Monday H.L Mencken Reads: “Boobus Americanus”

This would be great satire if it wasn’t really.  (via Ian Bremmer)

Good Day Sky Dancers! great

American History has left the building!  So has common sense.  But anyway …

Here’s just a taste of how the lesser “Boobus Americanus” presents. Notice his festive plummage as he struts and preens. His pack leader, the Major “Boobus Americanus” has a distinct vocalization.   Go straight to the tweet below for the latest capture of the Major Boobus Americanus in its habitat, the Faux News Show with the Lincoln Memorial as the chosen reality stage backdrop.   After all, who would say something stupid in a memorial to one of the greatest American minds, Presidents, and orators in our history?

H.L. Mencken was a known as the “Sage of Baltimore” which seems apropos to today as much as his time. I actually own a first edition of one his books of essays having tripped upon it in a St Louis used bookstore around 25 plus years ago.  I also bought that a child’s french grammar book.  It was a quaint little place and I wish I could revisit it. Perhaps one day.  The essays included “In Defense of Women”.  From the point I started reading this, I knew I was down one of my rabbit holes.

From the keyboard of Carson Vaughn:

For better or worse, I am a child of the Plains, and so my first experience with H. L. Mencken was less an introduction than a confrontation. I first learned of the Sage of Baltimore during his cameo appearance in a Great Plains history course, at the University of Nebraska. Henry Mencken considered us part of a large and ever-growing species he called homo boobiens, my professor explained. Wedged between the Omaha race riots and the Agricultural Marketing Act of ’29, Mencken showed up during the Scopes Monkey Trial to wield his pen against William Jennings Bryan, whom he described as “one of the most tragic asses in American history.” What a dick, I thought. I liked him immediately.

I liked him so much that I bought The American Language, the pillar of his bibliography, and never touched it again. Unaware of my purchase, my girlfriend gave me a copy of the same book as a gift, but not before gluing the pages together and carving out the middle to camouflage my secrets. Later I purchased a used copy of The New Mencken Letters and schlepped that 635-page tome around wherever I went, reading a letter or two here and there, recklessly quoting from it in term papers.

From the letters, I became smitten with Mencken’s verbal gymnastics, his apparent refusal to say something plain when it could be said with the cocksure verbosity of a Southern lawyer. Perhaps, too, I was charmed by that most convenient of facts: he was dead. Had Mencken still been alive, I have no doubt I’d have raised my guard, but that is the gift of hindsight. Instead I accepted him the way he accepted himself, disregarding the imperfections—of which, I would later find out, there were many.

By the time I stumbled upon Prejudices, a selection of Mencken’s essays, at a used bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, I felt as if I’d known the cigar-chomping wise guy for years, even though I hadn’t read a word of his professional canon. My respect for him was hardly reciprocated. About Nebraska, my home state, he had made himself very clear: “I don’t give a damn.” Mencken judged me with the smirk of a haughty equestrian, spun me around, tied my shoelaces together, and encouraged me to walk with him. He called me a boob, said it was okay, said that we children of the corn couldn’t be expected to understand the rich intellectual life along the Potomac, or better yet, across the Atlantic.

Flipping eagerly among the essays, I was aware that Mencken, like the Boobus Americanus he lampooned, had never attended college himself. In fact he rarely left the confines of Baltimore, and spent much of his adult life living with his mother and eating her sandwiches. In 1928, Irving Babbitt accused Mencken of “intellectual vaudeville,” and more recent critics have labeled him a philistine, but it didn’t matter to me. The show had already started, and his ridicule, in a way, seemed a privilege. I felt like the drunk at a comedy club, asking to be called out.

Yes,  Boobus Americanus still walks among us and is unfortunately planted in the White House for what I hope is less than another year.

“Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.” – H.L. Mencken

That’s a good one but this is by far my favorite.

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron”.

And, I thought that was George W Bush. Silly me.

So let me just juxtapose two headlines for you.

Kristin Myers / Yahoo Finance: Reopening states will cause 233,000 more people to die from coronavirus, according to Wharton model

Well, that does’t sound good.

New data from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that relaxing lockdowns across U.S. cities and states could have serious consequences for the country’s battle to contain the coronavirus, which has infected over a million people while killing more than 66,000 people.

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), reopening states will result in an additional 233,000 deaths from the virus — even if states don’t reopen at all and with social distancing rules in place. This means that if the states were to reopen, 350,000 people in total would die from coronavirus by the end of June, the study found.

Kent Smetters, the PWBM’s director, said the decision to reopen states is ultimately a “normative judgement that comes down to the statistical value of life.”

He explained: “That’s not a crude way of saying we put a dollar value on life, but it’s the idea that people will take risks all the time for economic reward.”

That figure far surpasses estimates and models that the White House has cited from the University of Washington, which put the death toll at roughly 73,000 by the start of August.

The U.S. economy is reeling as statewide lockdowns have thrown 30 million Americans out of their jobs, and stoked a furious debate about how long the restrictions can remain in place. Some states, like Georgia, are choosing to partially reopen, allowing businesses like restaurants, hair salons, massage parlors, and more to open again.

However, partially reopening would also cause the death toll to rise, the university’s data found. An additional 45,000 lives would be lost, according to Wharton’s Budget Model, bringing the U.S.’s death toll from COVID-19 to 222,000.

However, the policy of reopening states would provide a much needed economic boost, according to the model.

“Almost all net job losses between May 1 and June 30 would be eliminated,” the report found.

Well, maybe it sounds like ‘acceptable losses’ to both Boobus Americanus and extremely wealthy American businessmen who think they’re impervious because they’re white, they’re on the right, and their shortcomings can be viewed beneath the belt and on IQ tests.

And, here’s another:

Steve Benen / MSNBC:

For the 5th time in two weeks, Trump tweaks projected death toll  —  When a president finds it necessary to revise a projected death toll five times in 13 days, there’s a problem.

Two weeks ago today, Donald Trump said he believed the overall American death toll from the coronavirus could be as low as 50,000 people. By the end of the week, the president’s forecast had already been exposed as tragically wrong.

Exactly one week later, Trump said the overall American death toll from the coronavirus would “probably” be as low as 60,000 people. Four days later, based on NBC News’ overall tally, the fatalities from the pandemic climbed past that threshold, too.

This past Wednesday, the president suggested the number of fatalities in the United States could be as low as 65,000. Predictably, we also soon passed that projected total.

Last night, Trump held his latest Fox News event — this time using the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop — and acknowledged that he was moving the goalposts with his fourth number in 13 days. “I used to say 65,000,” the president said, pointing to a total he promoted just a few days earlier. “And now I’m saying 80,000 or 90,000.”

Around the same time, the president rolled out his fifth projected death toll.

President Donald Trump has warned that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus outbreak could reach 100,000 — revising upwards his estimate on the number of people the outbreak could kill by tens of thousands. “Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person out of this,” Trump said speaking during a Fox News virtual town hall.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, when I say I don’t know why Trump keeps doing this, I’m not being coy or facetious. I honestly have no idea. There is no upside to a president, every few days, presenting a new projected death toll, seeing reality catch up to that number, and then starting the process anew.

Open up America!  We just stockpiled another 100,000 body bags for no apparent reason at all.  The Boobus Americanus wants hair cuts, all you can eat buffets, and a job that will kill them.

The Department of Homeland Security is poised to spend $5.1 million on the largest batch order for “human remains pouches” from E.M. Oil Transport, Inc., according to an April 21 filing, NBC news reported.

The pouches have not yet been paid for or shipped to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to NBC News.

“I hope to God that they don’t need my order and that they cancel it,” the company’s marketing manager, Mike Pryor, told the news source.

According to the report, FEMA also opened up bidding for different companies to provide refrigerated trailers to serve as makeshift morgues to localities around the country. The request specifies a preference for “53-foot tall trailers”, the largest of their kind.

Other internal documents obtained by the media outlet showed that the White House coronavirus task force has serious concerns about what lies ahead for the U.S., with fears that the country might endure another spike in infections in the future.

Members of the task force were reportedly concerned over the lack of coronavirus tests, a vaccine or proven treatments for coronavirus and the possibility of a “catastrophic resurgence” of the disease.

Live Free and Die!  (Via BB)

From the NYT: “Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Administration Models Predict Near Doubling of Daily Death Toll by June”.  But you know, nothing to see here Boobus Americanus. Go out there and prove them wrong.  Just stay away from the hospitals and every one else.

So, my neighbor Nancy frequently chat.  She’s in front of the house and I’m walking Temple across the street on the neutral ground.  Total Social Distancing. She told me this story.

Nancy wanted to walk along the River in one of the many paths in the Crescent City Park. It’s outside, they’ve pretty much removed all the benches and it’s just a place to walk so no real danger in a little exercising there.  She veers off to a less broad side paths and sees two Wipopo walking towards her so she carefully pulls her mask up and moves to give them some space.

So, “Karen”–we’ll just call her that–starts yelling at Nancy that the mask is causing her to breathe in her own toxins and will kill her.  These comments just come out of the blue, uninvited, and of course Karen started moving in on Nancy because getting in some one’s face is just so real down home neighborly, am I right?

Nancy said well, she’s just doing what every one is asking us to do including the many doctors begging us to stay home and socially distance on every TV News outlet but Faux..  Karen, respond by telling her that all doctors are “retarded” and she’s going to die breathing in her own toxins.  By this time, Nancy is trying to move forward and says some like well, okay, have a nice day.  Karen does keep moving up the path while Nancy moves down.  Nancy cannot help but overhear the next subject.  Karen’s telling her companion something about all the trees dying because of 5G. Well, that’s all interesting except we don’t have 5G here in New Orleans let alone in my neighborhood and we had a mini drought in April.  But, hey, Karen’s gotta Karen and wipipo be wipopo and we still have an ample supply of Boobus Americanus as demonstrated resplendently by Donald J Trump who has managed to make George W Bush look better.

Take care!  Stay your ass at home!  Be kind to yourself!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today!

Lazy Caturday Reads: Looney Tunes Cats Plus News

Sylvester and Tweety

Good Morning!!

No one seems to know for sure whether Trump’s dear friend Kim Jong Un is dead or alive.

Rumors have been swirling for days, and now some news outlets are reporting that Kim is either dead or in a vegetative state.

Taiwan News: Japanese media reports N. Korea’s Kim Jong Un in vegetative state.

Japanese media, citing the medical team treating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, say the failure of initial surgery has left the 36-year-old in a vegetative state.

Amid conflicting reports about Kim’s health, Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Gendai reported on Friday (April 24) that a Chinese medical team member on the mission to North Korea briefly explained the situation to its senior writer, Kondm Daisuke.

The medical expert said during a visit to the countryside earlier this month, Kim clutched his chest and fell to the ground. A doctor accompanying Kim immediately carried out CPR and took him to a nearby hospital for emergency care.

The doctor also requested a medical team from Beijing for assistance. At the hospital, prior to the arrival of the Chinese medical team, the North Korean doctor performed cardiac surgery but there were complications due to the hereditary dictator’s obesity and the doctor’s anxiety.

Penelope and Pepe LePew

Reuters yesterday: Exclusive: China sent team including medical experts to advise on North Korea’s Kim.

China has dispatched a team to North Korea including medical experts to advise on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The trip by the Chinese doctors and officials comes amid conflicting reports about the health of the North Korean leader. Reuters was unable to immediately determine what the trip by the Chinese team signaled in terms of Kim’s health.

A delegation led by a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department left Beijing for North Korea on Thursday, two of the people said. The department is the main Chinese body dealing with neighbouring North Korea….

Daily NK, a Seoul-based website, reported earlier this week that Kim was recovering after undergoing a cardiovascular procedure on April 12. It cited one unnamed source in North Korea….

On Friday, a South Korean source told Reuters their intelligence was that Kim was alive and would likely make an appearance soon. The person said he did not have any comment on Kim’s current condition or any Chinese involvement.

From Twitter:

Newsweek reports that Kim missed another important occasion: Kim Jong Un Remains Absent on Day North Korean Media Celebrates Founding of Armed Forces.

The state-controlled media in North Korea focused on the founding of its armed forces on Saturday as its supreme leader Kim Jong Un remained absent amid reports that a Chinese medical team was assessing his health status.

Claude cat

South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that television coverage in the secretive northern state spent the day trumpeting the 88th anniversary of the birth of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army (KPRA), which falls on April 25, without the nation’s chief heralding the event.

Hong Kong Satellite Television reported that the supreme leader was dead but this has not been confirmed by U.S. sources with a senior Pentagon official not authorized to speak on the record, telling Newsweek: “North Korean military readiness remains within historical norms and there is no further evidence to suggest a significant change in defensive posturing or national level leadership changes.”

I wonder if Kim could have had Covid-19? If he’s dead, will Trump be able to express grief and sadness as he hasn’t done after the loss of more than 50,000 Americans?

Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them.

In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has announced that he planted a tree on the White House lawn in honor of Earth Day. He has offered his opinion on matters small and large, bragged about himself as “the king of ventilators,” and spent much time lamenting the pandemic-inflicted passing of what he invariably (and inaccurately) calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Despite the flood of words, though, what has struck me the most this week is what Trump does not talk about: the mounting toll of those who have died in this crisis. So voluble that he regularly talks well past dinnertime at his nightly briefings, the President somehow never seems to find time to pay tribute to those who have been lost, aside from reading an occasional scripted line or two at the start of his lengthy press conferences, or a brief mention of a friend in New York who died of the disease soon after calling him at the White House. “He said, ‘I tested positive.’ Four days later he was dead,” the President recounted. “So this is a tough deal.” It was not exactly the prayerful, if often politically expedient, mournfulness Americans generally expect of their elected leaders. Trump, for the most part, dispenses even with the ritualistic clichés that other politicians, regardless of party or creed, have always offered in times of crisis….

Sylvester Jr.

Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the “mourner-in-chief,” at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing “Amazing Grace” as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?

Just say it Susan. The “president” is a psychopath.

Michael Cohen at The Boston Globe: Say it loud, say it clear: Donald Trump needs to resign over his handling of the coronavirus.

The United States has just over 4 percent of the world’s population, but had about one-third of all global coronavirus cases and one-quarter of the fatalities, as of Friday.

This is a catastrophic failure that can be laid largely at the feet of President Trump. Editorial boards and politicians — both Democratic and Republican — should be calling on him to resign immediately.

Mrs. Sylvester

It’s not just the catalog of screw-ups that led us to this point — the playing down of the threat, the lack of testing, the spread of misinformation and lies, and the government-wide inattention to the issue. It’s that Trump represents an ongoing danger to the health and well-being of the American people.

Consider, for example, the strange case of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that Trump began publicly touting several weeks ago as a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “What do you have to lose?” the president asked, about a drug that had not been approved by the FDA for that purpose. It turns out the answer is “your life.” [….]

As remarkable as it is for the president to be suggesting the use of unproven drugs, Trump topped it on Thursday when he suggested that ultraviolet rays and cleaning disinfectants, injected into the body, should be examined as possible treatments for coronavirus. These comments led public health experts and companies like Lysol to remind Americans of something we regularly tell children: They shouldn’t ingest cleaning products….

Trump isn’t even participating in the federal response to the coronavirus. He reportedly watches television most of the day, doesn’t attend coronavirus task force meetings, and then uses his daily press briefing — for which he barely prepares — as a platform to self-aggrandize and lie.

Read the rest at the link above.

Hep Cat

Fallout continues from Trump’s touting sun and household cleaners to cure Covid-19. Is this where he got the idea? The Guardian: Revealed: leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus ‘cure’ wrote to Trump this week.

The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.

In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.

A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president said that disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!”

He went on to say: “Is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

Marc Antony and Pussyfoot

Trump did not specify where the idea of using disinfectant as a possible remedy for Covid-19 came from, and the source for his notion remains obscure. But the Guardian has learned that peddlers of chlorine dioxide – industrial bleach – have been making direct approaches to the White House in recent days.

Grenon styles himself as “archbishop” of Genesis II – a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a “miracle cure” in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, “miracle mineral solution”, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/Aids as well as autism.

Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it.

Read more at the the Guardian.

So . . . it’s another busy news day even though it’s the weekend. What stories are you following?

Frankly Over It All Friday Reads: Whistling Past the Graveyard

Skeleton Lord mask, Tibet, Citipati

Good Day Sky Dancers!

So, today I’m going to explore a few things since I’m down one of my usual rabbit holes. First, the art work today shows human skull/skeleton symbolism which is a form of artwork found in many religious and indigenous folk practices.  The best known skull art in this part of the world are the Mexican “Day of the Dead” skulls and icons like Sainte Muerte. There is also much of the iconography in gravestones. I’m sharing information and links on some of these from all over.

I’m also going to focus on literature, authors, and books to read. So, if you want to join me down my rabbit hole!  Enjoy!!!

So, my first offering of information on  skeleton imagery is from The City of Boston where there are some wonderful imagines and examples of skeletons on grave stones.  There are many examples of “Death’s head” there that date back as early as 1630.

The second type of decorative motif used on Boston’s seventeenth-century gravemarkers was the “death’s head.” A death’s head, often with wings or crossed bones, or both, was a stylized skull. Some have speculated that winged skulls were intended to symbolize a combination of physical death and spiritual regeneration. It is important to note that Boston-based Puritans did not advocate using religious symbols, such as cherubs, Christ figures, or crosses in their meetinghouses, on church silver, or on their gravestones. Puritans were adamantly against attributing human form to spiritual beings such as God, angels, or spirits.

Death’s Head from a Boston Cemetary circa 1600s

So, here’s one of my favorite authors discussing the women in his many books and this is an interview with a feminist author who discusses the characters with him.  Really, he’s a wonderful read if you haven’t had the pleasure. Lit Hub: “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself. Mieko Kawakami Interviews the Author of Killing Commendatore.”  This book was gifted me on my birthday by my sister. She’s turned into an avid reader and I frequently get her book club’s selections in the mail after they’re done with them.  I love his 1Q84,

Mieko Kawakami: I’m curious about the character Mariye Akigawa from Killing Commendatore. I could tell how stressed she was by the way that her identity is so connected to her breasts. This hasn’t been the case for the young women in your other novels. I can easily relate to characters like Yuki in Dance Dance Dance, or May Kasahara in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I’m thinking of the scene where May Kasahara talks about “the lump of death…round and squishy, like a softball.” Discussion of the protagonist aside, May has these incredibly powerful lines throughout the novel, about the murky distinction between hurting yourself and hurting others, or your own death and the death of others. The prose is fantastic. It captures the spirit of exactly what it’s like to be a girl. I love those passages so much. Yuki and May don’t talk much about their breasts or their bodies. But Mariye in Killing Commendatore…

Haruki Murakami: She’s really fixated on them. It’s almost an obsession.

MK: Sure, but don’t you think she’s a little too fixated, though? The second she’s alone with the first-person narrator, this guy she’s never met before, the first words out of her mouth are something like, “My breasts are really small, don’t you think?” I found this pretty surprising. Where does this obsession with breasts come from?

HM: I wouldn’t really say it came from anywhere. I just imagine there are girls out there who feel this way.

https://twitter.com/morphonios/status/1248463314255933441

Chitipati/Shri Shmashana Adhipati (protector) , Tibet, D 1700 – 1799, Sakya

And now, about the Skeleton Lords from Tibetan Lore.  This is from Himalayan Art Resources.

It is important not to confuse the protector deities Shri Shmashana Adhipati, Father & Mother, with the skeleton dancers found in the various systems of Tibetan religious Cham dance. Those skeleton dancers, sometimes categorized as having three types, are unrelated to the Secret Wheel Tantra and the practices of the Shri Shmashana Adhipati. So far all of the iconographic depictions in painting and sculpture of two skeletons dancing as a couple, with appropriate hand attributes, and standing atop a conch and cowrie shell, are Shmashana Adhipati as described in the Secret Wheel Tantra. It should also be understood that Shri Shmashana Adhipati are not worldly deities, but enlightened deities categorized as ‘Wisdom protectors.’ They are emanations of Chakrasamvara.

The skeleton figures, representing worldly spirits, in Tibetan Cham dance are often seen as jesters or servants for other minor worldly gods such as Yama. These Cham dancing skeletons, like the other characters found in dance such as the deer and yak headed servants of Yama, are generally only found in narrative vignettes if found at all in Tibetan paintings. The most common dance represented in painting is generally known descriptively as the Black Hat Dance, and specifically understood to be the Vajrakilaya Cham dance. There will of course be images or random skeletons found in wrathful deity paintings or in the many depictions of the charnal grounds where the relevant Sanskrit and Tibetan texts explicitly state that skeletons are found in cemeteries.

A survey of Vajrayogini paintings in the database finds 16 where Shmashana Adhipati is depicted in the composition as a protector.

Calavera of Francisco Madero by Jose Guadalupe Posada

So, if you ever wanted to know what a Nobel Prize winning economists reads and what he keeps on his night stand, you may check this out from the NYT Book Review: “Economist Who Wants You to Read More Fiction”.  Even better, the economist is Joseph E. Stiglitz.

What books are on your nightstand?

Like everyone, I have a large and aspirational pile on my nightstand. In fact, my wife recently bought me a bigger nightstand so we’d have more room for the books I want to read. Right now I’ve got “A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway, to remind me of Paris, which I fell even more in love with during my term teaching there. “The Ratline,” because the author, Philippe Sands, is married to my wife’s sister and he sent it to us. Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” and “The Light That Failed,” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, because everywhere I go people are talking about those two books. Ian McEwan’s “The Cockroach,” because the person who runs the renowned bookstore in Schloss Elmau (Germany) thought I would like this Kafkaesque parable of Brexit, in which a cockroach becomes prime minister. A book that was on my nightstand, but I have since read, is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s beautiful “Sonora,” a novel about the Arizona desert, New York City and the coming-of-age of a young woman whose parents are Palestinian and Israeli Jewish.

Inside Higher Ed has a suggested reading list of information on Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte; The Lady of Love and Death. She is known as Santa Muerte and is considered an idol, female deity or folk saint in Mexican and Mexican-American folk Catholicism.

“Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living,” wrote Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude, his classic interpretation of Mexican history and culture. “The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets, and hopes which is the life of each of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end…. A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.”

Paz does not explicitly refer to Posada’s work, but he captures its essence too precisely not to have been thinking of it. And both came to mind repeatedly as I read R. Andrew Chesnut’s Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press).

Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, set out some years ago to write a book on the Virgin of Guadalupe, only to find his enthusiasm fading after a while. He writes that he was fighting “research malaise” when, by chance, he learned of Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” known to her devotees by nicknames such as the Bony Lady, the Godmother, and the Angel of Death. She is, in effect the Virgin of Guadalupe’s dark cousin, if not her evil twin.

Santa Muerte’s history and role are complex and, in some ways, distinctly Mexican. But her power — like that of Posada’s artwork – is too great to contain within national borders.

She began to make the news in the 1990s — always (at least in the U.S. media) with reference to the Mexican drug cartels. When the police would raid a gangster’s home, they often found altars to a grim-reaper-like figure, presumably satanic in nature. By 2010, Santa Muerte entered norteamericano popular culture through “Breaking Bad,” a TV series that is about methamphetamine production in roughly the sense that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about having a bug problem.

Memento Mori, Pompeii, Artwork-location: Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Archaeological Museum)

So, another place you may find skull art is from the ruins of Pompeii.  This is from the Pompeii tour guide.

The mosaic represents an allegorical and symbolic philosophical theme of the transience of life and death that eliminates disparities in social class and wealth. The summit of the composition is a level with his plumb line, a tool that was used by masons to control the levelling in construction.

The axis of the lead is the death (the skull), under a butterfly (the soul) balanced on a wheel (Fortune).

Under the arms of the level, and opposed in perfect balance, are the symbols of poverty on the right (a stick a beggar and a cape), and wealth to the left (the sceptre a purple cloth and the ribbon).

Popular belief says the phrase “Memento mori” originated in ancient Rome: as a Roman general was parading through the streets during a victory triumph, standing behind him was his slave, tasked with reminding the general that although at his peak today tomorrow he could fall or be brought down. The servant is thought to have conveyed this with the warning “Memento mori” that means  “Remember that you will die”.

Remarkable photograph shows the Chimbu Skeleton Tribe of Papua New Guinea and were taken by amateur photographer Pongtharin Tanthasindhu who grew up in Thailand but now lives in Toronto, Canada.

New York Magazine asked 23 authors to recommend books to read during self-isolation.  What are they reading to “escape the present moment?”  I especially liked this suggestion.

I found this read about the Skelton Tribue of Papua New Guinea fascinating.  It’s from the Daily Mail.

‘The reason why they paint themselves as skeletons is to intimidate their enemy into believing that they are not human and have some source of supernatural power.’

Only first making contact with the Western world in 1934, the Chimbu tribe have largely remained a mystery-making their skeletal body paint even more fascinating.

Combined with dance, the paint jobs of Papua New Guinea’s Chimbu tribe were originally intended to intimidate enemies.

Go gaze at these amazing photographs and works of body art.

From the upshot at NYT: “Deaths in New York City Are More Than Double the Usual Total” By Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz 

Over the 31 days ending April 4, more than twice the typical number of New Yorkers died.

That total for the city includes deaths directly linked to the novel coronavirus as well as those from other causes, like heart attacks and cancer. Even this is only a partial count; we expect this number to rise as more deaths are counted.

These numbers contradict the notion that many people who are dying from the new virus would have died anyway. And they suggest that the current coronavirus death figures understate the real toll of the virus, either because of undercounting of coronavirus deaths, increases in deaths that are normally preventable, or both.

So, I always loved this video with the switching between the band and skeleton puppets.

We will get by
We will get by
We will get by
We will survive

And I thank you for putting up with my very dark side with its even darker humor.  Whistling past the graveyard is a very Buddhist and Brit thing to do of which I have roots in both.

And just so you know that I’m not just being morbid:

Respect Death and the Dead.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging and creating and whistling past the graveyard list today?