The Lilac Bushes and the Forest-Tent Caterpillars
by Martin Willitts Jr

Lilacs grew on our boundary.
My window opened to a whiffed aroma of lilacs.
Light-purple light would wake me.

There was a thin spider-web nest of caterpillars.
In the weight of their nest squirmed black larvae,
begging for mercy. The larvae moved together single file.
Silken treads were laid down by leaders.
They knew they were going places
and they were destroying things in the way.
Buff-colored moths emerged about 10 days later.
They searched the solitude of streetlights.
The neighbors tried smoking the nest to kill it.

I could hear the caterpillars dying.

Everything is a by-product of disagreement.
Everything that was is gone.
Everything that will be is not possible anymore.

And in the end, nothing survived.
The neighbors passed on.
My father turned purple as a lilac, and died.
There are no more moths hovering on…

“Quicksilver Times was an antiwar, counterculture underground newspaper published in Washington, DC. Its first issue was dated June 16, 1969, with Terry Becker Jr., a former college newspaper editor and reporter for the Newhouse News Service, the main instigator in the founding group of antiwar activists. It ran for 3 years, with its final issue (vol. 4, no. 9) appearing in Aug. 1972. Publication was irregular and during the latter part of its run it was publishing once every 3 weeks. It was a member of the Liberation News Service and the Underground Press Syndicate. Quicksilver Times was one of several anti-government underground papers of the period now known to have been infiltrated by government informants. Along with opposition to the Vietnam War, the paper was outspoken in its support for the Black Panthers, feminism, gay rights, and other movements of the period…

“Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/GOD-oh) is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett’s translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) ‘a tragicomedy in two acts’. The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. … Act I. The play opens with two men, Vladimir and Estragon, meeting by a leafless tree, whose species is later speculated to be that of willow. Estragon notifies Vladimir of his most recent troubles: he spent the previous night lying in a ditch and received a beating from a number of anonymous assailants. The duo discuss a variety of issues, none of any…

49th Street at Woodland Avenue, Philadelphia

“In Hardy’s ‘The Self-Unseeing,’ he visits the remains of his childhood home and recalls where the door was, how the floor felt, how his mother sat ‘staring into the fire’ while her fiddler husband ‘bowed it higher and higher.’ The last two bittersweet lines, ‘Everything glowed with a gleam / Yet we were looking away,’ remind him they couldn’t possibly have been aware of the harmonious moment while living it. They were oblivious, happily so. The moment is what the poem tries to catch up on. We’re always late for consciousness, neuroscientists say. And there are durations and degrees of lateness. When conversations turn to the trials of keeping up with the accelerated present, I say I’m still trying to keep up with the past. If you grow up in a concentrated, tribal, old-style working-class neighborhood, as I did, you’re in the dream and…

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has interesting insights on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The overwhelming resistance to Putin is remarkable, and Putin has turned to carpet-bombing cities and devastating civilian areas. Despite Russian efforts to convince the Russian public that the war “to liberate Ukraine from fascists” is going well, she points to the growing number of anti-war protests in Russia.

She writes:

In Ukraine, Russian troops escalated their bombing of cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mariupol, in what Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky called a campaign of terror to break the will of the Ukrainians. Tonight (in U.S. time), airborne troops assaulted Kharviv, which is a city of about 1.5 million, and a forty-mile-long convoy of tanks and trucks is within 17 miles of Kyiv, although a shortage of gas means they’ll move very slowly.

About 660,000 refugees have fled the country.

But the war is not going well…

“We all know the name Malcolm X, but few of us have heard of Malik El-Shabazz, the name the civil rights activist adopted after his conversion to Islam and under which he journeyed to Cairo in the early 1960s. As those who travel in the pursuit of knowledge so often do, Malcolm travelled alone, arriving in the Egyptian capital just before embarking on a long journey through Africa. Malcolm’s time in Cairo is rarely touched upon. Still, it seems to have had an important impact on his politics towards the end of his life, sparking a new emphasis on Black unity and the importance of brotherhood in the face of white oppression. The year before Malcolm X’s last visit to Cairo, he’d left America to travel the Middle East and West Africa. When he returned on May 21st, 1963, he had visited Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, and…

In her latest newsletter, Heather asks a question related to the Ukraine crisis that I thought would be interesting to ask as a standalone to see how my readers would respond.

Prior to her question, she wrote about how in 2019, Trump tried to skew the 2020 election by withholding congressionally appropriated funding for Ukraine to support its defense against Russia — and how Republican senators declined to convict him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

With this background in mind, she mused about how the Republican Party will respond to the Ukraine crisis.

She then went on to ask this question …

And how will America as a whole respond?

What are your thoughts? IF Putin does carry forward his plans to invade Ukraine, what do you think America should do? Biden talks about sanctions, but will this be enough? Many feel it will be. Or…

“After languishing out of print for many years, Mike Shea’s legendary film on Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market, And This Is Free, has finally been reissued by Shanachie and I imagine news of this will stir up quite a bit of excitement in blues circles. Shanachie has done an exemplary job with the packaging; housed in a soft covered fold out set is a two disc set containing the 50 minute documentary And This Is Free, the 30 minute documentary Maxwell Street: A Living Memory, some fascinating archival footage, an interview with sound man Gordon Quinn, a separate CD of performances by artists associated with Maxwell Street plus an illustrated 36 page booklet. The history of the film and music recorded by Mike Shea over the course of sixteen Sundays on Chicago’s Maxwell Street in 1964 has an interesting if convoluted history, and I find it odd that…

“‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (French: La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines) was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference (French: L’écriture et la différence). ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ identifies a tendency for philosophers to denounce each other for relying on problematic discourse, and argues that this reliance is to some degree inevitable because we can only write in the language we inherit. Discussing the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues that we are all bricoleurs, creative thinkers who must use the tools we find around us. Although presented at a conference intended to popularize structuralism, the lecture is widely cited as the starting point…