November 16, 2013

50th Anniversary of JFK assassination coming up soon. I was in the Eighth Grade, by 3:00 P.M. my class was in a church praying for him. My old college roommate was a huge conspiracy buff and still is. He was always interested in the Organized Crime connections, which were many. He always railed against the Warren Commission report.

The Warren Commission , above, was also a great source for Don DeLillo's Libra :

"Then there was The Warren Report, which is the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material. I’m not an obsessive researcher, and I think I read maybe half of The Warren Report, which totals twenty-six volumes. There are acres of FBI reports I barely touched. But for me the boring and meaningless stretches are part of the experience. This is what a life resembles in its starkest form—school records, lists of possessions, photographs of knotted string found in a kitchen drawer. It took seven seconds to kill the president, and we’re still collecting evidence and sifting documents and finding people to talk to and working through the trivia. The trivia is exceptional. When I came across the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother I felt a surge of admiration. Did they really put this in? The testimony of witnesses was a great resource— period language, regional slang, the twisted syntax of Marguerite Oswald and others as a kind of improvised genius and the lives of trainmen and stripteasers and telephone clerks. I had to be practical about this, and so I resisted the urge to read everything."

Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135



The Sunday NYT Book Review gives a thumbs up to The Bully Pulpit Thanks to Jury Duty, I am half-finished with this over 700 page book. TR dominates but it is interesting to see what an accomplished individual Taft was in all that he did.



Holiday Market getting ready.



Cayenne Peppers.