Steve Schmidt, in his daily posting on Substack.com, wrote a moving commentary on the war in Ukraine. Since some of you may not be registered to read his entry, I’m reposting it here.

The world stands at a dangerous hour, but it didn’t seem like it in Santa Monica, where the sky was blue and the weather was perfect. There were no missile strikes from Russian forces to worry about and no freezing temperatures.

The war in Ukraine seems like old news in America judging by its lack of attention. It seems far away, and not particularly relevant. The president doesn’t talk about the stakes very often. It seems that much of the American news media has drifted past the story, and moved on from the cheers and platitudes proffered to President Zelenskyy during his historic speech in front of the United States Congress. 

The war in Ukraine is…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
—Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“The enchantments of the past must always
become the disenchantments of the future.
But memory, a preservative, may intervene …
Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only
human vocation in which the time regained
by memory can be permanently fixed.”
― Howard Moss, from
The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL).

“In computing, a compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language or computer language (the source language), into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code or machine code). The most common reason for transforming source code is to create an executable program. Any program written in a high-level programming language must be translated to object code before it can be executed, so all programmers using such a language use a compiler or an interpreter. Thus, compilers are very important to programmers. Improvements to a compiler may lead to a large number of improved features in executable programs. … Software for early…

“Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by Barbara Strachey is an atlas based on the fictional realm of Middle-earth, which traces the journeys undertaken by the characters in Tolkien‘s epic. The book comprises 51 two-colour maps (a general map of Middle-earth and 50 numbered maps) at various scales, all based on the original The Lord of the Rings maps drawn by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s sketches. Each map is on a right-hand page in landscape format and depicts physical features in black and contour lines in red. Routes taken by characters on roads and paths are shown in dashed black and red; routes off-road are in red only. Arrows show the direction of travel and dates are listed in red. Scales along the top and left of each map show the distance east/west (mainly east) and…

“In 1956 Chess Records, famous for its blues, rhythm and blues and early rock and roll albums, established a new label named Argo. Chess was looking to release pop music with this label via a different distribution channel than its parent company, thus avoiding the need to crossover from the black music market Chess was known for into the mainstream charts. With the advent of the long play record Argo started signing jazz artists and the genre soon became its prime focus. While less known than other contemporary jazz labels (Blue note, Prestige, Verve), some of the finest jazz albums of the period were released on Argo. In this review we will look some of these albums, recorded in 1960. One of the finest jazz ensembles in 1960 recorded three albums for Argo that year. The Jazztet was perhaps the best showcase for the material created by Benny Golson, one…

“Emmett Grogan (born Eugene Leo Grogan, November 28, 1942 – April 6, 1978) was a founder of the Diggers, a radical community-action group of Improvisational actors in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649–1650), a radical movement opposed to feudalism, the Church of England and the British Crown. The San Francisco Diggers were a legendary group that evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement. The Diggers combined street theatre, direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing free food (‘Free because it’s yours!’) every day in Golden Gate Park, and distributing ‘surplus energy’ at a series of…

“Twenty years after he published Justine, the first novel of his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell returned to the city of his obsession. The signs of decay were everywhere, but he fixated on one small but telling change: The colorful movie posters he had loved, showcasing films in numerous languages, were now exclusively in Arabic. Where was the multilingual, multicultural society he had chronicled so painstakingly and poetically? It was 1977, a quarter-century after the revolution in Egypt that toppled a king. After years of military rule, Alexandria’s cosmopolitan culture was almost completely gone. According to Durrell biographer Michael Haag in his book, Alexandria: City of Memory, the novelist found the city ‘listless,’ declared that it had sunk ‘into oblivion’ and was depressing ‘beyond endurance.’ Were Durrell to return again now, he might despair even more. Two years after the Arab Spring precipitated another revolution, Egypt has seen a…

“Nearly two years ago, Bob Dylan had a motorcycle accident. Reports of his condition were vague, and he dropped out of sight. Publication of his book, Tarantula, was postponed indefinitely. New records appeared, but they were from his last album, Blonde on Blonde. Gruesome rumors circulated: Dylan was dead; he was badly disfigured; he was paralyzed; he was insane. The cataclysm his audience was always expecting seemed to have arrived. Phil Ochs had predicted that Dylan might someday be assassinated by a fan. Pete Seeger believed Dylan could become the country’s greatest troubadour, if he didn’t explode. Alan Lomax had once remarked that Dylan might develop into a great poet of the times, unless he killed himself first. Now, images of James Dean filled the news vacuum. As months passed, reflex apprehension turned to suspense, then irritation: had we been put on again? We had. Friends  began to admit, with smiles, that…

“JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — Overcoming disunity, out-of-fashionableness, poverty, and aching feet, the civil rights movement was reborn Sunday on the grounds of the Mississippi state capitol, before the executioners’ eyes of 700 Mississippi troopers and police, armed with M-1s, live ammunition, and tear gas. The ragged band that had begun as one mystical prophet in Memphis, that became 100 in Hernando, that became 1000 after the baptism of spit in Philadelphia and tear gas in Canton, had become 15,000 Sunday afternoon. And they were 15,000 Mississippi Negroes, their biographies etched in their bent spines and gnarled hands. There were a few clergymen, 100 New Left types, a small group of 1930s liberals like Paul O’Dwyer, and a handful of dreamy Dylanesque kids, but mostly they were the porters, maids, and high school students of Jackson, giving a great movement the rare gift of a second chance to redeem its country’s greatest…

“In many ways the most beautiful of all the mimeo magazines, J had an eight-issue run. The first five issues were edited from North Beach bars by Jack Spicer with Fran Herndon as art editor. Spicer, who embodied the spirit of poetry in the Bay Area, collected pieces for his magazine from a box marked ‘J’ in The Place, a bar at 1546 Grant Avenue in San Francisco. A refugee from Los Angeles with two degrees from Berkeley, he had been a student of Josephine Miles there in the mid-1940s. They became close friends, and Spicer participated in the Friday afternoon poetry readings in Wheeler Hall during the late 1940s as well as the readings organized with Rockefeller money at San Francisco State by Ruth Witt-Diamant at the new Poetry Center at San Francisco State. Into the cauldron of poetic politics surrounding Miles, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti…