Words 11.7

 Words Twice a Week        11.7

If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available (if I get to it!), along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church.  Click here.

Some days from the church calendar -

Nov 9    Elizabeth of the Trinity – She was a French mystic, a member of the Discalced Carmelites.  She said: "I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying."

Nov 10  Pope Leo the Great – he was one of the  negotiators who convinced Attila the Hun not to attack Rome.  He is regarded as the “founder of the papacy, establishing the bishop of Rome as the vicar of the Roman Catholic Church.

Nov 11   Liliʻuokalani   She was the last Queen of the Hawaiian Kingdom, from 1891 to 1893 when it was overthrown, “bolstered by the landing of US Marines to protect American interests.”  She wrote Aloha Oe – sung by Elvis in Blue Hawaii.  And by a bunch of other people and cartoon characters – Bugs Bunny to Popeye.

Nov 14 – Samuel Seabury He was the first American Episcopal Bishop.  He was a loyalist during the Revolutionary War.  Interestingly, he wrote that “liberty is a very good thing and slavery is a very bad thing”, although his father owned at least one slave, and he himself received several slaves through his marriage, and owned at least one when he died.  So -

(The terminology is worth reflecting on – slaves, enslaved persons, received, owned, the wikipedia article says “Hicks transferred the ownership of four slaves to Samuel Seabury” – I really need to stop and think about which words are most accurate and respectful.  This [the 14th] might be a day to do that.)

And some days from the earth/world calendar

Nov 8

+ John Milton died in 1674.  Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained.

+ In 1793 the Louvre opened in Paris.  Originally a fortress, Napoleon turned it into a national museum and home for it’s most famous resident - Mona Lisa.

+ HBO was launched in 1972.

+ Doc Holliday (I love it – he was an American gambler, gunfighter, …….and dentist!) died in 1887; Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900.  She wrote only one novel that was published during her lifetime.

Nov 9

+ Dylan Thomas died on this day in 1953.  He wrote and recited poetry, including Under Milk Wood, a play for voices.  He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales – a staple of the West family seasonal celebration.  He died in New York, possibly of bronchitis and pneumonia, as well as emphysema, all aggravated by heavy drinking and the air pollution in the city, shortly after arriving from London for a tour of the US.  About himself and his life as a poet he wrote “I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance ... I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of….”  

+ Kristallnacht occurred in 1938.  In Germany, Jewish stores, businesses, synagogues, and homes were ransacked by paramilitary troops and civilians.  “It changed the nature of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews from economic, political, and social exclusion to physical violence, including beatings, incarceration, and murder; the event is often referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust.”

+ the Berlin Wall started coming down.

Nov 10

+ Martin Luther was born in 1483; Neil Gaiman in 1960

+ Longfellow published Hiawatha in 1855.  There’s a Song of Hiawatha Garden in Minneapolis in the Minnehaha Falls Park.  It has some of the verses engraved in the rocks, but they are kind of worn and you can’t always read all of them.  It helps if you already know the poem!  A good day to read some of it?  A good day to think about Native American life and experience?  And to note that we are living in the ancestral home of the Anishinaabeg!  Here’s the wikipedia site about Hiawatha himself; here’s the site for The Song of Hiawatha.

+ Area codes were introduced, and 906 became another name for the UP.  Another number to remember.  Here is more than you want to know about national and international codes!

+ Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975.

Nov 11

+ well, Armistice Day, of course.

+ the odd and even numbering system for US highways was adopted in 1926.  North/south roads were given odd numbers, East/west roads were even.  So US 41 goes from Copper Harbor to Florida, Route 66, one of the original highways in the system goes/went from Chicago to Santa Monica, CA.

Nov 13

+ Karen Silkwood was killed in a “suspicious car crash” in 1974.  She had been gathering data suggesting negligence in a plutonium production plant in Oklahoma.  She was on the way to meet with a reporter from The New York Times.

+ the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982.  We saw the traveling one in Mqt several years ago.

+ Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Scotland in 1850.  He wrote all kinds of stuff, from Treasure Island to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Kidnapped to A Child's Garden of Verses.  He moved to Samoa in 1880 and died there in 1894.

Nov 14

+ Claude Monet was born in 1840.  He was a founder of the Impressionist style of painting.  Didn’t we have a task last year of coming up with a haiku that could caption a Monet painting of haystacks or something like that?  I’ll have to check.

+ Coventry (city and cathedral) was bombed in 1940 during WW2.

That’s what I got for now…..

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