On the Sixties

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Just be sure to post something about the Sixties.

Vietnam
Psychedelia
Summer of Love
Haight-Ashbury
The Grateful Dead
Acid
Free love
Peace
Make love not war
The sense of imminence
Thai-dye (sp?)
Woodstock
The Beatles
One small step for mankind
VW vans with curtains
Feminism
Civil rights
Janis
Jimi
The Doors
The Stones
Get Smart
Goldfinger
Groovy man

Kennedy assassination
Martin Luther King assassination
Selma, Alabama to Montgomery Marches
The Velvet Underground
"Trust no one over 30"
Stokely Carmichael's: "The proper position of women in the movement is prone." (ASSHOLE)
SNCC
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

Make love, not war.
War is not healthy for children and other living things.
The revolution will not be televised.
hip hugger jeans
granny glasses
"I buried Paul."
levitating the pentagon
The whole world is watching.

It's "tie-dye."

Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
The personal is political. (Response to the Stokely C. comment?)

This song written in 1968 after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dHvYB5JdSs

Bomb shelters and air raid drills at school during which we were herded into the hallways and told to put our head between our knees. (I guess that way the radiation would only affect the back of our heads.)

Yippies
Students for a Democratic Society
The Democratic National Convention

Goldwater campaign slogan: "In your heart, you know he's right."

Rejoinder: "In your guts, you know he's nuts."

Eugene McCarthy slogan: "Clean for Gene!"

Put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

9: Totally what sprang into my mind. GMTA!

I think the button that says "Join the army, visit exotic locales, meet interesting people, and kill them" or something like that is also from that era...

Whitey's on the Moon...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

After spending two days trying to get my computer fixed, what I like best about the sixties is that there were no computers.

Rereading this thread, I saw your comment at #5, Lisa, which I recall too, but in the fifties (not the sixties). From "Digging Deeper," the book I am still (endlessly) reworking, an excerpt in which I recall childhood in that decade:

... The sense of uncertainty I felt while walking to school, the Quonset hut with the army camp behind it, trucks rumbling by the schoolhouse windows, the grinding of tank treads, stirring up dust, the radar installation that tracked the sky for enemy planes that approached as I crawled under a desk, kneeling with the other kids, our hands clamped to our heads to protect ourselves from falling bombs.

Good stuff, slick. I can relate to the writing and rewriting (as well as the difficulty in getting published). I wrote and rewrote my own book over about thirty years, starting at about the same time: 1975 or so. And the other things are of the moment, when we talk about the sixties and attempt to delve beneath the surface.

Peter at #13--I did not start grammar school until 1960, so that is my frame of reference. I certainly did not understand then the significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or probably even know what it was. In my age group, we just knew we were afraid of "The Russians" and "A-bombs". We were also taught to know where the buildings were with the civil defense symbol in case of an air raid warning.

#14 slick--sounds like a good book, but probably quite disturbing to read. I can imagine that the poor guy could not get anyone to look at that book in 1977--we only withdrew from Vietnam in 1975. The photos of the airlift evacuation from the U.S. embassy are another vivid memory.

My class in high school was the last to get lottery numbers. Several years ago, I went to Vietnam as a tourist. Visiting Saigon was somewhat "otherworldly" for my friends and me because of our associations from the 60's and early 70's.

15: Yes, that is what made me think of you when I read it! Thought you might like the Jungian stuff too.

Bob Dylan
Joan Baez
Judy Collins
Joni Mitchell
Simon and Garfunkel
The Mamas and the Papas
The Rolling Stones
Eric Andersen
"It's my party and I'll cry if I want to"
"in loco parentis" and getting rid of it
Freshman beanies and getting rid of them
curfews and getting rid of them
dorm visitation restrictions and getting rid of them
25 cents for a pack of cigarettes and a dollar for a pitcher of beer
15 cent hamburgers at MacDonalds
cheap blue jeans to cut up and make skirts of
18 year old drinking ages
Mateus Rose and Boone's Farm Apple Wine, if you would believe
rye and ginger
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
Steppenwolf
Dune
Kahlil Gibran
Catch 22
Slaughterhouse Five
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov

Yeah, I'm old -- I could go on for days.....

Love.
Hope.
Joy.
Dancing.
Pop Festivals.
Communes.
Feeling a part of something much larger than myself, thinking we would change the world...
and
So many Beautiful Girls, still in my mind evergreen.

My goodness, how I miss those days.

slick, concerning Jung, I stick to: Psychological Types rather than the collective unconscious and its mythology, though he also wrote an appreciative foreword to my copy of The I Ching or Book of Changes. How could we overlook that, when discussing the sixties? Though I do appreciate that you were thinking about me.

Lisa: Nothing personal, but I don't want to hear about how young you are.

To Theelilzabet, et al. :

"Goldwater . . . In your guts you know heʻs nuts"

I wasnʻt settled down enough to be a registered voter in 1964, but I probably would have voted --
not so much FOR Johnson as AGAINST Goldwater.
But I didnʻt think he was crazy. On the contrary I thought he knew all too well what he was doing. I had observed the same attitude in General Douglas MacArthur in 1950-51: a war vs. China was, supposedly, winnable, and the Soviet Union would just sit back and hope we and China would beat eachotherʻs brains out.

The Goldwater candidacy was never so great a shock as the announcement 4 years earlier that
LBJ was going to be the D candidate for vice-president. Godlwaterʻs later conversion to Moderation and even to "Liberal" tendencies was
something of surprise.

Decades later I learned that among Goldwaterʻs zealous young supporters was
Hilary Clinton (D NY). In the 60s I knew only
one Goldwater supporter, and I remember that the attitude toward her among us other alc- --
er I mean us other "heavy drinkers" was
somewhat condescending. So she was "nuts" on that one topic? ʻSʻ Okay!

Hey there, Roland. I might well have been at B.U., in journalism school, when you were a librarian there. Took part in a few demonstrations, against the Louise Day Hicks reaction to school busing (remember that?), and an antiwar demonstration on the Commons that had the most threatening counterdemonstrators I'd seen anywhere: New York, D.C., Philadelphia (we went there because of the Liberty Bell). Boston was one polarized town back then.

Stokely Carmichael's: "The proper position of women in the movement is prone." Not only was he an asshole but he did not know the difference between prone and supine.

Alan Watts
Grace Slick
electric kool aid
You are on the bus or off the bus
Can't bust em
Glass packs

and so very much more.

Don't forget the Lakes Pipes. But I remember Glass Packs and Lakes Pipes from the fifties more than the sixties.

Meet the Beatles
12X5
Out of Our Heads
The Monkees
The Three Donovans: The Donovan of "Catch the Wind" and the Donovan of "Season of the Witch" sandwiched around "Sunshine Superman".
Hey Hey We're the Monkees
A Taste of Honey (The movie and the song)
Dancin' in the Streets and Sally Go Round the Roses (somewhere in there is the greatest R&R song evah).
I'll see your Grace Slick and raise you a Jefferson Airplane
Country Joe and the Fish
Steppenwolf
The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Heat/White Light
Winchester Cathedral
The Young Rascals who grew up to be just the Rascals
Cerdes (Outside the Gates of)
Ummagumma

This could go on all night.

Martha Vandellas' Dancing in the Street is the greatest song evah... It doesn't matter what you wear, just as long as you are there...

the greatest song evah

what do you think of this version?

Don't the 80s rule? Weren't the 80s so much better (and more lucrative $$$$$) than those idealistic 60s?

>26 absurdeist: SALTS! Where are my smelling salts? Must take to the divan!

I shouldn't have bothered to pause Pandora to listen to the Van Halen.

Robert

>26 absurdeist: the day my kids turn 13, I am sitting them down and playing them that video to explain the dangers of cocaine.

As far as the sixties go, lately, I have been getting super into paisley, free love (theory, not practice) and the Strawbs.

Oh, man. Paisley. That slipped my mind entirely. Energy waves breezing into an open window while on acid, exactly resembling the paisley patterns popular on those shirts. So, who was the mysterious acidhead designer who introduced those shirts long before anyone had even heard of LSD?

>30 copyedit52: was it Prince? Did he use his time machine?

Strawberry Alarm Clock
The Electric Prunes
Woodstock
The Summer of Love
The Valley of the Dolls
Peyton Place
Dark Shadows
I Dream of Jeannie
Bewitched
Hogan's Heroes
Green Acres
That Girl
Twiggy
Lost In Space
Petticoat Junction
THE WHO
The Supremes (Personally, I prefer The Supremes era with Diana Ross)
The Ed Sullivan Show
The Flintstones
Scooby-Doo Where Are You?
Josie and the Pussy Cats
Top Cat
Squiddly Diddly
Maggilla Gorilla
Barman
Gilligan's Island
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.
The Rat Patrol
The Addams Family
The Munsters
Star Trek
Daniel Boone
My Favorite Martian
The Wonderful World of Disney
The Smothers Brothers
Laugh-In
Hee Haw
Dr. Kildare
77 Sunset Strip
Dragnet
The F.B.I.
McHale's Navy
Sonny & Cher
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
FireBall XL5
Route 66
The Twilight Zone
The Outer Limits
HELP!
A Hard Day's Night (movie)

Beatles1964

The Rolling Stones' Altamont Music Festival
The Flying Nun
The Partridge Family
The Jetsons
The 1960 World Series Pittsburgh Pirates defeat the New Yankees in 7 Games
1967 The Impossible Year Boston Red Sox
Carl Yastrzemski a.k.a. Yaz the last Major Leaguer to win Baseball's Triple Crown Home Runs, Runs Batted In, Batting Average in '67 Yaz won the Triple Crown by hitting 44 Home Runs, 121 Runs Batted In & a .326 Batting Average
1964 The Beatles start The British Invasion
Hippies
Bell Bottom Pants
Beatlemania
Vulcan Mind Meld
Live Long And Prosper
Mr. Ed
Mission Impossible
the saying, If you can remember the 60s you weren't there
Casey Kassem & America's Top 40
AM Radio

Beatles1964

Jefferson Airplane
Grateful Dead
Wretched High School
Antioch College (not much better)
Bell Bottoms
Granny Dresses
Hair down to my a**s
Mission Impossible
The Avengers (lurve Mrs Peel)
The Smothers Brothers
Laugh-In
The Twilight Zone (Rod Serling was an Alumnus of Antioch..and i attended what i think was his last lecture there in 197???)
The Outer Limits (where we all live now)
The Supremes
Mary Wells
The Temptations
Timothy Leary
Richard Farina (& MIMi)
Joan Baez/Bob Dylan (Duh!)
Gary Snyder
Leonard Cohen (poet...before i heard the LPs)
Ken Kesey

.......i gotta stop. I think i'm gonna have a flashback!

;-}

> 29 Free love in practice is much nicer than in theory.

> 33 have to slip back just 2 years to the 1958 NFL Championship game - The Greatest Game Ever Played. In American football anyway (Grin)

>34 jdthloue: Joan Baez/Bob Dylan - have to put in a word for my lady Judy Collins. One of my most intense memories of the 60's was listening to "Come Away Melinda" on acid in 1965.

Here's the Velvett Fogg doin' "Come Away Melinda". Don't have any acid handy, though. :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcau4tGSFw&feature=related

But where's the paisley in the video? Different acid, I guess.

Which reminds me: this is the last day of my psychedelic giveaway: I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Memoir of a Psychedelic Year. One copy left. First to claim it, gets it (only those who don't already have a copy eligible).

>36 absurdeist: I really do not think I could have got on top of YouTube and acid. (Grin)

A fair glass of Wild Turkey 101 Plus and I've turned to the sixties, specifically Dylan. A playlist for the next few minutes:

It Ain't Me Babe
Visions of Johanna (but Madonna still has not showed. What a prophet!)
Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
She Belongs to Me
Maggie's Farm
Love Minus Zero (My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence... total genius.
Mr. Tambourine Man
It's All Over Now
Blowin' In the Wind
Girl From the North Country
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
Corrine, Corrina

Plus more later .....................

as rich as a christmass fruitcake, and as satisfying. B.D. didn't get stuck in all that 60's marshgass, did he?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q4GWKUOLK4&feature=related

And then there was...

Led Zeppelin
Cream
Three Dog Night
Joe Cocker
Credence Clearwater Revival
Crosby Stills Nash and Young
The Guess Who
The Moody Blues
Deep Purple

sensemilla
thai sticks
hashish
mescaline
peyote
mushrooms

Ah, but they were some high times, amigo.

mmmm, but must admit that I did not partake until the seventies...

>41 highdesertlady: thai sticks? I am such a fucking square.

omg... the best weed ever wrapped and tied to stems
http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/mj006.htm

Thai Stick was popular during the late 60s and early 70s. It was premium buds of seedless marijuana that were skewered on marijuana stems. Several rows of string found in the stalk of the marijuana plant were then used to tie the marijuana to the stem and keep it in place.

The real stuff was very potent compared with the marijuana that was available at the time. Two or three tokes of Thai Stick would produce the same effects as smoking a joint of regular weed. It was popular and available most places, at least occasionally, until the late 70's.

Reports of Thai Stick being dipped in opium are apocryphal.

I know of no studies that verify that Thai Stick has ever been dipped in opium, and I suspect that these rumors were a result of people not believing that marijuana could be that potent unless something else were added.

-Pete Zakel

Edited to note: Being square? You know that's not a bad thing, Booksfallsapart... right?

>45 highdesertlady: I do, but thanks for the validation!

Anybody mention pot?,
sputnik going overhead,
the song "Telstar",
hair down below my ass; straight & parted in the middle.
wearing bib overalls and nothing else,
parents saying: "what is wrong with these children",
bra and draft card burnings,
the age of aquarius,
doing pot & drinking Mateus wine (nice high),
driving miles in the fog at 20 miles per hour only to get to the destination and find it was clear as a bell out but the windshield was fogged over. (many times),
leaving my husband (because he "would not" do drugs; how much of a switch is that?,
not a whole lot of reading back then; too busy getting high,
bongs,
Turkish hasish for the bongs being mailed home from army dudes in Turkey,
"White Bird"

White Bird, in a golden cage
on a winters day
in the rain...

God I LOVE that song!!!!

And lest we forget:
hookah pipes
patchouli oil
brass incense burners
beaded doors
paisley patterns everywhere
"White Rabbit" Gotta love Grace

I so was a hippy wannabe! But alas, I was a decade too late.

48: Me too. There's always the Eugene Country Fair if you are feeling nostalgic for something you never really lived through the first time...

Oh yeah...

The nasty level of this post is somewhat elevated, even for me, so please ignore the post if you are easily offended, or even moderately so. Yes, I could have not posted this, but it's a really representative story of the time.

Some of the country fairs I went to in the early sixties when I lived in North Carolina were, shall we say, educational. There was the gal whose patter went something like, I died my hair yellow, and if I'd a mixed an extra batch I'd have the snatch to match. Or the gal who did a thing with ping pong balls and a target. Of course we all saw how a woman could smoke a cigarette when she had a cold. One woman blew smoke rings. Always in the back of the tent was a shell game where some carny separated the old farmers who were just flush with the years earnings from said earnings. Life was just different then, less hung up in some ways, freer to make mistakes or experience things. The Baptists weren't so dead in everybody's shit back then. People pretty much enjoyed each others' company and didn't try to Daddy each other so much.

When I was a kid--this would be the late fifties, actually--I slept over a friend's house, in Brooklyn, and he and I went alone to Coney Island one day, before it became a wasteland, as it is now. We went into a few of those booths that advertised such things as a man with the body of a lizard (a scaly guy, it turned out, probably suffering from psoriasis), and a woman with the head of a lion and the body of a beauty queen, etc. You'd see one of these freakish-looking people, and then be told by the barker that for another quarter you could enter another part of the exhibit to see another one, and after that another one, and so on, until they got as much from you as they could.

War and Peace published
Crime and Punishment published
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland published
American Civil War & Lincoln assassination & Reconstruction
Italian unification under Emmanuel II
Creation of modern periodic table of elements
Nobel creates dynamite
Mendel's Law formulated

Oh, I'm ever so clever!

And leave us not forget Mozart (1756–1791), who precociously came of age in the sixties.

I just linked this (Slash doing his rendition of the National Anthem) over on the metal thread, but thought you former hippies and faux hippies might be interested too.

In loving memory of Jimi.

>47 rainpebble: Mateus! yaaaaaay.

Also, let's all raise a glass to Charles II and curse the regicide Cromwell.

>47 rainpebble:. You don't need to be driving cautiously through fog to go 20 mph. Who rolls along more slowly than a character stoned on pot? And with a speedometer to measure your creeping progress and goad you to keep your foot on the gas. If you didn't have a speedometer, 10 mph would be more like it.

Or so they tell me.

Consider this...

Snorting your 1st line of coke and then floating down the hills from Council Crest; one of the highest spots (if not the highest) in P-town. You're in an old VW bus (called The Puppy) and you end up in a PDX suburb in what seems like 30 seconds. But in actuality it took at least 20-30 minutes (because Dave is driving 15-25mph). One minute you are on the Crest and the next you're in Beavertown. Wow! 'What a high' you say! We need to do this again!

You do more coke on several occasions after that and the high is just not the same... you think man, we were so ripped off. UNTIL, you are partying at a friends house and you are offered a bong hit. Whoa...you are starting to feel that same high you had after that 1st line of coke you snorted a year ago. Hmmm... Then AFTER you have taken said bong hit you're told that it was actually homegrown weed laced with Dust; Phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, PCP. Later that night you're driving home and it's snowing... In July!

It was not until probably 3-4 years ago, I realized that I was not hallucinating that night. I know this because I was driving home one night, in July, and turned on my bright lights and whadya know... It was snowing... cottonwood.

I will never forget my 1st high on cocaine.

I'm just a kid, so I remember the toys: "Fort Apache", "Super Helmet Seven", Marx plastic dinosaurs, "armymen", etc.

The rich kids had GI Joe and Stingray bicycles.

We weren't rich but I got a Slick Chick Stingray with a banana seat in for my eigth birthday in '68...

Proudest moment in my life up to then:

>60 highdesertlady: amazing photo.

Can you imagine that little tow head in 8 or 9 years into the future living #58? Sheesh...

As Don Henley once crooned, "this is the ennnnnnnnnnd, of the innocence..."

60: I had a bike like that! (about 10 years later) it was yellow. It had that exact same basket with plastic flowers on the handlebars. My relationship to it was like Calvin's to his - it took my mother two years to get to the point she could let go of the back.

63: It is a good song. I know not everyone loves the Eagles or Don H. but I can't help it.

#58 - I've done coke twice, more than thirty years ago, now. Can it really be that long? Anyway, the first time I did it it made me feel like God (or as VU would have it with regard to heroin - When I was rushing on my run, I felt just like Jesus' son). I knew anything that made me feel that good wasn't for me. I'd just finished reading de Quincey's Confessions, so I had some understanding of what the ride would be like, if it became a steady gig, so I let it pass. The second time I did it was immediately after ingesting a hit of good blotter acid, it smoothed the anticipation of the trip, but when the acid got going good, the cocaine was nowhere in sight. I did up a line and felt absolutely nothing. That was it. I haven't been at all interested in cocaine since.

I do, now and again, like a nice, easy bowl of kush with a small glass of whiskey, straight up, one drop of water, or with a wine spritzer (wine and ginger-ale). That's all I care to do, now. How people allow themselves to get hooked on stuff like PCP and Meth, things that have no upside at all, is beyond me.

I started shooting heroin when I was twelve. There ain't nothing in this world like a mainline high, let me tell you. I shot up so much, though, through my teens, that I got a really bad infection in the crease of my left arm where the bicep meets the forearm, and I had to have my forearm amputated as a result.

So now, I just snort black tar heroin. Not as great a rush of bliss as mainlining, but not bad either. I tried for the longest not to do it in front of the kids, but then I got to thinking, "they need to learn how to take drugs responsibly," and learn how not to share used syringes and how to pop up a vein properly so they don't stick themselves repeatedly into a freaking untreatable infection and amputation like me.

So...on Wednesday nights, the wife and the kids and I have a Family Drug Night (kind of a like the Family Game Night we have on Thurs. night, except we all take indiscriminate drugs rather than play games) where the wife and I will bring out various educational paraphernalia and pharmaceuticals and then demonstrate to the children (the youngest is already four, btw, so it's not like we're starting him too early okay?) their appropriate usage and dosage, etc. I think it's important to teach our kids to Drug Responsibly.

59 & 60: Don Henley is a God!!!

64: Mine was gold, Anna. Was an extension of me until my 13th b-day when I got my canary yellow Schwinn 5 speed with racing handlebars. (which I promptly crashed 2 weeks later into a parked car and broke my butt on the curb. my brakes went out)

65: Thank god I never became addicted to any of it. Alcohol did me in though. I thought Jack and his big brother Gentleman Jack (straight up/coke back) were my best friends, but have been Jack free for going on 13 years. However, IF the occasion arises, I do partake in a bowl or two.

'Rique... seriously.

#60 I had that same bike, but mine was blue and I think I got it in '66.

> 66 It is a shame about your forearm but all good thinks come with a little price tag attached.

So, we're into drugs now, are we? Started out with tie-dyes and paisley and Peter Max, and now we're mainlining. Well, I shouldn't say we. I got all this out of my system years ago.

I had a Schwinn when I was ten years old that someone stole.

EF's fictional family events somehow remind me of those 18th century scientist types who used to sit around after dinner, huff, snort and ingest all kinds of mean, nasty things and (try) to write about their experience(s).

Fictional?! You want me to post a pic of my stump?

Shoot. You guys had Schwinns, in 1978, when I was nine, I was cool, I had style, riding to my smack dealer in the ghetto on my GREEN MACHINE !

Low n slow, mean n clean...

Hey now, just wait one minute there! It said "some assembly required". How did you or any one else in the Freeque clan do that, ifin you were always trippin'?

Smack is whack!

It is hard for a rational person to hear (or read) anything at all good about the '80's, the decade that was only surpassed in emptiness by the Bush years...the soul-less, endless,extremely selfish and self-centered narcissistic search for wealth has done sooooo much good for this country and the world.
Oh- and thanks, G.H.W. Bush for all the crack!

Not to mention Jamie, A Flock of Seagulls. Barf!

> 73 You know I feel that William S. Burroughs would have totally gotten of on a green machine. Not to mention Neal Cassady

Wow, what a crazy weekend! Caught up with my high school pals and had a blast last night. The same ones mentioned in #58. I love those guys & gals! Total coincidence too. Synchronicity is bliss.

Lawrence Welk mocks you hippies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmSv2WFDrs&feature=related

The coolest assemblage of white people on the entire planet earth.

Not surpassed until approximately 40 years later, in the Salon...

> 79 That is very close to the single most lame video I have seen on YouTube. (Grin)

What's this I hear, Paul, about the Arkansas Supreme Court, or whatever your high court there is, striking a blow for same sex marriage adoption?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owto4Q473gA&feature=related

The girl is Debbie Harry of Blondie, believe it or not, circa 1968.

What a sweet voice!

Both of those are now reposted on my facebook, and I feel the joy of altruism.

Martin, the world owes you a HUGE debt..

> 82 sort of - kind of - Our wonderful state legislature had passed a bill that banned adoption by unmarried couples. A back-door ban against Gays of course. The Arkansas Supreme Court did find that to be just a bit much. I suspect the dear ledge will try again. At least we have advanced slightly from banning the teaching of evolution. Which the Governor before
Clinton tried to do.

Any of you beloved hippies familiar with Don Carpenter? NYRB recently reissued his first novel, Hard Rain Falling (1966) and man, I'm two hundred pages in and it is great. Portland, Oregon orphans turned pool hustlers turned prison inmates. Can you dig?

So many good one's go unread.

>88 absurdeist:. Can you dig it? Enrique.

Going to have to pick up that Don Carpenter. Oh ya, and Peter's book!

I'll get you yet, slick, persistent pimper that I am.

90: As always, Muphry's Law will bite you in the ass!

That goddamn Murphy's Law will also bite one in the derrier, Anna.

http://www.doncarpenterpage.com/

I'm really glad (yes I can dig it) that NYRB chose to reissue what's labelled his "first novel," though it doesn't read like one. He'd written and shelved three novels previously. UC Berkeley now has them as part of all his archives. I'm devastated by Hard Rain Falling. Haven't been able to post in three days because of it.

No, I was really talking about Muphry's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

I'm the original Grammar Nazi of the Salon des Amateurs de la Langue! I don't make mistakes! Bow to me! :)

Well eff me then, Anna.

Muphry's law is an adage that states that "if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law."

I'll have to remember that. And what a brave woman you are, Anna, for putting such a huge target on your back!

We are not worthy.

#96 Can I count on you to correct me if I am wrong, Anna? Oh, venerable one? ;-)

#94 Rique? Devastated? What happened?

98: Given your chosen livelihood I felt sure you had heard of it. Glad to add it to your repertoire!

94: Seriously now: What is so upsetting about this guy's books? Are you OK?

100: Oh no. I'm really a pussycat about grammar. Except in my one "rant" thread, I'm trying to conform to the descriptivist reality (English is not static and usage determines correctness) but sometimes I get fed up with "mistakes" (my latest rant to my poor, long-suffering SO, Chris, was about "VIN Number" and "ATM Machine") and want language to be clear, concise and logical. I'm trying!

I'm trying to conform to the descriptivist reality (English is not static and usage determines correctness).

Descriptivist, eh? That is the way I've always copyedited, but only now do I know what it's called!

'Should of' despite being usage is still an abomination; it is the usage of ignoramuses. Meaning, thanks to Wittgenstein, is in usage, but those of us holding our usage to a good standard are keeping any meaning at all alive.

I believe that there are people among us who make verbal gestures, for example they utter strings of words, who cannot actually mean much at all, their language is so deficient. If such a person gets a doughnut at a coffee shop it is not through the utterance of a sentence but through some sort of gesture system.

These people may be described but are not to be used as models.

Robert

From the essay "Life in the Stone Age":

... the change that the counterculture made in American life has become nearly impossible to calculate--thanks partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the sixties, and partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the people who hate the sixties. The subject could use the attention of some people who really don't care.

Louis Menand
American Studies

>104 copyedit52: on that note, from somebody whose ideas of the sixties are probably laughably inaccurate, my review of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?, with compliments. I enjoyed it.

http://www.librarything.com/profile_reviews.php?view=booksfallapart