moon traveller herald

News has been called the first take of history. But what about when the first take does a double take? When the news guys regurgitate history? "A War Is Long Over But Many Still Seek To Learn Its Lessons" in Tuesday's Times (9-9-2014) does a bit of such regurgitation - discussing the 100th anniversary World War I and the general torpor that finds many thinking people today finding similarities between the global Risk game today and then. Figuring in the story is Margaret MacMillan, author of "The War That Ended Peace". She comments that were now living in a much more complicated world than that of the predecessor Cold War period "with low-level conflicts that never seem to conclude and the sense of things ending somehow, of a great period of transition." Like Linus discussing the great pumpkin, this newsreader screams "THAT'S IT" To me this feeling of conclusion, transition and sconflict is a big part of the essential concoction t...

John Updike who could turn a sentence like very few died Tuesday north of Boston. I was not a big Updike head - never got through one of his novels - but like many literate micks in this neck of the woods-o in the late 20th century I read and admired his poetry, short stories and literary criticism, especially in the New Yorker and New York Review of Books. He was not like more favorite fellow writers Mailer and Kerouac. He strove as said in NYT Obit for a burgherly life. No harm, no foul. The threads of his prose were poetic zephyrs - like larks a'wing. Moon Traveller Herald once did write about Updike. It was just when some people were beginning to grok on the possibility that Google was nigh on a Golden Calf. Where is all this algortighmic parsing and free text borrowing going? He pegged aptly the problem with the new Digital Google Golem to its bloody wall of techno pap. He sang the praise of the physical book, the oily old book store and reminded the Google-eyed usurpers of th...

"This world we have .. is a torrent of suffering. You can see it streaming across the newspapers in a blur of print." - Jack Kerouac, Kerouac's Letters V1 , p. 479

I am in a dance forever with the news. I try to slow down or give it up. Conflagraton brings it to fever. The stock markets are unpredictable now and sectors are melting. And there I am at the news counter. Gotta have it. And here on page A22 are the Rosenberg boys - then and now - in one of those stories that plays on and on - this is a very sad picture, the folks are about to be executed - one wearing a Dodgers shirt and riding a rocking horse like mine; other reading the Daily News; healine: SPIES GET 1 MORE DAY - and Sam Roberts' story is called "Rosenbergs' Sons Sadly Accept That Father Was a Spy" - whew! Appartenly Martin Sobell on his way to a Better Place has let the world in on some factual details of long ago. It seem pretty clear for a long time that David Greenglass was doing what he could for the World Congress of Communism Cause, and was in cahoots with Julius Rosenberg - that Klaus Fuchs was working his butt off too - that the Ruskies were capabble of...