Against ‘Protest Fatigue’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I noticed after we had parted that my friend and I spent our conversation on Monday speaking in hushed tones, that we each ran through our own internal post-election checklist with the other before we proceeded; mine went something like: I know my friend is on my side but I haven’t seen anything on her Facebook feed recently, so when she asks “How are you?” answer her with generalities and let her be specific first.

We hugged hello. “How are you doing?” she asked. I replied with the specifically general (or generally specific), “Today?” and a weak shrug.

She spoke first. “I haven’t talked with you since the election? How are you holding up?” She confessed that she has felt overwhelmed since Inauguration Day. I confessed to the same sensation. “The worst appears to be coming to pass and it looks like they are trying to make it happen faster than anyone seemed prepared for,” I added.
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February 3 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is my mother’s birthday. Rena taught me to read, to write, and was my first audience … and she still is my first audience. Happy birthday, Mom!

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Unrelated to the above, today is “the Day the Music Died,” Don McLean’s memorable phrase for the day that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died with pilot Roger Peterson in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Today is the 58th anniversary of an event that introduced an absence into the iconography of rock.
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James Joyce Celebrates His Birthday

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

February 2, 2017, is the 135th anniversary of the birth of James Joyce (above).

In his huge biography, Richard Ellmann notes in several places that Joyce found his own birthday to be a topic most fascinating (he made certain that his novel Ulysses was published on his 40th, in 1922) and he tells how this affected his relationship with another writer, James Stephens.
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