muse-letter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on that which is perceived to be news, or newsworthy, usually in some ironic or absurd way.
pre November 2018
Parts of the site under reconstruction
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With that brief stretching...back to that first table.
In checking out the makeup of those 53 Pilgrims at that 3-day feast, some rather unsettling facts emerge. Starting with that they were the only colonists to survive the long 66-day journey on the Mayflower, and the first winter in the New World." (In effect, also, "first immigrants").
Disease and starvation struck down half of the original 102 colonists. Only four women survived. Yet despite such harsh conditions, 27 children and teenagers did (“I’m like, this is sooo boring. Can we go home?”). https://historyofmassachusetts.org/
As to why they came, the narrative we were taught, was to seek religious freedom. Partly true. But there were other places that offered that. Such as Leiden Holland, where some Separatists or English Dissenters had been for almost 20 years. But even then, America was seen as offering the promise of prosperity and land ownership; a better and easier life.
Never taught but should be noted, those pilgrims who made it through that first winter (and the next), did so with the help of the local Native American tribe. None more helpful than a man called Squanto,
In addition to teaching Pilgrims how to cultivate the land, catch fish and avoid poisonous plants, he served as an interpreter, as he spoke fluent English. Unlike most of his fellow Native-Americans at the time. He learned it in a school of hard knocks. One of being captured by English explorers, and then taken to Europe where he was sold into slavery.
He is a figure whose name never came up when we were briefly studying this piece of our history, post Plymouth Rock. Only a romanticized story surrounding Pocahantas and how she saved Captain John Smith’s life. (A story that some historians believe is simply not true).
So just when did Thanksgiving become the national holiday, and on the day we currently celebrate it? It goes like this:
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Continental Congress declared the first national Thanksgiving on December 18, 1777
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In 1789, George Washington declared the last Thursday in November as the day. This declaration did not make it an official holiday. Future presidents (like the complex Thomas Jefferson), did not continue the Thanksgiving declaration.
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It didn’t become a national holiday until 1863. America was in the middle of the Civil War and Lincoln hoped the new holiday would unify the bitterly divided country. (Really? It can’t even unify a bitterly divided family). But it was finally a success and has continued ever since.
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FDR designated the final Thursday in November, as Thanksgiving day every year until 1939. It was an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. His plan, known derisively as “Franksgiving,” was met with passionate opposition.
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In 1941, he reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.
Everyone will have a different personal history or perspective regarding this holiday. Though it seems the one thing we do have in common on the day, is turkey. At least a survey suggests that’s true of 88% of Thanksgiving dinners we eat. That day and dinner, were always my favorite ones of the year. Though at our Italian American table(s), it never looked like this at grandma’s.
Invariably, so many would gather, that makeshift tables had to be set up. And always there was the kids’ table to which being assigned, as you reached your teens, could be demoralizing. And in my experience, there was never a vocalized giving of thanks. Just a hedonistic headlong-dive into the cornucopia of food. During the course of which, I never remember any family discord about matters, political or otherwise, taking place as we stuffed our face. Nor afterwards, too bloated to care about anything.
At some point, we male types, would slip away to catch the annual Thanksgiving Day football game in progress. A sport which has been affiliated with this holiday going back as far as 1876, shortly after the game had been invented. In that year, Yale beat Princeton 2-0 (scoring rules were different then).The first NFL game was between the Lions and the Bears in 1934 (the Bears won 19-16). In case someone should ask.
The takeaway, one could argue, is that Thanksgiving is our most interesting national holiday. It has so many facets to it, large and small, that go far beyond the turkey. In particular, a history that I for one, had never stopped to consider at any length. Until now. And on that… “Pass the cranberry sauce please.”
Happy 400th Thanksgiving Birthday!
Of course it wasn’t really called Thanksgiving Day back then. And it actually went on for more than a day. As chronicled by pilgrim Edward Winslow, one of the senior leaders on the voyage. He wrote in part:
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week…many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted...
A portrait of Edward Winslow - the only Pilgrim to have a verified portrait, painted in 1651 in London. It hangs in the Pilgrim Museum in Plymouth, MA
Indians? A misnamed people that came about because Columbus thought the “new” world he’d landed on was India, and he called its inhabitants Indios, which later became Indians. That descriptive has been a powder keg of an issue for some time now (but how could Winslow know that?). Which in a tongue-in-chief piece I wrote eight years ago, focused on the particular controversy as it surfaced around the Washington NFL football franchise in particular, but other sports teams as well. Here’s some stuffing taken from that piece.
To Invite the Redskins Over for Thanksgiving?
With Thanksgiving coming up, and given its colorful origin of Anglican folk and Native Americans making nice in the autumn of 1621, I had been thinking of having the Redskins over for dinner. Oh, but that name. I don’t know how you dance around it, but it is rather racist...
A recent poll showed that a majority of Native Americans find “Redskins” offensive. (There is actually a National Day of Mourning observed on Thanksgiving Day by some Native American activist groups). Another poll showed that fans of the team, even if against changing the name, would still continue to root for it if they were called something else.
Anyway, if I do invite the Washington Name Pending, I’ve got to invite all those other Native American associated teams as well, no? With their questionable names and/or logos and all?
And yet in the spirit of that 1621 Thanksgiving, would it not be fitting to have them all at the table?
It should be noted, two have since changed both names and logos. In football, it is now the…
And next year in baseball, welcome the... Cleveland Guardians
I had been so captivated by the theatrics surrounding her retrial that I didn’t consider what the ramifications might be if she was innocent, yet had been declared guilty? (For shame).Which is exactly what happened at first. She and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were both sentenced to 25 years for the murder of Knox’s roommate Meredith Kercher. A crime that they didn’t commit. But wait. Then were found innocent in a retrial! Yet somehow, only to be found guilty yet again! And while all this had been going on, the real and sole murderer, Rudy Guede, had been convicted in 2007.
Finally, the Italian judicial system got it right, when in March 2015, the Supreme Court of Italy overturned the 2014 conviction. If this is hard to follow, that’s because it might look something like this:
Thanksgiving Turns 400
Seems like only yesterday when Native Americans sat down with the newly arrived Pilgrims to celebrate their first fall harvest in the “New World.” It was the so called first thanksgiving, and it is cogently depicted in the painting below. Yes, that’s a young Joe Biden there in the back, who arrived a bit late from Delaware, which was yet to even be called a colony, let alone become the first state.
Quote of the Month (with Pictures)
Swimming Pool
In the middle of the pool on tippy toes
pressed against the turquoised bottom
lies the day after day after day.
Mysterious entries in statements
dealing with money
needing to be sorted out,
the dental drill with its hum
of an insect you can’t quite place
with a sting you know all too well.
Let us not forget the clothes at the cleaners,
missing a garment,
like kids in the schoolyard
awaiting your arrival from the job
that bobs at chin level.
There is always more than enough
to rub one the wrong way.
The right way to rub went out following
the donning of pajamas.
On to the deep end of
existential phenomenology.
Where the water is far over the head;
a drowning possibility
despite swimming lessons.
And to think it all began in dark water
where time had no purchase
in an ocean of improbability
amid waves of ambiguity
with nowhere to stand
then inexplicably—
you could see the sky;
an entity set free
to imagine and create.
Thankfully, there is a shallow end.
The wadding in the parties and pastimes,
the Christmas Eves in suspended belief;
pumpkin carving and discovering
the magic of masturbation,
movies of imagination;
superheroes, anti-heroes
and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
In truth, one can keep afloat
across all manners of depth
on the rubber raft of one's soul
once it is inflated with enough air.
Which too can take some measure of effort.
Ron Vazzano
Word of the Month
halophobia noun
ˈhālō/fōbēə/
No, not the fear of a circle of light, especially one surrounding or above the head of a saint
or holy person to represent their holiness, but rather...
1. fear of salt
2. in botany, the inability of some plants to grow in salt-rich soil.
Used in a sentence
Given the nature of her demise, Lot's wife's halophobia turned out to be prescient.
Amanda Knox: Once a "Lucifero"...Now a Mommy
I am not a true crime fan. The husband or jilted lover is always the murderer. Eventually caught through having done some stupid guy thing along the way. Malevolent psychosis is not usually my thing. So I don’t tune
tune in to such lurid stories. But when I heard about this attractive young girl from Seattle on trial for a knifing murder of a roommate, being compared to Lucifer in an Italian court, well, this was nothing akin to murder-of-the-week TV fare. No, Dateline or 48 Hours here. No, this seemed like something out of an opera. And with a heroine being just a twenty-year old college student studying abroad, no less.
Here's an excerpt from my November, 2011 MuseLetter on that trial of ten years ago.
Sympathy for the Devil?
You don't hear much of the devil these days. He used to seemingly be lurking around every corner, lying in wait to lead us astray. And you sure as hell don't hear the name Lucifer thrown around in mixed company. At least I haven't since the Stones' classic song Sympathy for the Devil. And if you were forced to read Milton's Paradise Lost in your academic days, Lucifer is a main character in that epic poem. I also recall that in Disney's Cinderella, that was the name of the evil stepmother's cat.
But now here it was being invoked, not in a film, not from some pulpit, not in some rock song, but by an attorney in a court of law. That is to say, the retrial of Amanda Knox. (And of an ex-boyfriend, whose name no one can remember five minutes after hearing it).
"One side of Knox is angelic, good, compassionate, and in
some ways even saintly. The other side is Lucifer-like, demonic,
satanic, diabolical and longs to live out borderline
extreme behavior."
We also learned that Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor in the case, even went so far as to initially posit that the victim, Meredith Kercher, was killed during a "Satanic ritual." Then later revised that theory to one of a "sex-orgy-gone-wrong."
One would guess that in the country that gave the world Dante Alighieri, such unbridled condemnations might not be all that surprising:
She was so broken to lascivious vice
She licensed lust by law, in hopes to cover
Her scandal of unnumbered harlotries.
— Dante; Inferno, Circle II, Canto V
I have no idea of Amanda Knox's guilt or innocence. Or how satanic or Lucifer-like she might be. I didn't follow the first trial two years ago, nor this retrial. But what caught my attention last month in the media as it was concluding, was that major moral issues of good versus evil were being so publicly addressed. And with such passione!
As Sarah Stillman, a visiting scholar at NYU writing for CNN, pointed out so succinctly in the opening sentence of her essay…
"There is something about pretty girls, bloody knives and the slightest whiff of sex that gets the international news machine humming like nothing else."
So now I too was intrigued to see how this would all play out. Especially after the unequivocal denial by Knox—an American girl out of Seattle— in the native tongue of her accusers:
"Io non sono quello che dicono io sono -- perverso, violento. ... Non ho ucciso.
Non ho violentato. Non ho rubato,"
"I am not what they say I am -- perverse, violent. ... I haven't murdered. I haven't
raped. I haven't stolen,"
I could not help but be impressed with the repetitive cadence in her plea.
When the verdict came down, Knox once "guilty," on second thought was really "innocent" and allowed to go free. Sympathy for the devil? This is the stuff of grand opera. The libretto has all but been written. It needs just a musical score.
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Amanda Knox was none too pleased with this very outer edge of that rabbit hole, and announced to the press:
"I am the one who has been condemned to live with his infamy," …I do wish that he (Rudy Guede) had been fully held accountable for what he did and that he acknowledged what he did, and I don't know if that will ever happen."
"The only reason you know I exist is because [of] what he did, and that is a grave injustice,"
Which is the sort of statement that murder victim Meredith Kercher's relatives have slammed Knox for, as being "inappropriate" behavior following her acquittal. They too, must be lost in what to make of that rabbit hole. And this hadn't been the first time that Knox was accused of acting in a self-serving manner.
Six months later, Knox also took on, not a murderer, but American film director Tom McCarthy and his new film Stillwater, starring Matt Damon. McCarthy had said it is 'loosely based' or 'directly inspired by' the 'Amanda Knox saga.' To which she responded: "I want to pause right here on that phrase 'the Amanda Knox saga.' What does that refer to? Does it refer to anything I did?" And while Knox said, that McCarthy didn't completely fictionalize everything, she concluded that he just "chose to explicitly repeat the fiction that was invented by my prosecutor." Despite attempts to move on with her life, the "Amanda Knox saga" is destined to follow her. But a great deal, on a very positive note for her, has happened since.
She announced just last month, at age 34, she has become a Mommy. After a first attempt at motherhood ended in a miscarriage. Her daughter is interestingly named, Eureka Muse Knox-Robinson. Perhaps influenced by her husband, Christopher Robinson, who is a poet and writer. (My kind of guy; though not my kind of shirt).
Knox has since become an author, a journalist and activist. Especially in behalf of those falsely accused of committing a serious crime.
Just a couple of years ago, she returned to Italy by invitation to speak at the Criminal Justice Festival (Festival Giustizia Penale) in Modena. It was an emotional moment and after initially breaking down upon introduction, she gathered herself. Then reminiscent of "Io non sono quello che dicono io sonos," she spoke in fluent Italian. Opening with…
She was roundly applauded at the end of her remarks. Though criticized again by some for insensitivity to the memory of Kercher.
Six years ago, she had written a bestselling book Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir. Currently, she and her husband host a podcast, Labyrinths (which was not the inspiration for the rabbit hole graphic earlier). It has featured some noted guests...Andrew Yang, Malcolm Gladwell, LeVar Burton, Cheryl Hines, Sam Harris. Having tuned in to check it out, I have found her to be intelligent, articulate—and though fluent in Italian, speaks no Millennialese—and is in command of a good speaking voice. Which is more than I can say for many of the talking heads across various media outlets.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. I can’t imagine any other story surrounding a young woman, more bizarre than this. Way beyond that of Monica Lewinski. Though of course, how can one forget Patty Hearst?
Picture a Haiku
haiku and illustration by Ron Vazzano
finito
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