Greetings from Ephesus (or Maybe Rome)

T

oday’s saint is Luke, according to the Roman Calendar, anyway. “The glorious Evangelist Saint Luke was natiue of the city of Antioch, son to noble and rich parents, and from his childhood inclined to the study of good learning, and all vertue,” according to Pedro de Ribadeneira (The Lives of the Saints, St. Omers, 1669). “His perseuering all his life a Virgin, was a signal testimony of his honesty. He studied much eloquence and other sciences but more particularly Physick which he practised: and Saint Paul calls him the most beloued Physitian.”

There’s a lot to unpack in these claims, especially considering that the only historical fact we have about Luke is that Paul of Tarsus mentions him in a letter to Philemon as one of five people sending him greetings. Everything beyond this belongs to hypotheses piled on top of rickety foundations.

The first notable addition came late in the first century, when somebody took it upon himself to write a letter in Paul’s name ostensibly to the Colossians. Taking the letter to Philemon as model, Paul’s imitator expanded on it in its conclusion. Where Philemon has:

Epaphras, who is my fellow prisoner for Christ Jesus, sends you his greeting; and Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers, send theirs

Colossians reads:

My fellow prisoner, Aristarchus, sends you his greeting, and Barnabas’s cousin, Mark, sends his. (You have received directions about him. If he comes to you, make him welcome.) Joshua, who is called Justus, also sends his greeting. These are the only converts from Judaism who have worked with me for the kingdom of God; I have found them a great comfort. Epaphras, who is one of yourselves, sends you his greeting. He is a servant of Christ Jesus, and is always most earnest in your behalf in his prayers, praying that you may stand firm, with a matured faith and with a sure conviction of all that is in accordance with God’s will. I can bear testimony to the deep interest he takes in you, as well as in the followers at Laodicea and at Hierapolis. Luke, our dear doctor, sends you his greeting, and Demas sends his.

Are these new items of information about Epaphras, Mark, and Luke derived from solid tradition? Or are they just corroborative details, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing production (to borrow from Pooh-Bah)? Personally, I lean towards the former possibility, given that the new composition was probably created within living memory of the original, but there’s no real way of telling at this distance, and the audacity of forgers knows no bounds.

So we now have Dr. Luke rather than just plain Luke. For what that’s worth. I suppose we could examine what a physician in the Roman era might be expected to know, and from that build a generic picture of the good doctor. I don’t say it’s a waste of time entirely—but it is guesswork built on an uncertain basis. The other element—ἀγαπητὸς—could mean anything. It could be as meaningless as the word “esteemed” often is in English—the esteemed Dr. Luke sends his regards—or an indication of high regard—the extremely popular doctor, Luke, salutes you. Assuming that Paul’s imitator intended these new details to resonate with his readers, we may suppose that they believed—or would be gratified to learn—that Luke was a beloved figure.

With the next development of this historical snowball we are clearly in artistic verisimilitude country. Some second-century author, whose style suspiciously resembles that of a distinguished pillar of the Great Church, took it upon himself three letters in Paul’s name—two of them addressed to Timothy, and one to Titus. In 2 Timothy (4:10–13 to be exact) we find the following wonderful farrago:

Do your utmost to come to me soon; for Demas, in his love for the world, has deserted me. He has gone to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. There is no one but Luke with me. Pick up Mark on your way, and bring him with you, for he is useful to me in my work. I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus. Bring with you, when you come, the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments.

I love the mentions of the cloak and the parchments; Polycarp (or whoever it was) had a delightful imagination. “There is no one but Luke with me” he has Paul say with some pathos. So Dr. Luke, the much-loved physician, stayed with Paul when Demas, Crescens, and Titus had all deserted him.

Our next stop in this trip is Irenaeus, writing late in the second century. He tells us that “Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him.” This is the first reference to Dr. Luke being a writer as well; he is presumably the author then of the two-volume work addressed to Theophilus that appears in the New Testament as The Gospel According to Luke [volume 1] and The Acts of the Apostles [volume 2]. (If there were subsequent volumes they have not come down to us.) Raymond E. Brown in his introduction to the New Testament gives this description of the author as determined from his work:

An educated Greek-speaker and skilled writer who knew the Jewish Scriptures in Greek and who was not an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry. … Probably not raised a Jew, but perhaps a convert to Judaism before he became a Christian. Not a Palestinian.

There is nothing in this description that would either confirm or contradict its attribution to Dr. Luke, which is about where Raymond E. Brown leaves it. If Luke and Acts are his work, however, we are in a position to deduce quite a bit about him based on his own writings. But again, it is worth noting, to do so we put ourselves in the position of piling conjecture upon conjecture.

Our final stop on this tour will be a prolog written to the gospel, possibly as early as the second century, but more likely a couple of centuries further on down the road (considerably abridged here):

The holy Luke is an Antiochene, Syrian by race, physician by trade. As his writings indicate, of the Greek speech he was not ignorant. He was a disciple of the apostles, and afterward followed Paul until his confession, serving the Lord undistractedly, for he neither had any wife nor procreated sons. [A man] of eighty–four years, he slept in Thebes, the metropolis of Boeotia, full of the holy spirit. He … in parts of Achaea wrote down this gospel…. And indeed afterward this same Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles.

So, there you have it. That’s not really the end of the road; in later centuries we will learn that Luke was also a painter, as well as a close confidant of Jesus’ mother Mary. Not bad for a guy whose only real claim to fame is that he sent his greetings to a fellow named Philemon a couple thousand years ago. It’s better than you or I are going to do anyway.

Summer of Haight (opening) [1982]

[From Cellophane Visions, written 17/18 October 1982]

I

t was the 14^th of January in 1967 that the greed and stupidity of the HIP merchants and psychedelic hucksters of the Haight got it together to blow the lid off and make San Fantasia the adventureland Mecca for all the middle-class high schoolers who wanted to enjoy a brief fling into the exciting world of play poverty. They called it the Human Be-In. Like all the other events in which Finnegan played no part, it was lame. When Finnegan thought of how it could have been, he was ready to weep for the arrogance and disgusting flatulence of it all. All it was was a chance for the would-be radicals and so-called hipsters to indulge in a little public mutual masturbation, but it was enough.

Finnegan was slow in the realization of what was going down. The Gutter Free Food program was taking up so much of his time that he did not have time to put the promoters of the Summer-of-Love hoax in their place, which was weighted down with cement at the bottom of the San Fantasia Bay, but instead was merely content to let events take their course.

Finnegan had to wonder just how long these hip radical escapees from the middle-class could keep on kidding themselves. He thought of warning their intended dupes of their mendacity, of using his position as a counter-cultural folk hero to short-circuit the fast-buck ripoff artists who passed themselves off as the “leaders” of the new movement, but he felt that his anonymity, his reputation of never seeking the media limelight, was more important. He merely smiled to himself, and continued hustling the stuff that was needed to make the Free Food thing work. If the lemmings of the high schools of America wanted to throw themselves into San Fantasia, that was their lookout. Finnegan has always believed in letting people dig their own graves, if that’s what they want to do.

In those days, when he was trying to finish up high school without destroying his mind, Stephen Farnham began to picture himself as a character in a Jack Kerouac book. The long gray roads were calling him, the seagull cries of Heceta, Greyton and Cauldron on the Wyano coast, the mysterious beckoning of the Cascadia desert towns, Rattlesnake and Death Gulch and Desolation, the names like tombstones under the dry sun, and last the siren call of Fornicalia. San Fantasia. Everybody was going to San Fantasia that year. The secret was out, and all the hip people were hanging out in the Haight-Ashtoreth district. The Cosmic Park regulars all knew the inside story; smuggled copies of The Oracle circulated from hand to hand, each as precious as parchment hand-written copies of the Tao Te Ching, and each told o the marvelous mystic world where L.S.D. and marijuana flowed like wine, and where love was free.

Stephen had experienced the fantastic way that acid had of making the world into a mixed up salad of colors exploding across the retina like phosphorescent paint splashed across living flesh in the warm wet night. But was that all that it was about? Saruman spoke of metaphysical highs, mysterious planes of mystic consciousness, and God. Saruman spoke of God quite a bit in those days, but Stephen never knew what he meant by it.

Saruman was one of the people who never slowed down, rockets streaming through the psyche and gone already before there was time to register their passing. He had gotten his name from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. He had never read the trilogy; he just liked the sounds. Saruman sounded hip to him, like the sort of name a wizard should have. He called his place Perelandra. There were always a dozen or so people staying there, crashing out on the living-room floor or standing around drinking beer in the kitchen. Like Stephen he had taken to sleeping out in Cosmic Park himself; the two of them would smoke dope and talk until the sun rose. [17/18 Oc 1982]

Depression and Insomnia (1991)

[passage from my journal, 16 October 1991, 4:05 a.m. PDT]

N

ight horrors upon me again; no point in struggling I guess, but I hate every minute of it. Bad bad bad bad bad bad. Self-pity I suppose if there is such a thing, but it doesn’t feel like pity at all—not for myself, not for anyone. Not for anything. It just feels bad. Pointless, empty, unreal—a sharp pain high in the chest, sort of above and behind the lungs, and nothing at all where the soul ought to be. Just fucking pointless is all. Is this what they mean when they talk about feeling sorry for yourself? Sorrow is what you feel when you’ve lost something, and I know that feeling, even if not intensely. And as I think about it, who can you feel sorrow for except yourself? You can feel empathy or even sympathy with someone else’s sorrow, but you cannot feel their sorrow. If you feel sorrow, you feel it for yourself, inevitably. But this bad feeling I have, the one I call depression, is not sorrow. It is a different bad feeling. Sorrow heals, but depression is more like a sorrow that’s become infected. Sorrow is positive; depression is negative. Depression is like darkness, like numbness. Sorrow is something; depression is nothing. If you’re filled with sorrow at least you’re alive; to be filled with depression is like saying that a hole is full of emptiness. Damn it to fucking hell. [16 Oc 1991]

Original Motor Chums Sketch Continued (1970)

[A continuation of the original Motor Chums (then Moter Boys) sketch, written 15 October 1970.]

“I should have known you’d be a coward, Tom Wilshire,” Alvin sneered. “You and the rest of your gang. Well, I’ll get even with you, you white livered sneak.”

“Get even with me for what?” remarked Tom Wilshire softly.

“You motherfucker! I haven’t forgotten that cigar…”

“Well, really,” admonished Tom, “You knew that smoking was against the school rules.”

“So what! You were smoking too.”

“That’s irrelevant. The mere fact that others were breaking the rules was no reason for you to do so also. The rules were meant to be obeyed…”

“Don’t be so goddamned goody-goody. You didn’t have any business giving me an exploding cigar! I might have been killed.”

“I give you an exploding cigar! Hell, no! It was your guilty conscience, the knowledge that you were doing wrong, that made that cigar explode. That’s the scientific explanation.”

“God, you’re a bastard, Tom Wilshire,” snarled Alvin.

“Besides, the existence of that cigar is doubtful in the first place,” interposed Harry Fletcher. “You cannot show us the cigar now; we only have your word for it that there ever was such a cigar. Your perception of events differs from ours, and since events only occur within the mind, the events that are real for you may be fantasy for us. Perhaps for you that cigar exploded, but it didn’t explode for us.”

“You didn’t light it, that’s why! I’m gonna report you all!”

“Well, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” laughed Tom Wilshire. “I know some teachers who would find an account of the conversation we just had about the game very interesting.”

“Besides that, there’s the metaphysical question of whether that cigar ever had an actual existence in reality.”

“What Harry means,” amplified Ned, “Is that there are five of us who didn’t see the cigar and only one who did.”

“You’re outnumbered,” said Tom.

“And surrounded,” said Harry.

“And who’s dat teacher gwine to believe, a good kid lak Tom or white trash lak you,” put in Ersatz.

“You stinking n-gg-r,” snarled Alvin, “you keep out of this.”

“And anyway, if you tell anyone about that cigar, I’m gonna beat the hell out of you,” put in Dick Trefoil.

“Dat goes double fo’ me,” shouted Ersatz.

“Now we don’t want any violence,” said Tom. “But really, Alvin, that remark about Ersatz stinking was uncalled for. We demand an apology.”

“Yeah! Ersatz don’t stink any more than any other coon,” said Dick.

(“Thank you fo’ dem kind remarks. I ain’t never gwine to forget dem,” said Ersatz.)

“I won’t apologize to any fucking n-gg-r,” shouted Alvin, and he turned to run.

But the others had formed a circle around him. Alvin saw at once that there was no way to leave without a fight and he was too great a coward to fight five at once, especially if two of them were Dick Trefoil and Ersatz Simpson. But like all cowards, he possessed a certain shrewdness that allowed him to get himself out of difficulties such as the one he now found himself in.

“All right, what do you want?” he demanded.

“We want you to apologize to Ersatz,” said Tom Wilshire.

“Or to be more precise,” added Harry Fletcher, “we want you to sign this written apology here.”

Alvin Dodge looked around him desperately. He saw no chance of help coming. He turned back to the Moter Boys and said, “Let me see that paper.”

Tom Wilshire handed him the apology he was to sign. Alvin took it ungraciously and began to read it, but before he was even half-way finished he grew red in the face and hurled the document to the ground. “I wouldn’t sign that fucking paper to save my life,” he exclaimed.

“A pity,” remarked Harry Fletcher.

“Speaking of fucking—” said Ned.

“Yes,” said Tom, how would it look if we were to tell—say—your parents—what movie that was you really went to Friday night when you said you were watching Mickey Mouse Meets Frankenstein.”

The bully went white. “My God,” he gasped, “they’d cut off my allowance.” He paused. “You dirty sneak, if you tell—”

“Nobody said anything about telling,” said Harry. “Tom was only speaking hypothetically.”

“So, if you sign this paper, there’s no reason why anyone should know where you were Friday,” said Tom, handing Alvin the paper after picking it up from the ground where Alvin had thrown it.

“Shut up you bastards,” groaned that lad. “Where’s a pen?” Quickly the business was completed and Tom pocketed the paper.

“Now, get outa here,” said Dick Trefoil, hurling the bully out of the circle.

“You’ll pay for this,” screamed Alvin back.

“Remember what happened last time you said that,” called Tom, and then the whole group collapsed in laughter.

Finally Ned said, “Hey, Tom. Why didn’t you go along with Alvin Dodge’s plan? You know that we have to win that game or we’re in a hole. Why didn’t—”

Tom Wilshire interrupted. “Have you ever known me to do anything wrong since I became leader of the Moter Boys?”

The smaller lad replied, “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“Did I ever do anything stupid?”

“Well, no.”

“Don’t I always know what I’m doing?”

“I guess so.”

“Well then, there you are.”

“But why didn’t you want to follow Alvin’s scheme?”

“I had my reasons.”

“What reasons,” demanded Ned impatiently.

“All right, lesson one. First, Alvin is not very bright, and his scheme wasn’t foolproof.”

“He does better’n me in school,” interrupted Dick Trefoil.

“So?” said Tom. “Second, most probably he just wanted to get us in trouble. No doubt he would have reported us as soon as we carried out the plan. Third, the fool didn’t notice that Mr. Deraton was listening when he proposed it. Of course I had to object. My God!” [15 Oc 1970]

Slice of Life (1996)

[Passage from my journal, 11 October 1996 (4:55 pm PDT)]

I

 rose early and screwed around some with the old word-mangler here. Read the paper when it came—a boy who dreamed of being a herpe­tologist had been strangled by his pet python—and talked with my brother when he came [through to leave his dog off]. I was letting Glide [the dog] out to play in the back­yard after my brother left when the phone rang. This turned out to be someone from Unger and Associates (or something like that) to harass me about my student loan. Infinitely depressed, I headed out for the bus.

There was an older couple from Las Vegas on the bus who were heading for Pioneer Square and seemed so impressed by our public transportation system. There’s nothing like it in Vegas, they said, where the busses only run on the strip to get people from one casino to the next or whatever—and now they have people-movers running above the streets to accomplish the same thing.

I hit the library, which was interesting in a way. I found some information on William M. Turn­er in the 1880 Soundex, and learned a little about this new auto­mated renewal service and about this business of running out of renewals on books.  And then after that I headed out to Powell’s where I struck out completely on everything, though I did buy a book of parodies, as well as seeing a book on Rocky and Bullwin­kle.

I got home to find that GH had dropped by, bring­ing the final settlement from the estate. He had broken his collarbone while in England, at the same time he totaled his rented car. GH had come and gone, but he had stayed long enough to say that that tree growing by the driveway is a dangerous menace and should be removed (it is a fast-growing pest that does damage to foundations and so on). I went out and cut down that damn tree, wor­ried a bit about the student loan, and then came up here to write in my journal.

Original Motor Chums Sketch [early October 1970]

[Written before 10 October 1970. In later incarnations the Moter Boys became the Motor Chums, Wilbur Medley High became Horatio Alger High, and Central Grumley High became Jefferson High.]

“W

e just have to win tonight’s game,” said short Ned Eliot to his friends.

“I know that,” replied Tom Wilshire, the leader of the Moter Boys, as Dick Trefoil had named the gang.

“How we gonna do it, Tom?” asked the last-named lad.

“We’ll just have to do our best and pray for success,” interposed Harry Fletcher.

“Ise gwine fight till I drop to win dis game, and nobody’s gwine to stop me, nuther,” stoutly insisted Ersatz Simpson, a colored boy whose eccentricities of speech provided much amusement for his comrades.

When the laughter had died away, Tom Wilshire said, “Sure, sure, Ersatz, I know you’ll carry the water bucket to the best of your ability, but winning this game’s going to take some athletic skills.”

Just then they were joined by another lad, Alvin Dodge, who had no reason to like our young heroes as you will remember if you read the previous book in the series, The Moter Boys and the Exploding Cigar Trick.

“I heard you talkin’ about the game,” said that young lad quietly.

“Yes, you certainly did,” replied Tom.

“Well, you know it would mean a lot to me and my friends if Wilbur Medley High wins this game.”

“I didn’t know you were so concerned about school spirit,” said Harry.

“Oh, shit, you know why I want our school to win,” said Alvin, “and it hasn’t got anything to do with school spirit.”

“Ok, ok,” said Tom, “I’m sure of the purity of your motives. But what about it? I mean, why come to us?”

“Hell, everybody knows you’re the best player on our team.”

“I’m going to do my best pitching. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Hell, no! Look, I have a plan. Fred Aaron’s their pitcher, and he’s the only good guy Central Grumley’s got.”

“So?”

“So if he’s out of the game, Grumley hasn’t got a chance.”

“All right.”

“Now, I’ve got a plan. Before the game, as a gesture of fellowship and good will and all that shit you invite Fred to have a Coke with your side, free.”

“Free!”

“I’ll give you the nickel.”

“Ok.”

“But how’s that gonna win the game for us?” asked Dick.

“When you give him the drink, put this powder in it, and kggggsh, Fred’s out of it.”

“You want me to poison Fred?”

“Not poison him. Knock him out for a while. Long enough so we can win the game.”

“I don’t want anything to do with your reprehensible plan,” shouted Tom. “It’s dishonest, sneaky, and I don’t like it.” [early October 1970]

Profiles in Cowardice: The Susan Collins Chapter

W

hen I was in high school history class we used to get shown episodes from a show called Profiles in Courage, which was based on a book by the same name written by John F. Kennedy. Well, his name was on the thing anyway, though I see by Wikipedia that his contribution may actually have been fairly minor. Wikipedia says that “The book profiles senators who defied the opinions of their party and constituents to do what they felt was right and suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity because of their actions.” That’s how I remember it, though I haven’t read it in decades, and I don’t know what I’d think of it today. I definitely took issue with some of the episodes of the tv show we saw in class—but my high school history class was supposed to do that—make you challenge the material and evaluate the stories presented as history.

Now imagine its bizarro counterpart—Profiles in Cowardice, with, say, Spiro Agnew’s name on the title page. The book would presumably profile senators who kowtowed to the opinions of their party rather than doing what was right and reaped enormous acclaim and popularity because of their actions. The gutless cretins who backed GWBush’s attack on Iraq could have a chapter, along with the late Senator McCain. Susan Collins would fit right in. Not that I expected anything different from her. Today’s Republicans are a different breed from those of the past; I’d abandon the party myself except that I don’t want to give the motherfuckers the satisfaction. Why the hell didn’t the Anti-Americans start their own goddamn party, instead of ruining the party of Lincoln and TR?

Ah, well, let the dead bury their own dead, and move on. It was nice while it lasted, but America is dead, and the zombie Trumpenproletariat infest the land, eating the brains of others since they have none of their own. Move on—there’s nothing to see here.

Hovenweep Excursion [1986]

[passage from my journal, 4–5 October 1986]

S

omewhere short of the Colorado/Utah line TJ and I stopped because we were worried about the battery. We looked under the hood without accomplishing anything; and then this bearded character stopped to give us a hand. He said that what we were describing was normal for the car—so we decided to set off, with renewed confidence. Actually we decided to wait until R and M showed up, figuring that we had waited there long enough anyway—we might as well wait the rest of the time. I think it took about twenty minutes altogether before they showed up, but show up they did, and we took off together, the pickup in the lead. At some point in Utah we pulled aside to let some vehicle go by, and at that point we ended up following M’s car.

Utah 128, midday. We left Interstate 70 at Cisco, and soon found ourselves in a region of red rock walls and towers, alongside the Colorado River. From the maps it looks as if this is one of the few sections of the Colorado River that is visible from a road, and in a way it’s only technically part of the Colorado; it was originally called the Grand River, and then might be regarded as a mere tributary to the Colorado River. The Dolores (which we traveled alongside coming back) empties into the Colorado about the point we joined it, and I guess at one time that was the main course of the river (until the end of the Pliocene, anyway).

As near as I can figure it, the red rocks these rivers are cutting through were deposited here during the Triassic era, when the area was a low lying floodplain, after the retreat of the sea that had covered it during Permian times. (Moenkopi Formation)

Fisher Towers. M and R, who were in the lead at that point, turned off at Fisher Towers, and we had lunch there. These are bizarre columns of rock, shaped like gigantic chess pieces. F. A. Barnes says about them:

This type of rock tends to be eroded by rain into vertical towers with surfaces convoluted because of layers of differing hardness. Generally, caprocks, or harder uppermost slabs of rock, help rain erosion shape the slender spires.

The Fisher Towers, near Utah 128 to the northeast of Moab Valley, are outstanding examples of this type of spire.

I looked at a tower shaped like the Red Queen fairly closely—it was on the way to the toilets. Layers of fairly consistent red stuff were divided by some conglomerate that looked like solidified river gravel. There was a layer of harder green stuff—God knows what it was to start with. M thought it might be volcanic ash. It looked to me like (say) alternating riverbottom and riverbank, or better yet, lakebottom and lakebank. Anyway, it was fascinating to see, and made me wish I knew more about the geology of the whole place.

We had lunch there—TJ had packed eight slices of bread, some lunchmeat and some cheese, so we made sandwiches out of them and R and/or M came up with sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips. We ate by a small dropoff and inadvertently fed the ants bits of potato chips, which they lugged off down the slope. When we left, we were leading again.

Arches. According to the maps we passed near Arches National Park (it must have been across the Colorado River to our right) but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. All that sticks in my mind are miles and miles of red spires and walls and towers.

Moab. After the miles of uninhabited land Moab looked a lot like civilization to me. It’s a fairly substantial town for being located in the middle of nowhere, and I don’t know what fuels it. TJ says it’s an old uranium mining town. Anyway, whatever the story on it is, we zipped right through it down US 163/191 into the Moab-Spanish valley. Although Pack Creek appears to run along the valley floor, the valley apparently was not created primarily by erosion, but rather by the dissolution of underlying salt layers and the subsequent collapse of the rock layers above them. The red bluffs south of the valley are apparently Entrada Sandstone, formed out of desert dunes that covered the area in the Jurassic.

Newspaper Rock. We turned west on Utah 211 to see Newspaper Rock, a State Historic Monument. There are a large number of petroglyphs there, scraped onto the face of a flat rock protected by an overhanging rock shelf. I took my first pictures of the trip there, some (I’m fairly sure) with the lenscap still on. Some of these petroglyphs are believed to go back as far as 8000 AE [=2000 BCE]; the interpretive material at the site conservatively observed that the images cannot be dated. This is safe, but not altogether true—evidence of style and content, while not as “safe” as radiocarbon dating or dendrochronology, could certainly provide some indication of date. Whatever the story is, there is certainly some fascinating material there—a ladder with hands, for instance, and seven-toed footprints. Some one had scratched his name there as recently as 1954, right under another name dated 1902—both well above the main area of pictures. When we left the Newspaper Rock Historic site R and TJ changed places, to give TJ a rest from driving, and R drove the pickup from then on.

US 163. We continued onward down US 163 through Monticello and Blanding. I don’t remember what the country looked like through there exactly, except that it was sunny and hot and dry. Somewhere after Blanding R began to get worried about the gasoline situation, but we didn’t attempt to do anything until after we had passed Hatch—this of course after we had turned off US 163 at the Hatch turnoff. We stopped and debated what to do. TJ was for turning back and getting the truck gassed up, but M was for going on and sending her car back to bring back gas if necessary. We ended up going on to the campground first, as it was getting dark, or rather it would be getting dark soon, and we wanted to get set up.

Hovenweep Campground. Considering that it is October, and that there was hardly anybody there when we went back in july, the campground was crowded. Quite a few people there, though a number of them did not appear to hang around to see the ruins the next day. I don’t know what the story was—some of them seemed to be classes of some kind, but others seemed perhaps merely to be retired folk, or something of that kind. M at once began building a fire and getting supper ready while TJ and R set up the tent. I helped lug things from the car and then went up the hill to see about paying for the campground. This was one of those places where you put the money in an envelope and shove it in a slot that (as far as one can tell) feeds straight into the earth. Later I looked about at some of the other cars, but none of them seemed to have camping permits—were we fools to pay? And yet Hovenweep is one of the better sites, and it was still October…. Maybe these other people were legitimate—some of them seemed like maybe they were ranger trainees or something. Whatever,

Anyway, we ate hamburger steak and potatoes and onions and green peppers that M cooked in foil on the campfire, and we drank whatever was available. The sky was very clear—we watched Venus, then Jupiter, then Mars and Saturn and Antares slowly appear. Mercury was supposed to be visible, but I couldn’t find it at all. (I never have seen Mercury, not to know what it was, anyway.)

Many Stars. It was so clear outside that we decided to sleep out, and we set up our sleeping bags beside the tent. The people in the campspace next to us stayed up talking for a couple of hours after we had retired, but then we retired early. We only had the people on one side to cope with, luckily, because there was no campspace to the other side of us; there was a space there that marked the start of a trail to the Holly ruins. When the sun set, Arcturus was still visible, Saturn was visible in Scorpio, Mars near Sagittarius, and Jupiter somewhere near Pisces. The summer triangle was directly overhead, and it was easy to see Sagitta and Vulpecula inside it. We were facing east, and Pegasus dominated the sky there; I also specifically noted Pisces, Perseus, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus; it was probably about this interval that I traced out the length of Draco; I know I’ve seen its stars before, but that’s not the same thing as seeing the constellation. When I woke up again after an interval of sleep (it has to have been around 11:30, though I didn’t look at my watch) Orion was lying on his side on the eastern horizon, only about half risen. Auriga and Taurus were also visible. The Big Dipper was low on the northern horizon, and I could see the stars of Camelopardalis close by Perseus. Pegasus was directly overhead. As I awoke at intervals (it was cold) during the night Orion got higher and higher in the sky, Jupiter disappeared behind me to the west, Gemini and Sirius and Procyon showed up, and I could see the stars that in the morning when I looked them up turned out to be Lepus and Monoceros. I looked for Cancer, but clouds moved in then and obscured it. And the sun rose and I had to go to the bathroom, so I got up and took off for the facilities provided. Weird pink and purple clouds hung over the eastern horizon where the sun was coming up. One of the best night’s seeing I’ve ever had—no moon at all.

Hovenweep Ruins. We got up and breakfasted on bacon and zuchini-bread, and then headed off to look at the ruins. I had to go back for my camera, as I had forgotten it, but otherwise things went okay. R and I caught up with TJ and M at Tower Point, where I took some pictures through its windows. We then headed off down the Twin Towers trail. I think I took a picture through the natural tunnel, and we all paused at the Petroglyphs to try to guess their meaning, if any. One of the three birds had been extensively vandalized. We stopped at this tower base built up on a boulder, that’s also clearly visible from Tower Point, but for some reason isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Trail Guide. We stopped at Round Tower, and climbed about inside Eroded Boulder House and Twin Towers. I think we were looking over Eroded Boulder House when this bizarre group of twelve (their count) or thirteen (our count) people came marching cheerily by, reciting the lines from Monty Python’s Holy Grail while marching the wrong way down the trail and ignoring the ruins. They disappeared while passing the petroglyphs without even a first glance. Unit Type House was the most interesting to me, with its Kiva and holes for determining the solstices.

Afterword. It was amazing crawling through the old Anasazi ruins and all that—got some good pictures too. On our way back we drove through Unaweep canyon. Ten or fifteen million years ago it used to be the Colorado river bed, apparently; then the river changed course and left us an amazing canyon—steep walls, bizarre towers—the whole bit.

Celestial Memories

I

t was on this date in 1957 that Sputnik was launched, and for several months it orbited overhead before burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. I remember distinctly seeing it go overhead, eerie and silent in the dusk, though I somehow expected to hear it beeping in the night sky. It was at that moment, or soon after, that I decided to learn Russian—though in point of fact I never got much further than the alphabet and a few random words.

It’s possible that what I saw wasn’t the satellite itself, but its booster rocket, which according to some sources orbited with it and was brighter than the object itself. About that I don’t know. During the days in the late fifties, when we lived in North Portland and I went to a school in which whites were a minority, I saw a number of bright objects in the night sky. I watched a meteor go overhead, looking for all the world like a beam of a flashlight on the dome of the night sky. I saw the multicolored curtains of light that were the aurora borealis; I saw the craters of the moon through a telescope belonging to the kid who lived across the street from us; I saw the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through my father’s binoculars. I learned how to find Polaris by using the bright stars in the Big Dipper, and how to follow the tail of the bear to find Arcturus. I learned to recognize Cassiopeia and Cepheus, Orion and Cygnus, the Pleiades and Sirius. I saw weather balloons and airplanes, but I never saw a flying saucer, though I had high hopes of it for many years.

But Sputnik I remember with special fondness. That wasn’t just something that happened to be up there—it was something that human beings had put in the sky, something that would not be there without human ingenuity and will. It was a sign of what people could do, for good or for ill, and an omen, or portent, of things to come.

Or so it seemed.

End of Captain Jack (Guest Post by Edward Fox) [1873]

[Edward Fox’s account of the execution of the leaders of the Modoc insurgents, 3 October, 1873]

Fort Klamath, Oregon, 

Oct. 3, 1873.  [By telegraph.]

Shortly after reveille this morning I accompanied Lieutenant Taylor to the guardhouse, and after securing the services of Scar-face Charley as an interpreter, we went into the large cell and informed Barncho and Slolux of the commutation of their sentence. They did not show the slightest emotion at their escape from the jaws of death, and Barncho simply remarked, “It is good.” Captain Jack and Schonchin were in the next cell, and I walked in to see them. Captain Jack was looking very much pulled down, and had evidently not given up all hopes of a reprieve. Somebody asked him for his autograph, and he mechanically made a number of crosses on some sheets of writing paper that were furnished for the purpose. Boston Charley and Black Jim were then brought out from their cells and the blacksmith set to work, and, after knocking off the shackles that bound them together, riveted a new set on each man. We were then called back into Captain Jack’s cell, as he wished to know what the writing was for, and through the medium of Boston Charley he was told it was simply to have some remembrance of his handiwork. He was evidently rather disappointed, as he still had hopes of being pardoned. Shortly after eight A.M. the troops were paraded in front of their quarters, and at half-past eight A.M. the procession formed in front of the guard house that was to escort them to the gallows.

The howls of the women relatives of the condemned were then distinctly heard as they came from the stockade. The other prisoners—Curley-Headed Doctor and the Lost River murderers—were then removed from the guard house to the stockade. At half-past nine the wagon and four horses were drawn up in front of the guardhouse, and the condemned were brought out. Black Jim got in first, followed by Boston Charley, Schonchin and Captain Jack. The great chief looked rather sick, and had to be helped into the cart. The drums then rolled out the funeral march, and the procession moved on to the gallows. The cavalry led, with the infantry on guard around the wagon. At ten minutes to ten the wagon halted behind the scaffold and they got out. Boston Charley and Black Jim mounted the stairs first and were placed on the left hand side of the platform, facing north. Captain Jack came up next and was evidently very weak, requiring assistance to get up, and Schonchin came last. Captain Jack took the position on the extreme right, with Schonchin next, Black Jim next and Boston Charley on the extreme left. They were then all seated, and the four men on duty proceeded to pinion their arms and legs. The latter were fastened just above the knees. Captain Jack wore a striped linen shirt and a pair of gray pants. Schonchin wore a dark blue shirt and army pants, and both Black Jim and Boston Charley were in the soldiers' clothes they had stripped from the bodies of those killed during the war. A company of cavalry and infantry were drawn up in the front of the square, and a company of infantry and light battery artillery occupied the right of the square. About five hundred Klamaths then came up, led by their chiefs, and squatted on the ground at the north side of the square. Mrs. [Louisa] Boddy and her daughter [Kate Schira], and the widows of some of the settlers murdered on Lost River, occupied a prominent position on the right. They sat on the front seat of a high wagon.

At five minutes past ten A.M. Colonel Hoge, who was acting as provost marshal, walked behind the prisoners and inspected the strength of their pinions.

Oliver Applegate and Dave Hill, the interpreters, then explained to the condemned the sentence and the crimes of which they were found guilty. Lieutenant Colonel Hoge made a final inspection of the condemned and then went down the rear stairs of the platform. General Wheaton and the officers of the garrison then formed in line in front of the gallows and the two prisoners Barncho and Slolux, whose sentence had been commuted, were also marched to the front with their backs to the gallows and facing Lieutenant Kinsbury, who then proceeded to read the charges and findings of the military commission, the approval at Washington and the commutation of the sentence in regard to Barncho and Slolux. There were, besides the five hundred Klamath Indians, some one hundred citizens present. Many of the latter had ridden two or three hundred miles to witness this execution.

The reading of the sentence took up about twelve minutes of the time. The sun was shining brightly on the backs of the condemned, and for a moment there was dead silence, occasionally broken by a wailing from the timber on the right. The Post Chaplain stood with his prayerbook open behind General Wheaton, and Post Surgeon McElderry stood on the right of the line. The correspondents of the different journals represented were scattered around, holding their horses, and ready to start for their ninety-mile ride. There was considerable competition among the newspapers, as there is only one wire at Jacksonville, and the coursers must have a race for it. This despatch will be carried by three men, riding thirty miles, and changing horses every ten miles, and they expect to ride the ninety in seven hours. At fourteen minutes past ten o'clock A.M. the reading of the sentence was concluded, and Colonel Hoge reported to General Wheaton.

The Post Chaplain then advanced into the centre of the square, and read an appropriate service for the occasion. The four condemned men squatted down on their haunches, seated on the solid platform, with their feet resting on the hinged part, which was so designed as to fall at the cutting of a single rope.

At eighteen minutes past ten Colonel Hoge advanced and mounted the rear steps of the platform, and at a signal the ropes were adjusted. Private Eugene Anderson put the rope and cap on Captain Jack, Corporal J. H. Killen on Schonchin and private R. Wilton on Boston Charley and Black Jim. Boston Charley and Black Jim then took a drink of water, but both Schonchin and Captain Jack declined. Private Anderson cut some of Captain Jack’s hair off, as it was very long and interfered with the rope. Some of Schonchin’s and Black Jim’s hair was also cut. At twenty-one minutes past ten the black caps were adjusted, the condemned men still cool and collected. The four were then stood up and for a few moments everything was perfectly quiet. The condemned, though in instant expectation of death, were perfectly collected and quiet, and not a muscle moved. At twenty-five minutes past ten Colonel Hoge, who was leaning on the back rail of the platform, dropped his handkerchief. Corporal Thomas Ross, of the Twelfth infantry, raised his hatchet, cut the rope, and the four criminals were launched into eternity.

Everything worked perfectly, and the arrangements reflect the highest credit on Mr. Fields, the post carpenter, under whose orders the gallows was built. Captain Jack and Black Jim died easily, but Schonchin and Boston Charley both twitched considerably.

Bleak Moment [1995]

[A passage from my 1995 journal]

M

aybe this is really a Black Journal entry, I don’t know, but it’s 3:45 on a late sunday night—literally, of course, and I always have to be literal, a goddamn monday morning—and I feel that old sense of LoS—Like on Sunday. Like on Sunday. The grimmest, most barren part of the week. I don't really know why except that I’m too tired to sleep and I can’t breathe and every­thing looks suddenly hopeless. Not suddenly hopeless; just like it's always been, except that for the moment the cover has been whisked away and I can see the hopelessness that always existed underneath it. I just watched something called Angels in the Outfield and as it ends I feel something of that same sense I felt years ago contemplating the end of Make Way For Ducklings. Disillusion, I guess, the sense that one gets when watching the Christmas Tree burn after New Years. [1/2 Oc 1995]

October Reflections [1991]

[Passage from my journal, 1 October 1991]

I

t’s October already, and it only feels like a day or two has gone by since I last wrote, but it’s been over a week. Do we care? Summer is back, hot days but cooler nights. This has got to be about the end of it, however, since the year is so far advanced. It’s really only beginning to look like autumn—leaves falling and morning frost and occasional fog—High Autumn—this is more like Indian Summer. In some ways this is the most beautiful time of year; yeah, I know this is a bunch of garbage thrown out to disguise the fact that I can’t remember enough of what happened in the gap, but bear with me. You get all the benefits of True Summer—sun, chicks in shorts and miniskirts, not having to wear a coat, being able to go places without getting wet—without the damn wet heat, shirt sticking to your back, sleepless nights of True Summer. And Indian Summer has the same nostalgic quality as a sunset—it looks back on what was, rather than ahead to what will be; it has more in common with the past than with the future. Oh, it’s true we lose the long lazy summer afternoons that last till bedtime, but isn’t that made up for by the crisp autumn evenings, with the winter stars just beginning to show themselves? [1 Oc 1991]

The Poor Misunderstood Herald Sun

T

he poor little babies at the Melbourne Herald Sun are bitterly whining that people—stunned by the overt and blatant racism of Mark Knight’s recent cartoon—missed the point of the piece. It was a criticism, the paper lamely protests, of Serena Williams’ (alleged) bad behavior on the court during her match with Naomi Osaka—and apparently we are supposed to overlook the over-the-top racism of the generic stereotype used to represent Serena Williams and focus on what the “artist” intended, rather than on what he achieved.

Sorry, Herald Sun, but that’s not how it works. Your “artist”—and I use the term very loosely here—blew it. If he wanted people to focus on the message, he should have done it without the racism. Overt racism, mind you. J.K. Rowling’s ironic message has it just right: “Well done on reducing one of the greatest sportswomen alive to racist and sexist tropes and turning a second great sportswoman into a faceless prop.” (When I first saw the cartoon I was wondering who the girl in the background was supposed to be, and was stunned to learn that she represented the brilliant Naomi Osaka, reduced to a nonentity by the “artist’s” blatant racism.) Great cartoonists of the past—Thomas Nast and James Montgomery Flagg come to mind—used racist caricatures to make their points about the events of their days, but nobody holds them up for admiration on that point. No, the best people can do with that is to point out that they lived in societies that were more overtly racist than ours, and racism was a convenient and available shorthand for them to use in conveying their attitudes to their public. That excuse doesn’t cut it today.

The Herald Sun’s bitching and moaning about how people didn’t get it is missing the point completely. People got it. Okay, I can’t speak for people in general, but I got it. Insofar as the (alleged) artist was being critical of Serena Williams’ behavior on the court I halfway agree with him, though the chair umpire was not taking sides with Serena Williams, as depicted in the cartoon. Quite the contrary in fact. But the point here is that the Herald Sun chose to make its point by using a racist stereotype (rather than any sort of caricature) to stand for Serena Williams, and this in the twenty-first century, when we’ve supposedly grown past that. The Herald Sun (and its alleged “artist”) needs to grow the fuck up, learn from its mistakes, and apologize for its bad judgment—not blame people for reacting to its racism rather than focusing on the “point” the paper was trying (very badly) to make.

If You Don't See Racism, You're Part of the Problem

T

his 1904 sports-related cartoon by James Montgomery Flagg—the same guy responsible for the famous I Want You Uncle Sam recruitment poster—is racist as fuck.

So is this 2018 sports-related cartoon by Mark Knight.

If you honestly don’t see racism in these cartoons then you have revealed to the entire world what is in your heart of hearts, and it ain’t pretty. You, my friend, are a racist. And you need to deal with it.