Paracultural Calendar for May 8

[Mark Thibodeau]

On this day in *1891*, Russian-born author, mystic and *spear-point of the
Theosophical movement* <http://blavatskyarchives.com/longseal.htm> *Helena
Petrovna* *Blavatsky* passes away at the tender age of sixty. In her own
time, few would have hazarded a guess as to the tremendous impact her life
and work would have on the century to come.

*****

Born on this day in *1911*, blues-man *Robert Johnson*. At some point
during his early twenties, Johnson allegedly sold his soul to *Satan* in
exchange for musical virtuosity. With a grand total of twenty-nine songs
recorded during a grand total of two sessions, this Mississippi native
became the progenitor - via the young working class white men of England
who so loved his stuff - of *the Blues*.

*****

*Thomas Pynchon*, one of America's greatest post-war novelists and one of
the handful of world-class writers with bona-fide parapolitical
credibility, was born in Long Island on this day in *1937*. Of his major
works, *V.* is an impressive arrival, *The Crying of Lot 49* is a stone
hoot, *Gravity's Rainbow* is an encyclopaedic, mind-bending masterpiece,
*Vineland* is a hippy's delight, *Mason & Dixon* defies
categorization, *Against
the Day* remains mostly unread and I*nherent Vice* is like *The Big
Lebowski* meets... well... Thomas Pynchon! He remains the only person to
ever have a Pulitzer Prize revoked after *The Powers That Be* decided their
panel of judges should never have rewarded such an "unreadable" and
"obscene" work of literature. This, of course, was the highest possible
compliment those decrepit old fools could have paid it.

*****

On this day in *1970*, one of the strangest confrontations in American
post-war history takes place in Lower Manhattan when roughly 200
construction workers, allegedly acting on orders from the *AFL-CIO*, attack
a thousand demonstrators protesting the *Kent State* shootings, the
invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Seventy people are injured and
six arrested in the fracas, which was dubbed the *Hard Hat Riot*
<http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=568> by the media of the day. The
incident served as a stark underline to the deep, essentially unbridgeable
divisions between the Old Left, which was mostly labor-oriented, and the
New Left, which focused more intensely on identity politics. This also
happens to be one of the main themes in the aforementioned *Thomas Pynchon*
 novel *Vineland*.

*****

On this day in *1980*, the *World Health Organization* announces that the
deadly disease of *smallpox* has been wiped off the face of the Earth…
except for a few large boxes of the stuff stored at various bio-weapon labs
in the USA and elsewhere, of course.
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