May 17, 2018
“I’ve simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse—when people talk about their faith, I can’t connect with what they’re talking about. This isn’t a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I’m just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds but not music. I suppose my religion is reading.”
AVID READER
By Robert Gottlieb
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Posted by Jim
February 14, 2018
(Click image to enlarge.)
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Posted by Jim
November 18, 2017
A client of mine, the writer Bob Hale, recently sent this email:
Hi. Jim,
Have a great Thanksgiving!
I especially enjoy this holiday because my great-great-grandmother, in the midst of the Civil War, persuaded President Lincoln to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Before that it was celebrated at different times in different states.
She was also editor of the first national women’s magazine.
Bob
Note: The following is my edited version of a post from Biography.com
On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as a national day of thanks, setting the precedent for the modern holiday we celebrate today.
Much of the credit for the proclamation should go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1830, and helped found the American Ladies Magazine, which she used as a platform to promote women’s issues. In addition to her publishing work, Hale was a committed advocate for women’s education (including the creation of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York).
She had grown up regularly celebrating an annual Thanksgiving holiday, and in 1827 published a novel, “Northwood: A Tale of New England,” that included an entire chapter about the fall tradition, already popular in parts of the nation. Hale often wrote editorials and articles about the holiday and she lobbied state and federal officials to pass legislation creating a fixed, national day of thanks on the last Thursday of November—a unifying measure, she believed that could help ease growing tensions between North and South. Her efforts paid off: By 1854, more than 30 states and U.S. territories had a Thanksgiving celebration.
She continued to write editorials on the subject, urging Americans to “put aside sectional feelings and local incidents” and rally around the unifying cause of Thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln himself called for a day of thanks in April 1862, following Union victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry and at Shiloh, and again in the summer of 1863 after the Battle of Gettysburg.
Shortly after Lincoln’s summer proclamation, Hale wrote to both the president and Secretary of State William Seward, urging them to declare a national Thanksgiving, stating that only the chief executive had the power to make the holiday, “permanently, an American custom and institution.” Within a week, Seward had drafted Lincoln’s official proclamation fixing the national observation of Thanksgiving on the final Thursday in November, a move the two men hoped would help “heal the wounds of the nation.”
After more than three decades of lobbying, Sarah Josepha Hale (and the United States) had a new national holiday.
Footnote: In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt briefly moved Thanksgiving up a week, in an effort to extend the already important shopping period before Christmas and spur economic activity during the Great Depression. Several states followed FDR’s lead, others balked, with 16 states refusing to honor the calendar shift. Just two years later, in the fall of 1941, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution returning the holiday to the fourth Thursday of November.
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Posted by Jim
November 1, 2017

“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

By Timothy Snyder
Tim Duggan Books, New York
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Posted by Jim
September 15, 2017
By James Thurber
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer then twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.
Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.
“The Little Girl and the Wolf”
Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated, 1939
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Posted by Jim
July 31, 2017
The following is one of seven blog posts that have appeared on doodlemeister.com featuring Sam Shepard talking about his craft over the years. To read all seven posts, type his name, including capital letters, into the search window off to the right.
Adapted from: The Pathfinder
By John Lahr, The New Yorker, February 8, 2010
The male influences around me (growing up) were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent. I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid.
I just dropped out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there (NYC, 1963) when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting. I think they hired everybody. It was wide open. You were like a kid in a fun park—trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened . . . . For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties. Terrible suffering . . . . Things coming apart at the seams.
I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer . . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come . . . . Break it all down in pairs. Make the pairs work together, with each other. Then make ’em work against each other, independent.
I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable . . . instead of embodying a “whole character,” the actor should consider his performance “a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme,” . . . . to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel the need to completely answer intellectually for the character’s behavior.
Character is something that can’t be helped. It’s like destiny . . . . It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, and the blood that runs through our veins.
(I was) dead set against revisions because I couldn’t stand rewriting . . . . (The plays) were chants, they were incantations, they were spells. You get on them and you go. Plays have to go beyond just working out problems. (They have to move) from colloquial territory to poetic country.
I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.
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Posted by Jim
June 12, 2017
“Orwell would have despised Trump as a kind of fat, dumb, uneducated oligarch,” Ricks said last month in a podcast produced by the magazine Foreign Policy. “Churchill would see America as somewhat childish. We occasionally stumble and elect a childish president, and that’s what we’ve done here, but Churchill would also appreciate how robust the American government is. Basically, we’ve had a decapitation strike that we executed ourselves. We no longer have a working presidency. There’s nobody at home, mentally, running the U.S. government. And guess what? It runs pretty well by itself. Probably better. If President Trump were competent, he’d be much more dangerous.”
Thomas E. Ricks, N.Y.T. Book Review, June 11, 2017
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Posted by Jim
May 2, 2017
CLICK ESSAY TO ENLARGE.
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Posted by Jim
April 13, 2017

“Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founders.”
Quote from page 5 of the Introduction to White Trash.
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Posted by Jim
February 13, 2017
Design copyright 2017, Jim Sizemore
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Posted by Jim
Today’s Quote
June 12, 2017Thomas E. Ricks, N.Y.T. Book Review, June 11, 2017