History of the Day: 10/7

Happy Triplicate Day! Not really, but carbon paper was patented on this day in 1806. Speaking of triplicate, triple triple is nine and today just happens to be the Chinese Double Ninth Festival! According to the I Ching, nine is the yang number; the ninth day of the ninth lunar month (or double nine) has too much yang and is thus a potentially dangerous date. To protect against the danger, it is customary to climb a high mountain, drink chrysanthemum wine, and wear the zhuyu plant. Also on this holiday, some Chinese also visit the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects.

Rupert Murdoch, believing that there was too much liberal yang in the media, launched Fox News Channel on this day in 1996. So, happy anniversary to "fair and balanced reporting," proving that a news network insanely slanted to the right can be as successful as one which is insanely slanted to the left.

In 1928, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. He was thought to be the descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheeba and is worshipped as the Lion of Judah by Rastafarians. What's interesting is that he was a Christian, Coptic Orthodox to be specific. Even Bob Marley converted late in life to follow his example.

Happy Anniversary to American Bandstand, proving that, just because you can't dance, doesn't mean you shouldn't show it on national television. Or, as Simon Cowell (whose birthday is today) would say,

You look like my drunk uncle at a wedding dancing on the tables.

Lots of musical birthdays today. Judee Sill was born in 1944. She died young (35), so she's not very well known, but she should be. Here is her song Crossmaker, covered by the Hollies. It's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

Dave Hope of the band Kansas was born in 1949. Here is some anonymous guy covering Dust in the Wind (or Ecclesiastes in 3.5 minutes, as I like to call it). It just happens to be the first song I learned how to fingerpick on the guitar, so it has a special place in my heart. Or my hand, at least.

Happy birthday to Yo-Yo Ma, the Asian, French-born cellist who is a little scatterbrained and, not kidding, once left his cello in a taxi. Here he is playing Bach's cello prelude, one of my favorite classical songs.

Cristobol de Morales died on this day in 1553. He's one of those polyphonic composers I love so much. Here is his Parce Mihi Domine which is absolutely sublime.

In poetry history, Oliver Wendell Holmes, died on this day in 1894. You often see this quote of his on the doors and walls of our classrooms and the bumpers of our cars:

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Usually, they avoid another quote from Holmes, showing what a closed mind looks like:

...the white man hates him [the Indian], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.

Another poet, Edgar Allan Poe died on this day in 1849 at 5 am after being found in a Baltimore gutter and, this is interesting, wearing someone else's clothes. He kept repeating the name "Reynolds" and his last words were:

Lord help my poor soul.

Knowing Poe, he probably planned the entire thing.To this day, on Poe's birthday, an unknown figure visits Poe's grave and drinks a toast. In memoriam, here is a poem by Poe's cat (via Henry Beard), The End of the Raven:

On a night quite unenchanting, when the rain was downward slanting,
I awakened to the ranting of the man I catch mice for.
Tipsy and a bit unshaven, in a tone I found quite craven,
Poe was talking to a Raven perched above the chamber door.
"Raven's very tasty," thought I, as I tiptoed o'er the floor,
"There is nothing I like more."

Soft upon the rug I treaded, calm and careful as I headed
Toward his roost atop that dreaded bust of Pallas I deplore.
While the bard and birdie chattered, I made sure that nothing clattered,
or snapped, or fell, or shattered, as I crossed the corridor;
For his house is crammed with trinkets, curios and weird decor--
Bric-a-brac and junk galore.

Still the Raven never fluttered, standing stock-still as he uttered,
In a voice that shrieked and sputtered, his two cents' worth--
"Nevermore."
While this dirge the birdbrain kept up, oh, so silently I crept up,
Then I crouched and quickly leapt up, pouncing on the feathered bore.
Soon he was a heap of plumage, and a little blood and gore--
Only this and not much more.

"Oooo!" my pickled poet cried out, "Pussycat, it's time I dried out!
Never sat I in my hideout talking to a bird before;
How I've wallowed in self-pity, while my gallant, valiant kitty
Put an end to that damned ditty"--then I heard him start to snore,
Back atop the door I clambered, eyed that statue I abhor,
Jumped--and smashed it on the floor.

In other poetry history, Allen Ginsberg, legendary beat poet, read his poem Howl for the first tim in 1955.

I saw the best kittens of my litter abandoned by humans,
feral delirious rabid,
propelling themselves through the calico weeds in over grown railyards, searching for a catnip hit,
silverwhiskered hipcats purring in blissful, herbal intoxication leaping to bat the hard white moon-ball bouncing in the black top sky,
who crossed the paths of superstitious pedestrians and
stolled with ominous nonchalance under window washers ladders,
who cowered in the window of the ASPCA shelter hoping that the lunatic in the loden green loungewear would adopt the paranoid parrot instead,
who ran through the subway tunnels pursued by herds of rats as big as broncos rhinos hippos, enormous armored rodents hammering along the knife bright rails on horny hooves
who were chased by stir crazy dogs in Central Park and clambered up Cleopatras Needle using the edges of the smog softened heiroglyphs as paw holds and sat laughing on the pointed peak at the impotents mutts below.
who whined and shrieked like car alarms in the brownstone gardens of uptown matroms until they put out the leftover gravlax appetisers in a Spode china dish,
who fell off a ledge of the Plaza Hotel trying to evade the house dick after browsing on room service trays and landed on little cat feet ten stories down this is a true story and walked away totally intact and didnt even rate a photo in the Post let alone Animal of the Year on the cover of Time Magazine,
who caught and killed and actually ate a pigeon in Herald Square that tasted of rust and grease and pizza crusts and bus exhaust,
who bit the animal control officer on teh ankle and dived into the storm drain and thereby narrowly avoided ending up in a lab cage in Brookhaven wearing a plutonium flea collar,
who slipped in to an exhibit of dadaist art in a gallery in Greenwich Village and dined on cheese cubes and cheap Chablis for a week until the artist showed up and petulantly declared that although the jar of water beetles and teh box turtle with the padlock on its foot were part of the aethetic conception the cat most definitely was not
who were adopted by Mafiosi while hanging around in an alley next to the Fulton Fish Market and lived for a month in an overdeocrated duplex on Queens Boulevard until someone found the decapitated corpse in the trunk of an Oldsmobile at Newark Airport and the cops came, and the lasagna ran out,
who lived happily for one whole year in a mouse bountiful bookstore on Braodway which one blown Monday was bought by Moloch Inc. a national chain which put up metal detectors and Garfield posters and hired an exterminator,
who paused halfway across teh Brooklyn Bridges vibrating wire woven web looking for the iron spiders and saw instead a madman make a clumsy human jump in to to oily Lethe'e filthy Bonxward flow, and thought cats would never do that what with their allotted span of no score and 10 to 15 years, not exactly a life sentence, and all that slimy fur to clean and dry if they failed,
who saw a fifty foot Kodak kitten on a billboard in Times Square and hallucinated a King Kong Kitty stroll through Manhatten pulverizing multitudes with two ton paws
and who afterward bounded through the sour streets inspired by a vision of the power of the meow the holy vowels the ultimate animal mantra the lone phenomenal feline dipthong,
to repeat the one sound song shout pure mysterious yell containing all words phrases speeches novels pamphlets leaflets ballads epics textbooks archives mounumental columned bibliographies filled with infinite alphabets of unfathomable meaning,
the burned out stray and bebop misfit cat, unowned, who beat skulls numb with metered feet and cried out loud what cats have said before and still have yet to say in all the eons after death
and reappeared nine lives later in the tinsel socks of fame in the blazing arc light glare of the tube and trumpeted America's rampant love of dear sweet pussy in a Hail the the Chief Cat saxophone caterwaul that scattered the dog walkers down to the last pooper scooper
with the indigestible furball of the poem in the heart coughed up out of their own bodies on to the absolute centre of the immaculate carpet of life.

Continuing the cat vein, Cats, formerly the most popular musical of all time, opened in 1982 and ran continuously for 18 years. I'm thinking of writing a musical myself, based on my 6th period class, called Herding Cats.

R.R. Laing, a Scottish psychologist and author, was born in 1927. He wrote this crazy book I picked up once on a whim called Knots. Since he was Scottish, you'd think it was about what happens to your intestines when you eat haggis. Ach, noo. It's full of poems like this one:

They are playing a game.
They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are,
I shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Once I started reading it, I realized it is what happens to your brain when you read his poetry. A Scottish philosopher named Thomas Reid died on this day in 1796. He was known as a proponent of common sense (as in the kind that "you weren't born with.") Here are his six axioms:

1. That the thoughts of which I am conscious are thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person;
2. That those things did really happen that I distinctly remember;
3. That we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determination of our will;
4. That there is life and intelligence in our fellow men with whom we converse;
5. That there is a certain regard due to human testimony in matters of fact, and even to human authority in matters of opinion;
6. That, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like what has been in similar circumstances.

Finally, today is the feastday of the cephalophoric St. Osyth of England. According to legend, Danish Vikings cut her head off (which is true), at which point her body picked up her head and walked to the abbey where she was abbess.