The Year of the * (Happy New Year)

In the years ahead references to 2020 will likely be filled with asterisks denoting that whatever is being mentioned took place against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

All those shuffled and shortened sports schedules, for example. 

And all that death. As this is written and the year winds down, COVID-19 has claimed more than 320,000 lives in the United States and more than 1.6 million worldwide.

The last twelve months (roughly) have sucked – but it’s absurd, of course, to blame a calendar. And yet ... let’s hope 2021 is an improvement. Happy New Year.

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Inconsequential as it is, I’m still writing this dreary little blog. Here are some posts from the last twelve months that I have not yet disavowed. (Give it time!)

• Neighbors in Perpetuity Paid a visit to my father’s grave, shortly before the pandemic became such a huge inconvenience.

• Jade Visions Semi-book review of a Scott LaFaro biography.

• Vincent J. Salandria A few words about an early JFK assassination critic who made a difference in my life. (This post is actually from a second blog I keep.)

• Priscilla is Heard This has rolled around in the back of my brain for years. I finally wrote it down.

• Bowel Prep As enchanting as it sounds!

• M*E*S*H Speaking of asterisks ... this, like the above post, describes a medical procedure.

• (Fewer than) Ten Albums A discourse on some recorded music that has meant a lot to me over the years.

Priscilla Is Heard

The Muses Are Heard is a largely forgotten book by Truman Capote. Published in 1956, it is a nonfiction account of an American company of Porgy and Bess and its visit to the Soviet Union.

When I first read it a dozen or so years ago I was surprised by the appearance of someone associated, indirectly, with the JFK assassination. To wit: one Priscilla Johnson, later Priscilla Johnson McMillan.

Johnson was ostensibly a journalist when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole in November 1959, some four years after the events in The Muses Are Heard. She profiled Oswald, a supposed defector, for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Right after the assassination, claiming she “had been thinking about him ever since” their 1959 meeting, Johnson wrote another article, “Oswald in Moscow.” It supported the argument that Oswald shot JFK largely because he was a publicity seeking lone nut.

Sometimes journalists get lucky: they’re in the right place at the right time. Was this the case with Johnson and her Moscow meeting with Oswald? Elements of her tale smell funny: she worked for John F. Kennedy in the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a Massachusetts Senator, and sought employment with the CIA, without success. So the story goes.

Priscilla Johnson testified before the Warren Commission. Later she befriended Oswald’s widow Marina and began writing a book, Marina and Lee. After its publication in 1977 she became a persistent and reliable supporter of the lone nut scenario, drawing on her brief acquaintance with Lee Oswald and longer acquaintance with Marina to pose as an expert. (As this is written she is still alive at 92, according to her entry in Wikipedia.)

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And lo! She makes a cameo appearance in The Muses Are Heard. This short work, remember, describes events that took place in late 1955 – some four years before Priscilla Johnson’s encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Capote accompanied an all-Black cast of Porgy and Bess to Russia, part of an entourage that included the wife of the opera’s lyricist, Ira Gershwin. The trip was newsworthy as the first performance of an American theatrical company in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik revolution. (The New Yorker magazine picked up Capote’s tab, and serialized The Muses Are Heard before it appeared in book form.)

Capote wrote his piece in the first person – “observant, gossipy, bitchy, and always entertaining,” said biographer Gerald Clarke – inserting himself among his subjects. At one point he described how the cast, before one of their own performances, attended a ballet in Moscow.

Sitting in the row ahead, there was one girl whose hair was neither plaited nor a sour bundle of string; she had an urchin-cut, which suited her curious, wild-faun face. She was wearing a black cardigan, and a pearl necklace. I pointed her out to Miss Ryan.

“But I know her,” Miss Ryan said excitedly. “She’s from Long Island, we went to Radcliffe together! Priscilla Johnson,” she called, and the girl, squinting near-sighted eyes, turned around. “For God’s sake, Priscilla. What are you doing here?”

“Gosh. Gee whiz, Nancy,” said the girl, rubbing back her tomboy bangs. “What are you doing here?”

Miss Ryan told her, and the girl, who said she was staying at the Astoria, explained that she had been granted a lengthy visa to live in the Soviet Union and study Russian law, a subject that had interested her since Radcliffe, where she’d also learned the Russian language.

“But, darling,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “how can anyone study Russian law? When it changes so often?”

“Gosh. Ha ha,” said Miss Johnson. “Well, that’s not the only thing I’m studying. I’m making a kind of Kinsey report. It’s great fun, gosh.”

“I should think,” said Miss Ryan. “The research.”

Gosh. Johnson added that she was writing and submitting articles to American magazines. “Priscilla,” Miss Ryan whispered to Capote, “is sort of a genius.”

She also participated in a “pub crawl” through Moscow with Capote, Miss Ryan, and several others, “indulging [Capote’s] lifelong passion for ... foul-smelling, vile places,” Gerald Clarke wrote.

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An Atlantic article about Priscilla Johnson McMillan, published at the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, called her the only person to know both JFK and Oswald – “his killer,” as the stuffy rag dutifully referred to him.

Not so fast! Capote made the same claim. In “A Day’s Work,” a story collected in Music for Chameleons, he said he was a guest at a dinner party hosted by then-Sen. JFK. Elsewhere in that collection he described meeting Oswald in Russia: this claim made in a story/interview with, of all people, Robert “Bobby” Beausoleil, who, when Capote talked to him, sat in prison for crimes associated with Charles Manson and his murderous “family.”

“Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?” a startled Beausoleil asked, after Capote’s revelation.

“No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. [sic] in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did.”

True? Maybe. I’m not sure the chronology adds up. More to the point, Capote had an uneven relationship with truth, and for me at least, has almost no credibility anymore. I have been an admirer of his in the past, and still think his oeuvre contains some very fine work. But you need a good bullshit detector.

Capote is, or was, an inveterate liar. “He took substantial liberties for the sake of lively reading,” Gerald Clarke wrote of The Muses Are Heard. “In one case he invented a whole scene.”

Not only that, he fabricated sections of his acknowledged masterpiece, In Cold Blood. This, alas, is beyond dispute. As with any liar, once a falsehood is exposed it reflects negatively on everything you’ve ever done, said, or written.

What, then, of Priscilla Johnson McMillan? I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the characterization in The Muses Are Heard. Am I using a double standard? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a judgment call.

Priscilla Johnson applied to the CIA in the early 1950s, according to the Spartacus website and other sources. Her application was supposedly rejected. Yet there she is, an American in Moscow during the Cold War. Seems highly unusual to me.

Could the encounter between Johnson, Capote, and Miss [Nancy] Ryan have been just a coincidence? Or could Johnson have taken a seat one row before Capote and her erstwhile classmate in order to be spotted, thereby enabling her to keep surreptitious tabs on these Americans? Johnson, of course, dismisses the idea out of hand: “There’s a lot of stuff like that online,” she told The Atlantic.

I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe it’s only a literary curiosity, or maybe it’s absolutely nothing. But it’s at least worth knowing about; the intelligence swamp surrounding the Kennedy case is legendary.

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Notes

Capote meeting JFK is in Capote, A Biography, by Gerald Clarke. Also referenced in “A Day’s Work,” collected in Music For Chameleons. This collection includes “Then It All Came Down,” with the Beausoleil conversation.

Gerald Clarke discusses Capote having invented scenes for The Muses Are Heard and In Cold Blood in his biography. Surprisingly, the bio makes no mention of Oswald. Capote inventions are also  discussed in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields, and Truman Capote, by George Plimpton.

M*E*S*H

During an ordinary physical five or six years ago, my doctor noticed I had a hernia – you know, uh, down there.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. Negative. “Does it cause any discomfort at all?” Negative. “Then let’s just leave it alone,” she advised. And we did.

Five or six years later, and five or six well checks later, it did begin to bother me. Long story short? I consulted a specialist and we scheduled surgery to fix the damned thing.

There are various types of hernias. Mine was inguinal, which according to a Google search is among the most common. The inner groin, if you’re curious. Nationwide about eight hundred thousand of these are fixed each year, and something like ninety percent involve a synthetic material called mesh. As I understand it, mesh is a kind of thin fabric used to reinforce the abdominal wall and is associated with a lower rate of hernia reoccurrence.

Interestingly, during our initial consult, the surgeon did not use the word “mesh.” The surgery would be laparoscopic, he explained. Robotic. He sketched it out on a piece of paper and drew a rectangle representing the stuff he’d use to reinforce the repair.

Only after I got home and Googled it did I realize that what he was talking about was mesh. I’d heard of it. “Almost every mesh is made, at its base, of polypropylene,” according to an ambulance-chasing lawyer's website. Polypropylene is a petroleum-based plastic. Same stuff disposable water bottles are made of. The potential for nasty side effects is high. It can stiffen and harden in the body.

So I called the surgeon’s office and spoke with him again the next day, explaining my newfound reservation to having that shit put in me.

“Look, I’ve been doing this a long time,” the surgeon said, with a hint of exasperation. “I’ve done hundreds of these things. Anymore, mesh is standard. If there was a serious issue with it I’d be sued left and right. I sure as hell don’t want that.”

That was enough; I relented. We scheduled the surgery for a week later.

Then, a few days before, I learned my brother-in-law had a hernia repaired about a year and a half earlier. Mesh was used. Afterward everything was fine – at first. But within weeks he began suffering debilitating pain. My sister said he had to prop his legs up just to relieve the pain and pressure – a real textbook bad reaction, based on my Googling. He had just undergone a second operation to remove the mesh.

Only sometimes does the moon enter its seventh house, and Jupiter align with Mars. This felt like one of those times. The cosmos sending me a message. I called the surgeon’s office yet again – this time, just one day before the procedure (by which time I had cleared the pre-operative COVID screening).

They were very accommodating, but there was a potential hitch. The insurance company had signed off on Plan A, and now I wanted Plan B – open surgery, no mesh. I won’t bore you with the details beyond saying I sat on pins and needles all afternoon, waiting for the callback saying the change had been approved.

As this is written it’s the day after the surgery. There is no mesh in me. Since it was open surgery I’m left with a ghastly wound – if wound is the right term for a corrective procedure I submitted to voluntarily. Very hideous in appearance, with swelling and bruising. No obvious stitches; they are either internal (most likely) or not there. On the surface there is some glossy crap, as if the incision had been superglued back together. I have pain pills but am not taking them. Not because of any macho dementia, but because of the known side effects. And maybe a few unknowns.

Bowel Prep

For most people the mere thought of a colonoscopy is frightening. As one who has had several I can assure you: they really aren’t that bad. One minute you’re lying in a hospital bed with a needle stuck in the top of your hand. Next minute the sedation flows and you drift away. Before you know it, you’re waking up and it’s over. You can eat again.

So fear not; there is nothing to worry about. There is no lingering, post-procedure discomfort. You barely know what happened. As FDR said in a much different context, the only thing you have to fear is, etc etc.

There is a bad part, of course. There always is. It comes the day before, when you have to drink a magic potion known generically as a purgative.

Purgative. Noun.

|pur-guh-tiv| 1. A purging medicine; stimulates evacuation of the bowels. 2. A strong laxative.

It’s evil stuff, and there are several liters to glug down. Drinking this brew, and enduring what happens afterward, is referred to as bowel prep.

Bowel prep.

I cannot say that enough. Bowel prep. It is so suggestive, and sounds so repulsive.

Bowel Prep

When you Google “bowel prep” you get hits like “Six Tips for Easier Colonoscopy Prep,” “Eight Expert Tips,” “4 Steps on How to Prepare for...”and so on.

Articles like this are not entirely useless. But they’re all pretty much the same, the number of tips notwithstanding. If you’ve read one, you’ve read ’em all.

The WebMD site, for instance, shares this pearl: “Your colon has to be empty and clean for your doctor to get a proper look at it. To make that happen, you’ll have to fast and use strong laxatives beforehand.”

Strong laxatives? Pwah.

The bowel prep is usually in liquid form: a noxious swill (mine was lemon-lime) that’ll give you diarrhea like you have never experienced – not in this life. You blast out hamburgers, pâté de foie gras, and pork rinds lite you ate six months ago. Talk about a world of shit!

Why am I writing this? I just had another colonoscopy the other day. There is a history of colon cancer in my family, so it’s my pleasure to get one every few years. For most people ten year intervals are sufficient. This time it got delayed twice, thanks to COVID-19. I am pleased to report a clean bill of health.

Colonoscopies really are the best way to detect and prevent a killer disease. But the bowel prep is a total drag. The procedure itself? A piece of cake!

Postcards With An Edge

It’s a rare surge of optimism that has me participating in something called Postcards to Swing States, a get-out-the-vote effort arranged by – well, I don’t know who. Or even what.

When I signed up to do it a few weeks ago I asked for two hundred postcards, the fewest you can request. They arrived a week or so later, with a long list of names and addresses of apparent fence-sitters, or others who have been identified (by whom?) as needing a little nudge to get them to vote.

All the names on my list are in Texas. Texas is not usually considered a swing state, I don’t think, but it’s a target for possible flipping. The organizers claim to be “data-driven,” and say that “voters who receive handwritten postcards are significantly more likely to vote.”

So far I have completed a little over half of the postcards. Zero imagination involved: you’re supplied not only with postcards and addresses but the text to write, and even the date to mail them. The closer they arrive to election day, I’m told, the better.

I almost always vote, but never with conviction. I don’t trust the process and I don’t trust politicians. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic (or any other) party, aside from a brief flirtation with the Greens. But I’m voting blue, and hoping for a blue tsunami.

Optimism is probably not the right word for my postcard involvement. Fear is closer to it: fear of what a second dump administration would do. I am convinced the votes are there to overwhelmingly defeat this bastard. I am not convinced they will all be counted. There will be cheating.

Nevertheless...

www.postcards2swingstates.com

Drop Dead

Somewhere on this blog I wrote something along the lines of, “I hope I am never so self-debasing as to applaud the death of another human being.”

I stand by that statement, in principle.

But I have to admit that every time I hear the news alert chime on my phone, part of me thinks: maybe Trump has dropped dead!

So far, I have been disappointed each and every time.

I don’t actively wish for his death. But I don’t think it would be a bad thing, even if there is a long line of MAGA maggots ready and willing to immediately take his place.

Forecasting his sudden and unexpected death isn’t all that unrealistic. In spite of his absurd claims four years ago that he’d be the healthiest person to ever assume the presidency (merely another of his countless lies, and perhaps one of the more benign) he is obviously a gross and grotesque human specimen.

He is severely overweight, morbidly so; all those rounds of golf haven’t helped a bit. He is said to be partial to McDonald’s burgers, as well as meatloaf with a lot of ketchup. Probably hates his vegetables and loves his deep-fried French fries.

He’s also in his mid-seventies, and looks like the kind of guy who would be felled suddenly by a massive coronary – dead before he hit the ground. Part of me might like it if he cracked his skull on a rock first.

But it probably won't happen. He also seems like the kind of guy who will keep on living; keep on making everyone in his sphere miserable and corrupt; keep on exacting his psycho-sicko revenge on society for years and years, until he finally dies in his sleep.

Ding!

Righteous Rage

The spectacle of unaccountable federal cops in major U.S. cities, still unfolding as this is written, is the most frightening development in the Trump era. It seems inevitable. Not sure how best to label this blatant abuse of civil liberties: fascistic, authoritarian, autocratic, despotic, tyrannical? Martial law?

Scary stuff. But it’s happening. Scary words, too: fascist, and the rest. It’s been ramping up at least since June, in Lafayette Park in DC.

Since Trump was elevated to the presidency (not elected – remember that he lost in 2016) I have written a series of anti-Trump blog posts here – unfocused rants, for the most part. In the first one I said the Trump era would not end well. Elsewhere I have predicted civil war. With such a blatantly divisive imbecile in the oval office these were not particularly insightful observations, but seeing them on the brink of realization is terrifying, indeed.

The present unrest (sorry for the cliche) is a direct outgrowth of George Floyd’s death, and the logical culmination of the thousand-plus days of Trump. The World Socialist Website says that by sending federal paramilitary forces into major U.S. cities, the ruling class is preparing for war. They may be right.

For a time I thought that if dump loses the 2020 election it would be his followers instigating insurrection. Now I’m not so sure. The widespread demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis cops tells me where the rage really is: not in fringe right wing lunatics (even though they rage, and are heavily armed) but with the majority of us decent people in cities large and small, who have been unalterably opposed to this fraudulent menace, this malignancy, this useless idiot – and who understand a second term spells the end of the United States.

Yes, dump is losing in the polls. I have no doubt the vast majority of us may vote him out. Will the votes count? I’m certain that he and his minions will try to steal another election via voter suppresion and other unconscionable means that decent people would never even think of, let alone actually do.

John Lewis: A Great American

Rep. John Lewis already had my deepest respect and admiration when he announced he would not attend the January 2017 inauguration of Trump.

“I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” he said, adding, “You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong.”

The Georgia democrat, first elected to the House of Representatives in 1986, died from pancreatic cancer on July 17 at the age of eighty.

He had my deepest respect and admiration not only for unimaginable acts of courage, but for his obvious integrity.

That courage – in the sense of functioning in spite of fear – was demonstrated repeatedly by Lewis and countless others during the civil rights era. He was among the “Freedom Riders” who in 1961 challenged a racist southern custom. Custom is too polite a word for it: communities across the south ignored a Supreme Court ruling (Boynton v. Virginia) that made it illegal to deny services at bus stations along Interstate routes due to race. Over a period of weeks, and in several deep south states, Freedom Riders used these “services” (waiting rooms, rest rooms) – or attempted to – and were attacked and beaten by white mobs, and arrested and jailed by racist cops. Buses were firebombed.

There’s a well-known photograph, quite sickening, of Lewis and another Freedom Rider, James Zwerg. It was taken shortly after both were brutally beaten at a Montgomery, AL bus station. They are battered and bloody. Zwerg also had some teeth knocked out.

In 1965 John Lewis was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in voting rights demonstrations in Selma, AL. These culminated in vicious attacks by mounted police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Ordered to disperse, demonstrators walked across that bridge anyway with the full expectation they would be beaten.

The cops also fired tear gas. “If you’ve ever been in tear gas, it makes you feel like, you just feel like giving up, you know,” John Lewis told Howell Raines in the 1970s. “I thought it was the end.” There’s a picture of Lewis on the ground, taken as one of the cops clubs him. “I was hit [in the head] almost in the same spot that I was hit on the Freedom Ride in 1961 by an officer, by a state trooper. This trooper just kept hitting.” He was hospitalized for three days with a brain concussion.

Meanwhile Trump was in a formative period of his own, learning to covet money, power, and himself above all else. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” as the Selma violence came to be known, John Lewis received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barrack Obama.

He also spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. So I’ll say it again: John Lewis already had my deep respect and admiration when he announced he would skip Trump’s inauguration.

“I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected," Lewis said shortly after the 2016 election. “And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

In late 2019, as the House debated Articles of Impeachment against Trump, Lewis told his colleagues they owed it to future generations to vote to impeach. “We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

Unfortunately the fix was in, and Trump wriggled out of conviction. He continues to debase whatever he touches. May he keep his big mouth shut, and his Twitter finger still, in the aftermath of the death of John Lewis, who unlike Trump is a truly great American.

General To Specific: We Knew This Was Coming

After the first Women’s March in 2017, when millions of people the world over demonstrated against the newly-sworn-in U.S. president, someone – possibly Stephen Colbert – quipped that never in all recorded history had one man been rejected by more women in one day than had Donald J. Trump.

Looking back to that period now, it seems almost harmless. The days immediately after the inauguration (the Women's March being the next day) were scary, but the threat was unfulfilled, if not altogether benign. Maybe that’s because it was still new, and because a lot of people still thought Trump might “grow into the job.”

One impeachment, one mishandled pandemic, and more than one sickening abuse of power later, that’s all gone. We have morphed from the general to the specific; from potential to consummation; from benign to malignant; from scary to downright terrifying.

Trump is now a cornered rat. Someone once said something about always betting on the cornered rat. I don’t remember the context.

Even before Trump took office there were riots in the streets of American cities: the very night, thanks to the electoral college, after he was elevated to the presidency. (He lost the 2016 election. He lost. We must never forget that.)

At that time I was among the last to brand Trump a fascist, in a flight of fancy I couldn’t resist calling Life in the Fascist Lane. How quaint. As the world witnessed in DC’s Lafayette Park on June 1, these early musings have also gone from general to specific.

I went to that first Women’s March, the Denver edition, and found myself unexpectedly inspired, if not optimistic. We were 100,000 strong. I may not really believe that the future is female. I believe it should be; that a world run by women would probably, probably, be more equitable (at least at first, since power corrupts, since ideals are seldom realized, etc etc).

Donald J. Trump. The J stands for Judas. He is utterly divorced from reality. That he must be removed from office is a given. That it will actually happen, in spite of what any survey says, is not.

Vote anyway. If you have not registered to vote, do so. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic party – or the Republican party, or the CPUSA, or the Socialst Party, or the Greens, or you-name-it. I don’t care for Joe Biden all that much. My vote is not so much for him as it is against Trump. It may be futile, but I shall cast that vote anyway. By mail.

Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by enforced isolation, dragging themselves maskless outdoors at dusk to howl – not at the moon and maybe not to each other, but to declare I am here! I am real! I am alive!

Or something like that.

Maybe I’m laying it on a little thick.

And maybe they aren’t the best minds of our generation. Not theirs, not yours, not mine. In fact most in this quasi-wolfpack are probably quite ordinary.

Yet they howl nightly into the wind. In the midst of our shared, enforced isolation, howling has become a cultural phenomenon.

Have you heard it in your town? Weather permitting, it happens here every night at eight. In an era where the nearest clock is your phone, synchronization is not a problem. The first distant yips are heard at precisely 8pm, and quickly swell into a howling chorus (though some nights are more active than others). The howling is well-distributed, spread far and wide, though by no means is it universal.

Howling is not in my nature, so I don’t do it. But I walk out on the back deck each night to listen.

Different howling styles are identifiable. Some people just open up and let loose a sustained, single-note cry. Others imitate our wolfean brethren: ow-ow-oooowwwww! Still other forms are recognizable: yips and yaps and barks.

One might expect a few comprehensible words (I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!), and someone somewhere must actually verbalize. But I’ve not heard any.

Meanwhile, the communal ritual during this generation-defining health crisis continues.

______

With apologies to Allen Ginsberg