-on-safety.  So no matter brand reppin' and loyalty club membership we were outsmarting that "thing," that insta-tokyo-s thing.  Caring glimmers even in a wash of neon and acid rain.

  And there were really important reasons why businessowners/workers were doing what all we were doing.  When I was young I got to learn a lot working, as we all do in reality, at the crossroads between city and country.  Sometimes as a mainstream-needs-to-dominate culture that's a mix of culture, it's about listening to eachothers' whys.  And in some political clime, it's treacherous-going: upholding law/fading grey.

  As youth and non-owner-participants some days at work were like Hardy Boys books.  You'd be wondering why an ancient boss did things exactly in a certain way, just like chores on a farm.  But askin' why could getcha almost smacked or a dirty look.  Especially asking why or how come in frontah customers.

  This ain't public, one boss must've said fifty times a day to those "loitering".  Why's he so mean?  An afterschool workerkid would ask.  Them'ns blockin' the entrance, bossman would have heard or guessed the kid's question.

  When I was older young I couldn't figure out why people were frighteningly concerned with a person working in more than one place.  I had patient people in the businessworld to ask and some of the answers were not really totally understood by me.  I got some things but on my "level" of learning all about business.  Just like in college, survey courses come before seminar level work.  Secret ingredients, yes; sale info & timing of reveal; outdoing competition; business espionage; insider trading; the weight of "higher up" was crushing and for pennies in earnings...entry level jobs in retail and food service, laboring, and administrative seem not just like a hard row to hoe but damn near impossible thruways to class status in America.

  And then I got a little older still and had work that let me come to understand how something like an egg in a breakfast place could be like a nugget of gold or nuclear material.  Food safety and licensing is some of the most complex "law" there is.  A whole region can be impacted by a bad egg.  And a bad egg might be indicating somebody messing with the eggs or something's wrong with a/the chicken(s)... Both possibilities are criminal.  And sometimes a bad egg brings people together to fend for and tend boundaries.  When businesspeople tend supply lines there's US teamwork but not communism.

 

 God owns the mountains; the rest of us are scrubbing around in the panhandle of the Garden of Eden, forging a brief survival, witnessing social contrasts.  --Lara Lynn Lane

 McCrary: I covered it up, and John Hersey uncovered it.  That's the difference between a P. R. Man and a reported.

  Hersey planned ahead for at least some recognition.  He planned to not have to yell hypocrits.  During the war Hollywood had been toning "the enemy" even more yellow than not pitch-white.  As war rages on, enemy can get broader in the range of kinds of humans.  These days in war zones is similar.  Mole hunting or whacking or whatever the liberal, popular-speak is for "checking" terrorism loses the definition of people presenting orderly wallets to pay a kiosk.  In the early 90's we paid attention and asked questions while we could.  You leave that space open for a Vet?  

  Like layers in describing artwork, for grown ups there's usually lots of answers, so sometimes pauses, and thens, Did so caws that's law.  Sahandeecapspot

Yeah it does

 

  Found some awesome books at a thrift.  One of them is about digital photography by the 4H.  That had me remembering working at Eastern Mountain Sports and discovering that there are other groups like scouts too!  Field scouts? Or something like that.  And my favorite, orienteering groups.

Orienteering USA

  There was a whole round of creativity sparked by a "commercial" Dana did for some kind of prototype truck with more "storage space" than other features.  I think somebody filmed or tubed a version of like redneck carwash, or, hoarder bustin' in one of the imagined vehicles; somebody else linked portable nuclear plants (u can get parts all over the place per policy wafts) to their vehicle's storage space; that sort of "envisioning".

Lint licker style?

'Sides it's sweettea not moonshine over here.  My rig is more like a junk gypsy tin can at this point.  His name's Patrick.  Those uns r in a business anniversary year I think, the authentic Junk Gypsies.

Okay, but I can't publish the print of the painting.  In print media, like "coffee table" books and such, there's a strict old-school-new process for getting permissions.

  Why I would post this page of Perry's Western Civilization: A Brief History....

  The textbook like description has the kind of leading question that is at the heart of embroil in education.  I mean questions in general can focus conversating.  But, Perry's book asks: What does this painting reveal about his temperament and perception of the world?  That seems to reduce the work of art to a work of subjectivity only.  And, depending on political boundaries in the world, that might implicate or accuse an artist of being a belligerent, or relegate the artwork into some kind of pile.

  The painting is "Burning of the Houses of Parliament", c. ("circa" or made around the year) 1835, by J.M.W. Turner (who lived during 1775-1851).  Author of the caption says, "Turner was preoccupied with shimmering light.  Though he often used literary themes for his paintings, in accord with Romantic taste, the people, buildings, and ships were often obscured" (Art History section, Perry).

  It's sort of a bird's eye view, smoke and flames in the fore backlighting a cathedral wall and some towers.  A river or some body of water and a fortress block of bridge play in light and dark in the middle of the painting, and ringing the southern edge closest to viewer to horizon are crowds of people.

I WANT TO GET MUDDY!

   A kid plead-wailed at his mama as the rainshower pummeled us into shelter.

  Inside was much milling about.  CASHLESS kiosks blinked neon primary colors at the greengreys of spring.  I wondered what sort of "food" such machinery might produce anyway.  And settled into a corner of flesh and bone, wet-smelling and picnic-failed looking.

  Sounds like sumpin' you need to pray on, a gentle looking big beard was telling his phone.

  I couldn't get Hamlin Garland out of my head.  Daughter of a Middle Border functioned sort of like Kaprow and his "happenings" about a hundred years later.  By W.D. Howell and Garland opening editorial selection to "localists" there came to be a thawbank, like a cloudbank, in between Romance and Realism.

  Waves of goblins, a not-journalism text-to-me read.  I checked with a Marie on the veracity of waves and if that was nation-wide; Do we have any sense past-region?

  Didn't text back, something like, You do mean people with goblins or who may see goblins?!

  I keep a light on in my soul and a bluebird lofted out of my transistor radio as I dialed to check the weather.

  Kaprow and company's Get Present was issued without warning, sometimes subtle, sometimes in aphorism and gesture, and looking back it's twinned in the echoes of history with silo-opening test sounds.

  Schelissinger was more direct in her effort to pair how we need to approach moment.  There's ten of them.

  Newscasters and anchors learned-by-doing how to pivot, Continent-to-Continent, Spaghetti-O's to diamond heists, Uncle Joe who just came home (but it's 13 years on in Nam) to presidents' visits.  In some respect how could our own brains not start to swing on the stars and slam doors, no more, no more.

"To Be Rather Than to seem"

   The North Carolina "In God We Trust" license plate, To be rather than to seem.

  Parings.

  I know in grad school, I spent a semester fumbling around in the dark forests of metaphor and trope.  I did not like it.

  It seems like philosophers have all the answers sometimes.  But I struggled to match wit to the realism(s) of our own age.

   "The great electric globe was still shining with a milky whiteness that paled the stars and splashed the foliage.  He looked right and left, at the opposite bench and at the pedestal of Byron's statue.  At last, quite close to him, between his legs, he saw a crowd of grimacing, villainous faces, wrinkled like the muzzles of camels.

  "They wagged their chins from side to side, they stuck out tongues like shoe soles, they winked their eyes at him slyly.  Some of these ugly faces had only one eye and its lid drooped halfway over the eyeball..."

  "The professor felt his alarm melt away.  His heart returned to its normal size and he began to examine these grotesque mannikins with scientific detachment.

  "'Ah!' he said to the one with the long nose.  'Lift your pant leg a little so that I can see!'"

  "Mr. Paraskevas looked at them one after another.  There was almost a score of them milling about.  The longer he looked at them, the more confident he became, until finally his features broke into a smile and he laughed heartily.

  "That seemed to please the visitors.  They murmured approvingly and the sound rustled like dry leaves in the wind."

  "Of course, I recognize you," said the old academican, striking the ground with his cane...From the time my grandmother first told me at the family hearth what kind of creatures you are, up to now when I have completed the most exhaustive study ever made of Goblins, it is you who have taken up my time and it is you I have lectured about."

  "Which means that you don't exist.  So there." 

  "The professor spoke triumphantly, brandishing his cane aloft like a conqueror waving a flag above a vanquished stronghold."

  "Haw-haw-haw!"  The Goblins laughed uproariously."

  "Then how is it that so many of you learned professors have been taken in?  You've racked your brains and wasted your time all these years even though we don't exist, eh?  Does your science exist if it deals with things that don't exist?"

  "The others said, 'E-e-e-e-h?' and waited for his reply with their heads thrust forward."

  ".... striking his breast proudly.  'You are merely our own creation.  We have formed you out of our fears and anxieties.  That's it.  All these that go to make you are ours.  Your ugliness, your wickedness, your indecency, your erotomania, your rutting goatishness which you hide under your rags, your dropping filth over everything-- all this is ours and we project it on you to ease our minds...."

  

  Then the Goblins take the professor dancing, down to a fountain in the park, past marble busts on a path.  "They trampled flower beds and finally arrived at the entrance of the Zappeion."

  A wild farandole ensued.  The professor gets caught up in hoopla-ing until the Goblins decide to go.  "Mr. Paraskevas looked around and found himself alone...."

             ~from "The Goblins" by Stratis Myrivilis, Translated by Abbott Rick, copyrighted 1959

"The Americans have lost their sense of identity.  The country is falling apart physically and politically because of the speed of information.  The American bureaucracy, political and educational, was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways.  At electric speeds, nothing in the U.S.A. makes sense."

  ~Marshall McLuhan visionary of the TV dinner, The New Majority with Ed Fitzgerald, CBC Television, 1970

 

"When reading McLuhan, as his associate Derrick de Kerckhove explains, it is necessary to play 'experience and knowledge against these new combinations of thoughts that arise from these new bits and pieces of writing.  You are the bond of the thoughts--you, the reader." ~Benedetti and DeHart, intro Rearview

Def, mustah been in the 1911's

   Along the way we had some grown ups that seemed to realize, of course, the next gen and the next gen might have different ways of saying things.  Some of us just made memos of stuff we were perceiving and/or feeling but was like puzzle piece not ready to be put in place.

  Reading about Marshall McLuhan.  Like some of the Sisters With Transistors people, and the Black Mountain College bunches, and Clifford Geertz come to think of it, these were young people coming to life awareness after the world had been sculpted into dark and heavy.  Forged into annihilation, split-second performance, and cold war, the world was actually similar to when some people wanted to make a new place called the United States of America.

  Politically, the 1950's, sixties, and into the 1970's often gets talked about in historical broadstrokes like there was Establishment and there was Counter-culture.  The end.  And yet, in every aspect of American culture there was milestone and stay which held every topic open (even if obscure), and prevented the human-ness from disappearing in a world that's been increasingly machine.

  They did and they didn't.  Understand themselves, understand themselves as being important thinkers, doers.  I think of Herzen's journals, or artmakers the world over: at once living in the present, but also thinking, doing for "the future."

  McLuhan was thinking about effects of media before psychologists "studied" and reported correlations.  And that reminds me of University of Hartford days, when our "seminar" thinking was grooving.  It was the first opportunity many individual scholars had had to collaborate and if not work together, witness putting their work with that of others.

  For all its blamed for having everything on it, internet, social media does present chance to crack isolation.

  Pretty cool.  A little rainy to see solar eclipse.  I checked with a librarian and it has to do with planetary bodies being in relation to others, the eclipsings.