This Day in History

This is day four of nanowrimo and guess what I'm doing? If you're reading this, you know. I wish last year's winner of the Procrastinator of the Year award would shine up the trophy and send it my way. I'm really not worried about word count, my goal is to fill in the gaps, add another 10-30K, and I really don't want to get obsessed and crazy this month, like I have in the past. One good thing about writing this blog, even though I'm not spending every minute being a nano purist working on my novel, blogging is a good warm up.

I culled the dates from the website, This Day in History, rambled a bit about what I know, then googled.

1869 - The first issue of the scientific journal Nature is published.
One hundred and twenty-nine years later in November 1998, the British science journal Nature published the results of Dr. Eugene Foster’s DNA Study, which concluded that it is likely Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemming's children. No kidding! Fawn Brody came to this same conclusion in her psychobiography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait, way before DNA. She also gave up the goods on Joseph Smith.

1916 - Walter Cronkite, American news broadcaster born.
As a child, I loved watching Walter Cronkite report the news, so much so, that when my younger sister protested that we always watch the news, I lied and told her that he had saved an entire family, mostly children, from a terrible fire when he ran into their burning home, and carried all of them to safety. For whatever reason, this worked and shut her up, so I could watch the news without arguement. I liked Walter. I was curious about the world, and from my perspective Walter offered up gems of the dangerous and exciting known world outside of my experience. It's curious that now, with so many sources of 24/7 news stations, Internet sources, etc., that I detest the daily news, probably because it's so redundant to watch the same story unfold day in and day out, decade after decade. And really, is the +8 couple's divorce really breaking news? I like BBC and The Christian Science Monitor for world news, The New York Times for book reviews, and I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Mosaic: World News from the Middle East on satellite channel 375, otherwise known as linktv. Generally, I listen to NPR and the local news on the way to and from work.

1899 - Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is published.
This book was ground breaking and brought the unconscious mind out of the closet. An interesting bit of trivia: Dr. Freud wrote the first psychobiography on Leonardo di Vinci. I carried a chip on my shoulder named Sigmund for a very long time. Penis envy? Hysteria, and that machine/treatment? Oedipus Complex? Seriously? Once I read Freud's personal history, looked into his family genogram, well, I understood how Sigmund would look to the Oedipus myth to explain and project his own experience onto the experience of all humans, especially in light of when his father married a young hotty, he quickly sent his two young sons off to boarding school, and avoided a very prickly situation, but not a scathing psychoanalysis from afar. Just goes to show that the personal is the political, or in this case, the psychological.

1922 - In Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to King Tutankhamen's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
My imaginary friend called herself Senya, and related her sad tale that she was an abducted African princess made to serve and live in Imonhotep III's household. She missed the boa-boa flowers,(can't find evidence of this flower), her homeland, which I understand was geographically close to Ghana or Kenya. Of course she was the pharoah's lover. Of course his wife plotted both of their ends. The fact that her story is almost an exact parallel to Verdi's Aida is a little wierd, especially since I was far too young to have been to the opera, and my parents are not the type to have a libretto of the opera laying around the house. Senya came unbidden, and fully-imagined. I believe she was real, for a time anyway, much the same as my daughter's imaginary friend, Sissy, whom she carried around in a shot glass, tossed into the air and caught her while jumping on the trampoline, was real. I can still see Senya's charcoal black feet, her beautiful shoulders, and her hands embroidering her life's tale in red thread on flaxen cloth. I still see her running through the pyramid which had become her tomb, frantic for an escape. I have always been fascinated with Egypt and so have spent countless evenings reading books about ancient and present-day Egypt. I've also googled Senya, and all of the grammar school details I recorded on notecards. Nothing. I'm holding out that Dr. Zahi Hawass will unearth a detail which proves African woman named or renamed Senya lived. I like to think that her restless soul returned to befriend and inspire by telling her story to a little white farm girl from Utah.

1924 - Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming elected as the first woman governor in the United States.
I think it's about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we've been voting for boobs long enough. ~Clarie Sargent, Arizona senatorial candidate. First, I'd like to offer sincere thanks and gratitude to all the women who made my way of life possible: I can speak in public, I can vote, own property in my own name, divorce a husband, retain custody of my child, remarry, take whatever name I chose, keep the money I earn, have access to birth control and decide how many children I will have, earn advanced degrees, work in a profession of my chosing, be a full partner with a man of my choosing. On the way to work yesterday, the reporter said something like, "if elected, Annise Parker will be the first openly gay mayor of Houston; Mary Norwood urged Atlanta's residents to look beyond race, and that if elected, she will be the first white mayor in nearly three decades." Honestly. What will really be a first, is the day when "first woman", "first African American", "first Latina", "first gay", "first whatever" is no longer relevant or even recognized, and we just recognize the whole person, not the race or gender, or other differentiating factors.

1946 Robert Mapplethorpe - photographer born.
Before the economy went completely off the grid, my husband and I used to head to Las Vegas every year to be wined and dined. Those days are over. My husband would spend his days at a conference, and I'd spend mine in one of the many fabulous art museums the city has to offer, and then later we'd meet at the sushi restaurant dujour for fantastic sushi and my yearly sake duel with fabulously eccentric Alex. I always lost. Never duel with a man who drinks vodka like water. Sadly, the annual work trip and Alex are both casualties of the corporate mayhem meltdown that still has the country by the throat.

In 2007 I attended the Venetian's Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition presented by The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. Spend some time with Mapplethorpe's photographs here, here, and here.

1960 - Filming wraps on The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable -- the last film for both.
I fell right on my face in love with Clark Gable when I was in the seventh grade, after my teacher called Scarlet a "bitch" and pressed Gone with the Wind on me. I read it in one stretch, then ran right out and saw the 1939 film at the local dollar theatre. This was way before DVD's, so it says something that roughly thirty-six years after the film's debut, it was still playing at a Saturday matinee. I went with my cousin and she hated it. I'm certain I shushed her. A lot. This was before I acquired all my bad manners,and still cared about being a good girl. I never wanted to be Scarlet, I just wanted bad boy Rhett to fancy me. I immersed myself in the history of the period, and even though it would be some time before I realized just how incorrect much of the history presented in the novel was, I became intensely interested in the Civil War, Reconstruction, carpetbaggers, etc. I should note here Alice Randall's fabulous parallel novel, The Wind Done Gone, told from Cynara, Scarlet/Other's half white sister's point of view. Also, that I absolutely hated Scarlett. Hated it. And hated the made-for-tv movie. Scarlett kicks ass. She isn't some mealy-mouthed victim, that's Ashley's job. Back to my GWTH obsession: I wanted a corset, and if I'd been able to find one, I'm certain I would have worn it. Too bad Victoria's Secret wasn't in every mall back then. I spent hours creating parts for myself in the film, the novel. I painted a cheesy portrait of Gable as Rhett Butler, wrote poetry, a very cheesy "Bonnie Blue" song, learned to play "No Other Love" on the piano. I imagined I'd marry Gable, even though he had died before I was born. Brother! I got over the book, but it took much, much longer to get over Gable. It Happend One Night cemented my fixation with all things Gable, but it was The Misfits that broke the spell, and my heart. Gable's ravaged face, his bravado and charms nearly all gone, and the sadness, the gravitas that permeated the film still makes me squirm. Despite the damage the decades of partying, the wreck of his love life, the state of his health, Gable still had "it", and gave the performance of his life in this film. A relative has a framed snapshot of Gable that her uncle took of Gable right after Carole Lombard was killed in that fateful plane crash, (see how I'm falling into cliche). It's a nice black and white phot of Gable in his car waiting at a stoplight for the light to turn. He looked disheveled, like he'd stayed up drinking all night into the next day. A newspaper with the headline of his wife's death is barely visible on the seat beside him.

1979 - Iran hostage crisis begins: Iranian radicals, mostly students, invade the United States embassy in Tehran and take 90 hostages (63 of whom are American).
I was in high school when the hostage crisis began, and in college when it ended. When it began, I didn't know one Iranian and all I knew about the crisis was what was reported on television. I wrote a very earnest and clueless political poem, The Dance, in which Khomeini, Carter, and the hostages perform a ballet. I was awarded Second Place and $50. First Place was awarded to the poem, The Kiss, and I was livid that some stereotypical first love poem about stolen kisses and furtive glances had beaten my OH-SO-VERY important poem. I accepted the award at an assembly in which I performed later, in my drill team sequin micro-mini dance costume and white go-go boots. Ironic, eh? When the crisis ended, my bubble had expanded. A lot. At the college I was attending, I was witness to for mock executions by Shah or Khomeini proxies enacted on the campus square, and to pro and anti-Khomeini demonstrations. In one instance, police from the surrounding cities were called in and I remember them lining the sidewalks, dressed in riot gear. My algebra tutor, and numerous friends schooled me on the real politics of the region.

1994 - San Francisco: First conference that focused exclusively on the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.
That there was even a conference held to discuss this seems laughable with 20/20 hindsight, and reminds me of the Frances Hodges Burnett quote, At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. It's impossible to imagine a time when the Internet wasn't a force, commercial or otherwise.

2008 - The 56th quadrennial United States presidential election was held. Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.
For the last four years, 2008 in particular, the last year of the Bush Presidency, first thing in the morning I clicked on political cartoons.com, found a favorite to set the tone for the day, then headed over to poets.org to find a poem that matched the theme or spirit of the cartoon. Humor, not the mean-spirited, derisive or divisive kind, but the nudge you in the ribs, ohmigod is this for real, kind, got me through some very rough Orwellian times. I'm an Independent with strong Democrat tendencies, although I have and do vote for Republicans. I live in Utah. I've tried my very best to stay as far away from anything that has organized and religion as a descriptor, so many times I've felt like I was in a lifeboat with the other fifteen democrats, holding on to the sides for our lives, bobbing in the salty waters of the Great Salt Lake. I know the president is hardly the saint he was made out to be and that he's just a man doing a very hard job, trying the best he can with the his particular skill set and moral compass, just like the majority of our former presidents were. It doesn't really matter where you weigh in on the Obama scale, Novemeber 4, 2008 was a momentous day. Good on us, America!