Author: Gem

An incident occurring at daybreak, on Saturday, December 9, 1531, in Mexico, [represents] the culmination of all the superstitions we have discussed. Of tremendous sociological and psychological impact, it has left physical traces that can still be seen — and, indeed, are still an object of much devotion — today. On that long-ago morning, a fifty-seven-year-old Aztec Indian whose Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle and whose Spanish name was Juan Diego was going to the church of Tlaltclolco, near Mexico City. Suddenly he froze in his tracks as he heard a concert of singing birds, sharp and sweet. The air was bitterly cold: no bird in its right mind would sing at such hour, and yet the harmonious music went on….

At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, it was found that if red hot irons were placed to cool on a man’s back, certain phenomena were to be noted. The monks, the scientific men of that day, occasionally made records of their conclusions as to this process. Some valuable data no doubt has been lost, but enough remained when that Frenchman, Paquelin, made his exhaustive study of the subject to result in the cautery named for him.

Hemingway had decided, with all good intentions, to give his wife a belated Christmas present. He rented a Cessna 180 and hired a bush pilot named Roy Marsh to fly them over some scenic African sights. They would see Lake Albert and the spectacular Murchison Falls where the Nile River falls through a rock cleft and descends into cascading pools of water several hundred feet below. Mary Hemingway shot roll after roll of film as the bush pilot circled the falls several times. Suddenly, a flight of ibis, birds with long legs and long curved bills, flew in front of the plane….

“Her books (‘South American Magic Realism,’ she murmurs almost disparagingly — ‘nowadays everyone seems to be at it’) are full of fairly innocent girls who suffer at the hands of Bluebeard or The Beast, or the alarming owner of an extraordinary toy shop. In her stories the woman is frequently the victim, fearful only that she may enjoy that condition too much.”

The best way to learn a language, I’d heard, was to have an affair with a native speaker, one who didn’t speak English. Clearly, I needed a new approach and this one did have a certain sex appeal. I gave it a try. He was, I recall, rather cute — tall, blond, soulful eyes. Perhaps not an intellectual powerhouse, but given our linguistic limitations, I had no way of knowing. I wasn’t even sure of his name. I’m sure he’d told me, but I’d forgotten. By the time I knew it was a name I should know, it was rather too late to inquire. I rummaged through the papers on his desk and found both Alain Chausse and Chausse Alain, but neither had commas.

“The captain and mate were seeing to it that the crew should not get away…. The captain’s boat was hoisted on board every evening, and the oars put away. There was also a night-watchman, who had two guns strapped around him, but did not look fierce to correspond. Being a Frenchman, and rather religious, I doubted if the necessity could arise to make him shoot to kill. Liverpool Jack and I held a conference, and decided that the time was near to make a dash for freedom.”

“When Sarah was born on October 23,1844, Judith was only 16 years old. A beautiful girl with a lovely face and figure, Judith had been a milliner before arriving in France to seek her fortune. Perhaps she could have become a governess or a seamstress, but she thought either option was too dull and poorly paid.”

Even if you have never swung a partner to a stamping fiddler’s call, it is not hard to imagine a square dance, that exuberant American social occasion in calico and straw. The caller was the most important part of the dance, for it was he who got folks on their feet and made them mix. Many a romance has started from the clever calls of the fiddler who kept a sharp eye out for matchmaking. Here are some of his lively directions. You supply the music and the dancing and see whom you end up with!

First things first: as a chicken rancher, you do not need a rooster in order for the hens to lay eggs. Hens lay eggs nearly daily for most of the year, in accordance with the length of the day (i.e. waxing in spring and waning in winter). The only thing a rooster can do that is useful to humans is to fertilize the eggs if you’d like to have chicks. Fertilized eggs have no more nutrients than unfertilized eggs. Notice that I wrote the only “useful” thing. Just about everything else a rooster does is completely obnoxious….

“Most of the 60s in my memory is like one long blur of trying to cook dinner from the inside aisle of a moving bus with pots and pans tied onto it.”

“This LIGHT SHOW MANUAL is a ‘HOW TO DO IT’ report based on personal experience and observations of the author over the past decade. A major adjunct to psychedelic ‘happenings,’ rock-and-roll performances, ‘in’ parties, and ‘turn- on’ scenes are the color effects grouped under the heading of ‘light shows.’ This imaginative use of color and light expanded greatly in the psychedelic scene, adding much to trips festivals, ‘GUAMBOS’ (Great Underworld Artist’s Masked Balls and Orgies), ‘freak-outs,’ and futuristic night clubs.”

The next fall after this marriage, three of my neighbours and myself determined to explore a new country. Their names were Robinson, Frazier, and Rich. We set out for the Creek country, crossing the Tennessee river; and after having made a day’s travel, we stop’d at the house of one of my old acquaintances, who had settled there after the war. Resting here a day, Frazier turned out to hunt, being a great hunter; but he got badly bit by a very poisonous snake, and so we left him and went on. We passed through a large rich valley, called Jones’s valley, where several other families had settled, and continued our course till we came near to the place where Tuscaloosa now stands. Here we camped, as there were no inhabitants, and hobbled out our horses for the night. About two hours before day, we heard the bells on our horses going back the way we had come, as they had started to leave us….

…That was in 1929 and I went home to New York for the Christmas vacation. New York looked even better to me than before and I hated the idea of returning to the Middle West, so on the way back I got off the train in Albany and spent the night there. In the morning, I took another train back to New York, and got a room in a fleabag hotel. The Elk, on West Fifty-third Street and Seventh. I sent my mother a letter telling her not to worry and then set out to find a job.

The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to “pure” fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol’s antibacterial properties.

“The trip was not without fateful consequences of its own. My mother and father met in London — he followed her to America a year later. And on my Aunt Kate the trip produced so profound an impression that she never recovered from it for the rest of her life.”

[Carl Jung died of a heart attack in 1944, only to be brought back to life. This is an excerpt from his experience.] As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me — an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me.

It was a long day in court, with much happening before the defense for Mrs. Snyder rested and the defense of Gray began with the immediate production of Henry Judd. Out of the dark tangles of this bloody morass there stepped for a brief moment a wraith-like little figure all in black — Lorraine Snyder, the nine-year-old daughter of the blond woman and the dead art editor. She was, please God, such a fleeting little shadow that one had scarcely stopped gulping over her appearance before she was gone. She was asked just three questions by Hazleton as she sat in the big witness chair, a wide-brimmed black hat shading her tiny face, her presence there, it seemed to me, a reproach to civilization.

“One Sunday afternoon, aged twelve, while my father was safely at work in the stable block ‘over the way’, I watched on the little television Anthony Asquith’s film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-open, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing.”

Lincoln always took great pleasure in relating this yarn: Riding at one time in a stage with an old Kentuckian who was returning
from Missouri, Lincoln excited the old gentleman’s surprise by refusing to accept either of tobacco or French brandy….

…From all this one may conclude that the equivalent of four hundred pounds a year was the minimum for respectable travelling [circa 1600] and that the Average Tourist would certainly need at least half as much again. But this is assuming that all who were respectable, or above the need to be so, paid all their own expenses, which was far from being the case…