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COLUMN
NINETY-EIGHT,
OCTOBER 1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
FROM CAPN SKYP BABBS I
Subject: Re: [AGALIST] MY HUMBLEAPOLOGIES!
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 09:43:50 -0700
From: capn skyp skyp@skypilotclub.com
To: AGALIST-owner@yahoogroups.com
the level conscious state, only presented to us as a gift through the focused enlightenment of self, the attainment of the
superconsious state, a state in which we do not voice a tale, we merely represent
nature through our embodiment of all that is natural, of all that is covered by the flight of the skypilot as he makes mistakes
and
corrects them into the wild blue yonder.
capn of the skybabbs
http://www.skypilotclub.com
skypilotclub
81774 Lost Creek Road
Dexter OR 97431 ##
* * *
FROM CAPN SKYP BABBS II
Subject: Re: [AGALIST] MY HUMBLEAPOLOGIES!
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 10:41:10 -0700
From: capn skyp skyp@skypilotclub.com
To: al aronowitz info@blacklistedjournalist.com
that's one way of putting it. --Al
Must confess, stole most of it from a huxley quote that is making the email rounds.
kb
http://www.skypilotclub.com
skypilotclub
81774 Lost Creek Road
Dexter OR 97431 ##
* * *
BUNNYDRUMS. . .HMMMM
Subject: Village Voice/Bunnydrums
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 16:27:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Goerk dgoerk@yahoo.com
To: aga7866 info@blacklistedjournalist.com
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0336/smith.php
Thought you might get a kick out of this...have to admit , I've read it twice and I'm not sure what's
really being said...but, I do like the heading :
Philadelphia Phase-Fuzzers Invent Goth Music; Nobody Notices 'Til Two Decades Later
David ##
* * *
ABOUT ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM
Subject: loog
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 02:15:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: john ochs sauceman7@yahoo.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Hello Al,
I read you were going to interview Loog Oldham and thought you may be interested in this if you haven't already seen it
http://www.sixtiespop.com/
Steve ##
* * *
THE WPA WRITER'S PROJECT
Subject: WPA writers
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:46:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Grant bookzen2002@yahoo.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A.
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
The New York Times August 2, 2003
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 1 -- Writers are usually unabashed about claiming authorship for their work. So it's
curious that many of the alumni of one of the most significant American literary projects of the 20th
century were ashamed of it: the Federal Writers' Project, a program of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.
Created in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, the Writers' Project supported more than
6,600 writers, editors and researchers during its four years of federal financing. When the government funds
expired, Congress let the program continue under state sponsorship until 1943. Although grateful for even
subsistence wages in a time of economic despair, few participants deemed it a badge of honor to earn $20 to
$25 a week from the government.
But the Library of Congress takes a different view. With little fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of
extraordinary Writers' Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage facilities.
After an arduous vetting process, much of it is now available to the public.
What is becoming clear, says Prof. Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University, in Kirksville, Mo., is that
the editors of the project believed that they could build a national culture on diversity. "They faced a
great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and
anti-immigration laws, held sway," Mr. Hirsch said. "In the Federal Writers' Project, ethnic minorities
were celebrated for being turpentine workers or grape pickers or folk artists."
John Cheever was one of the program's unenthusiastic participants. A child of proud Massachusetts
Republicans who had called the W.P.A. short for "We Poke Along," he was ashamed of working as a "junior
editor" at the program's Washington office. He once described his duties as fixing "the sentences written
by some incredibly lazy bastards."
Nonetheless, Cheever's experiences at the Writers' Project provided the material for many of the best
scenes in his 1957 novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle."
Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the Writers' Project. Others included Conrad Aiken,
Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale
Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel,
Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby.
These federal employees produced what would become the renowned American Guide Series, comprising volumes
for each of the 48 states that then existed, as well as Alaska. The Writers' Project also turned out many
other regional, city and cultural guides, like Algren's "Galena, Illinois" and Wright's "Bibliography
of Chicago Negroes." All in all, it published more than 275 books, 700 pamphlets and 340 "issuances"
(articles, leaflets and radio scripts).
Eudora Welty even served as photographer for the Mississippi guide. W. H. Auden called the whole
project "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by a state."
Cataloging the output has been a long project. John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the
Library of Congress, has been working on it since 1978, when he first read Jerre Mangione's seminal
study "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943."
"The Library of Congress has its work cut out," Mr. Cole explained in a telephone interview from his
office on Capitol Hill. "It's an amazing collection. The Federal Writers' Project helped us rediscover our
heritage in a more detailed and colorful way than it had ever been described. I'm thinking here of both the
state guides and all of those other publications that they put out -- the collection offers the best
examples of local history and oddball anecdotal stories ever amassed."
Nearly 3,000 of the oral history interviews are now available on the Library of Congress's W.P.A. Life
Histories Web site, http://www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html
, with more
to come.
In the last few years, some good biographies of the most notable alumni have been published. But no one
has yet tackled a broad-based study of the thousands of untested but talented young writers who fanned out
across the continent in search of a collective self-portrait of America. Recently, though, a number
of scholars and researchers have begun to track the literary paper trail, unearthing documents and
writings that have been packed in boxes for decades.
Pam Bordelon, a writer in Pensacola, Fla., for example, has spent the last 10 years editing
interviews and compiling artifacts from the project's Poets Recording Expeditions Into the Floridas. She has
traveled all over the state, searching for Writers' Project work done by Hurston, who was hired to collect
folklore during the 1930's.
"I was just blown away by the richness," Ms. Bordelon recalled. "The voices in Florida alone are
unbelievable."
David A. Taylor, a writer, and Andrea Kalin, a Washington filmmaker, have begun work on "American
Voices," a documentary focusing on the Writers Project in four states: New York, Florida, Illinois
and Nebraska. One discovery is unpublished correspondence between Cheever and Ellison, who met at
the project.
"The F.W.P. was much more than guidebooks and oral histories," Ms. Kalin explained. "It was where social
and economic history met the individual imagination in literature."
But it is difficult to trace authorship for the W.P.A. guides. Mr. Bellow, for example, left mention
of his Writers' Project work at the Chicago office out of his entry in Who's Who in America. In "Bellow," his
biography of the author, James Atlas writes that Mr. Bellow was humbled to be toiling alongside
hard-drinking literary heroes of the proletariat, like Algren and Jack Conroy, editor of the leftist journal
The Anvil. Mr. Bellow explains in the book, "I rather looked up to them, and they looked down on me."
Mr. Bellow, whose first Writers' Project job was inventorying Illinois periodicals at the Newberry
Library, was later assigned to write 20-page profiles of writers like John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and
James T. Farrell. Mr. Atlas discovered the essays only a few years ago when he was researching "Bellow."
"They're incredible essays, very advanced for somebody 21 or 22 years old," Mr. Atlas said. Mr.Bellow, he said, was ecstatic to reread them recently,
amazed that they still existed.
Wright and Walker were also first published while employed in the Chicago office. Studs Terkel, another
veteran, used the oral history techniques he learned in the late 1930's as his model for books like "The
Good War" (1984) and "Working" (1974). And Albert Murray, perhaps Ellison's closest friend as well as
the author of classic works like "South to a Very Old Place" (1971), maintains that without the Writers'
Project, Ellison would not have written "Invisible Man."
"It was because of the Writers' Project that I first got to read pieces Ralph was writing on his own," Mr.
Murray recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Harlem. "It pulled him away from music and focused
him on writing. It put writers and artists in touch as they had never been before. It was even more intense
than the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout `Invisible Man' there are sketches and caricatures of people he
met during the Federal Writers' Project."
Ellison himself is quoted in a Library of Congress document as saying that the Writers' Project helped
him better understand the powerful connection between serious literature and folkways. "I tried to use my
ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded," he notes in the document. "I
developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect
through misspellings."
But Ellison, like many of his peers, didn't like to talk much about his days as a government employee. "He
wanted to move away from it," Mr. Murray said. "It was his training ground. But he had higher concepts of art
than the W.P.A. Guide Series."
Yet to many, the guide series are treasures. William Least Heat Moon said he wouldn't have written
"PrairyErth: A Deep Map" (1991) without the Nebraska guide. When John Gunther hit the road for his memoir
"Inside U.S.A." (1947), his suitcase bulged with W.P.A. Guides. So did John Steinbeck's when he set out
to write "Travels With Charley: In Search of America" (1962).
"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and
nothing since has even approached it," Steinbeck writes in the book. "It was compiled during the
Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other
group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."
Steinbeck points out that many of the printing plates for the guides were smashed in the wake of a
late-1930's witchhunt by Representative Martin Dies Jr., Democrat of Texas, who insisted that the
W.P.A. was a Communist plot. But the Library of Congress has hundreds of boxes of the guides' raw material:
correspondence, interview transcripts, slave narratives, research notes and photographs. It is one
of the most underused and untapped historical collections in America.
With help from the library staff, Ms. Bordelon, for instance, unearthed tape recordings or transcripts of
recordings of these Florida sources: Earltha White, who ran a soup kitchen in the slums of Jacksonville; a
Cuban cigar maker from Ybor City; white squatters in the Everglades; Izzelly Haines, a midwife, who recalls
delivering her first baby; and Norberto Diaz, whose tale of the race-related murder of a friend in Key
West inspired Stetson Kennedy, a project folklorist, to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
"Whenever anyone asks me what it was like working with the Works Progress Administration and recording
Florida folk songs back in the 1930's for the Library of Congress," Mr. Kennedy once said in a radio
broadcast, "I tell them we were as excited as a bunch of kids on a treasure hunt."
In "On Native Grounds" (1942), Alfred Kazin said the Writers' Project, originally a "drive toward national
inventory which began by reporting the ravages of the Depression," ended with triumphant "reporting on the
national inheritance." He concluded that it changed the course of American literature forever.
##
Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at the University of New
Orleans.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ##
* * *
WHO KILLED THE MAN WHO WORE A DRESS?
Subject: Who at fault for "Reverend" Geoghan's Demise?
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 17:01:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: In Sanious insanious@yahoo.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Who Really and Truly Killed Geoghan?
By Dr. Vigmund Freud
The Associated Press did their thing with an article entitled "Lawyer for inmate accused in Geoghan killing
says he wanted to avenge molested children" on Wednesday, August 27, 2003.
Does anyone really believe The Catholic Church wasn't involved in this? If a pope can get poisoned it
stands to reason a pedophile ex-priest can be quickly sentenced to death.
Boy - a couple of years ago Attorney Matthew Brief - husband of publicist Gail Parenteau, went ballistic
that I would dare criticize Archbishop Law. Ahem - excuse me? Like this article, that essay was right on
target. No one listened to me then - some New York attorney used my article published on the Mad Faxer
site to attack me. He who laughs last...
But it is no laughing matter. It takes courage to point the finger at some pompous old fat man in a
dress who can't behave as well as hooker drag queens in front of Jacques nightclub on a Saturday night at
midnight. Because that fat old drag queen claims he can send you to hell post haste - and many believed
him. Someone had to pull the curtain to expose the wizard.
What isn't a conspiracy these days: "Support Our Troops" yells Bush - his buddies at
Clear Channel blacklisting the Dixie Chicks for criticizing a sitting president. Read
http://www.michaelmoore.com . ##
* * *
IRAN-GATE RELOADED
Subject: IRAN-GATE "RELOADED"
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:59:36 퍭
From: "-" isprinsen.revealed@hetnet.nl
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
BLACKLISTED JOURNALISTS
Dear Ladies & Gentleman,
We are on a succesful investigative journey into another episode of the worldwide
block-buster IRAN-GATE.
So far we caught coca money laundering in Panama and a massive weapons delivery in the Middle-East.
We miss out on some smoky details to be obtained in Washington, New York and possibly
elsewhere too as the story develops. And that's where we are calling in for your assistance.
All of this has been made possible via a lawyer (recently arrested for bank
fraud of just $132m) in the Netherlands working for the US Govt. as a spy for the rightfully
distinguished people's representative US Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Pa) to bring
down the Ayatolla govt. in Tehran, Iran.
Mister Curt Weldon, the crook, has made his beloved Pennsylvania very proud of him
as he has managed to maneuver himself into the headlines in the Netherlands with a
letter that he wrote on the behalf of the US Govt. to his spy and which letter has been
intercepted and entirely published in one of the most respected newspapers in our
little and peaceful Kingdom.
For those in doubt; NRC Handelsblad, Saturday August 9, page 3. ( http://www.nrc.nl)
In case you feel offended for us coming after your president. Remember that the Dutch are historically the longest allies of the US and that we here owe our freedom
to our lost brothers and sisters in the US and Canada. We now come to the aid of our
Democratic friends in the US with a massive weapon of destruction; our freedom of
speech.
Who will assist in IRAN-GATE "RELOADED" "?
Republicans should better not reply and we have our own ways to check.
* * *
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