‘Nobody is sleeping in the sky’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is believed that August 19 is the date on which the poet Federico García Lorca (above) was assassinated by Nationalist forces in Spain. The killing was 80 years ago today. The poet was 38.

Lorca was murdered during the Spanish Civil War by soldiers on the Nationalist side, the Francoists. In “Fable and Round of the Three Friends,” he foresaw, in his surrealist fashion, his own end:
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Today in History: August 19

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Eight hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union declared themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency” and pronounced themselves the new government of the USSR twenty-five years ago today. The “Gang of 8” staged a coup d’état in which they ordered the nation’s president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to be prevented from returning to Moscow from his holiday retreat and then took over the country’s airwaves and held a press conference in Moscow.

At the press conference, the members of the self-declared provisional government looked somewhere between fear and tears. The coup lasted two days but appeared near collapse through the entire ordeal. The event was the Soviet Communist party’s last gasping claw for power as it felt power slip away. And it was Boris Yeltsin’s debut on the international stage. (In the photo above, he is the figure on the left with papers in hand.)
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Moonlight Madness: A Non-Quote

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In his published works, Allen Ginsberg wrote not one single thing about moonlight and madness, yet there is a popular Internet meme—an Internet poster—usually seen with a handsome photo of our moon and the rousing declaration credited to him that you should “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” (See above.)

It is a Bizarro World version of a speech given by a football coach at halftime. “Follow your inner moonlight, boys, and let’s win one for State! Don’t hide the madness!” (The team huddles together and starts to chant, quietly and slowly at first, but then they build it to a hypnotic intensity: “Don’t. Hide. The. Madness. Don’t. Hide. The. Madness.”)
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