Paracultural Calendar for May 8

[Mark Thibodeau]

Didn't mean to offend. I think compared to the rest of his oeuvre, Against
the Day remains the least read.

MT

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> AGAINST THE DAY remains mostly unread?? Getting better read every day,
> maybe.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On May 8, 2015, at 5:34 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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