11.28.2001

In memoriam (again)

I didn't miss this, but have been too bummed in general to post it. They are coming too fast and furious these days -- Kleps, Leary, Garcia, D.M. Turner, Janiger, Lilly, McKenna -- now these. Time is relentlessly ending yet another era, and there is less color in the world without them all.

The first bit below was written by Kesey's campadre and fellow Prankster, Ken Babbs. As for the second -- I wouldn't put it past either of them.......



    Ken Kesey -- B: September 17, 1935 -- D: November 10, 2001

    Kesey's belly was hurting and the docs did a scan and found a black spot on his liver. It was cancerous but encapsulated which meant there was no cancer anywhere else. They decided to cut it out and the surgery went okay. He had sixty percent of his liver left to carry the load but in one of those dirty tricks the body can play on you everything else went to hell and this morning at 3:45 AM his heart stopped beating.

    A great good friend and great husband and father and grand dad, he will be sorely missed but if there is one thing he would want us to do it would be to carry on his life's work. Namely to treat others with kindness and if anyone does you dirt forgive that person right away. This goes beyond the art, the writing, the performances, even the bus. Right down to the bone.

    -- Ken Babbs

    TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2001

    "Now, all you people over there, get the news spread around that they're going to do a memorial service for me at the McDonald theater in downtown Eugene at noon tomorrow and if you can't get inside we are going to put speakers out on the sidewalks so everyone can hear all that hoopla bound be to spreading out of the theater like moths on the wing. It says here they are going to bury me in private. Babbs says there's been thousands of emails and he wants me to thank you all for writing. Meanwhile, I've still lots of forms to fill out and they're looking for a bigger halo but durned if I'm going to play that harp. I'm holding out for the thunder machine. See you around."

    -- Kesey



    (For more on the Kesey-Babbs partnership, go here. And Salon, it turns out, has a nice selection of fond Ken remembrances.- Ed.)
And this one I did miss.

    Richard Evans Schultes (Jan 12, 1915 - April 10, 2001)

    Richard Evans Schultes was a botanical explorer, ethnobotanist and conservationist, who carried out extensive field studies, particularly in the Amazon, specializing in natively used medicinal and toxic plants and on new sources of rubber. Boston-born and Harvard-educated, he was Jeffrey Professor of Biology and Director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University (Emeritus). Schultes published over 400 technical papers and nine books on ethnobotany and was widely recognized as one of the most distinguished figures in the field. He received many awards for his work including the Cross of Boyaca (Colombia's highest honour), the annual Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Linnean Gold Medal (the highest award in the field of botany).
You can find a nice write-up here (.pdf format). And here's the obit that the Harvard University Gazette ran:

    Richard Schultes, medicinal plant expert, dead at 86

    Richard Evans Schultes, the Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology Emeritus and renowned expert on medicinal uses of plants, died April 10 in Boston at age 86.

    Schultes is considered by many the father of modern ethnobotany - the study of native people's uses of locally available plants. He was known for his wide travels through the Amazon collecting plants and talking with local people. In 1992, he received the gold medal from the Linnean Society of London, considered botany's top honor.

    Schultes first came to Harvard as an undergraduate and stayed through his graduate years. He received an A.B. in 1937, an A.M. in 1938, and a Ph.D. in 1941.

    Schultes' fieldwork, conducted mostly in the Colombian Amazon beginning in 1941, made him a leading voice in the field and one of the first, in the 1960s, to warn about destruction of the rainforests and the disappearance of their native people.

    "I think one of the things his work did that previous work didn't was he brought in a scientific background. He tried to look at the [plants' active] compounds, at their biology and biochemistry," said Donald Pfister, the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany and curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium.

    Before joining Harvard's professorial ranks, Schultes served in various positions at the Harvard Botanical Museum. He was a research associate from 1941 to 1953, curator of the Orchid Herbarium of Oakes Ames from 1953 to 1958, curator of economic botany from 1958 to 1985, executive director from 1967 to 1970, and director from 1970 to 1985.

    He became a professor of biology at Harvard in 1970, the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences in 1973, the Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology in 1980, and became the Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology Emeritus in 1985.

    Schultes' adventurous travels in pursuit of science spawned books and articles, including "One River" in 1996 by Wade Davis, a student of Schultes. Another student, Mark Plotkin, followed in Schultes' footsteps, writing a popular account of his own travels in "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice," published in the early 1990s.

    Schultes himself wrote 10 books and hundreds of scientific articles. In addition to being an authority on the medicinal uses of plants, he became a leading authority on rubber-producing plants during World War II, at the request of the U.S. government. He was a member of numerous scientific societies, the editor of botanical journals, and the recipient of many honors.

    Pfister, who knew Schultes as a senior faculty member, said his demeanor was somewhat contrary to the "swashbuckling" image his scientific travels gave him. Pfister described Schultes as a "very charming and kind man" who was courteous to both senior and junior people. Having spent much of his career at Harvard and having completed both graduate and undergraduate degrees at Harvard, Pfister said Schultes felt very strongly that Harvard should be the best in everything.

    "I saw him as a very senior and very mature member of the department," Pfister said. "He always wore a lab coat, he always wore a red tie and he was fiercely Harvard."



    Schultes is survived by his wife, Dorothy Crawford McNeil, and their three children: Richard Evans Schultes II, Alexandra Ames Schultes Wilson, and Neil Parker Schultes.

    A memorial service is scheduled for April 29 at King's Chapel in Boston.
We were There

Well, fans, I've been meaning to post this for over a month -- meaning to re-work it, meaning to polish it, meaning to embellish with some links -- meaning, meaning, meaning.

And yet not quite getting around to it.

I will try to get back to it for you. I intend to. But, for now, here it is, in raw form.

A Failure of Angels

11.21.01

We knew it was real before we arrived, of course. Somehow we knew. I say somehow because there are so many people who seem not to get it, whose behavior would indicate that they don’t really know that it happened, or don’t know that it happened on any real level. Perhaps they should go, go to New York City, go to lower Manhattan, and see for themselves. Maybe then they would understand, would feel something, anything. Would at least stop annoying the rest of us with their obliviousness.

They say they haven’t been “directly impacted.” How are 3,000, 4,000 — at one point it was upwards of 6,000, we thought — people killed in the span of 45 minutes without directly impacting everyone who’s left? The true nature of this event is that, among those who do know that this has happened, there is a very real sense that we were lucky. There is a sense among the living that we escaped. Somehow. We were all targeted. That much is clear. Those of us who are still alive simply escaped. For all of the same reasons that some of the victims were in the Towers, or the plaza, or one of the nearby buildings, also destroyed, were simply there — visiting on business or for pleasure, shopping, walking their dogs, taking a last-minute flight, heading out on some long-awaited adventure, or just enjoying what has widely been reported as an otherwise beautiful early fall morning in New York.

We’re still alive because we were lucky. We escaped.

10.23.01

I’m watching TV, first snippets of news, then some show about a judge and her dysfunctional family and her interactions with them, and their interactions with her. My annoyance with myself for not getting this journal entry posted sooner is tempered by a surprising realization that I no longer need to look at the keyboard to type. I wonder how long that’s been possible. I wonder if it’s some amazing tele-type-kinetic feature of my little Compaq Armada. I wonder if it’s a Microsoft trick. I wonder if it’s a rare effect of mixing a relatively cheap cabernet sauvignon with a Foster’s Lager, and, if so, I wonder if it can be duplicated in daylight. It would be pretty useful. I could, for instance, ditch this management mess, and become a court stenographer. Something interesting with my life, my career, my time, if there is such a thing, if any one of us has anything even remotely similar to time that we can call our own.

I digress, as is my tendency when needing to focus on the task at hand.

10.12.01

Your Humble Chronicler and Our Muse spent the weekend in the city. We landed in LaGuardia Friday afternoon, flying in from Cleveland Hopkins Airport. We heeded the FAA’s advice to allow ourselves two to three hours prior to scheduled departure time, to allow for intensified security checks. So, we got there at 8:30 am for our 10:55 flight, and more or less spent all of our time allowance waiting in the concourse, after our ID’s were checked against our tickets, and we went through the metal detectors, and they wanded our coats, the Muse’s purse, and had me tip my cap. Security was tight, I’d say, but relatively efficient; tight for America, that is, compared to the carefree atmosphere that typified air travel in America prior to that horrible event a month and a day ago. Probably still would get us laughed at by, say, Israeli airport security personnel, but I don’t know that for sure. At any rate, we weren’t stuck waiting in any line for more than fifteen minutes, which these days can sometimes qualify as the express line at Starbucks. There were only a few MPs in Cleveland that I noticed, but in New York we had the full monty – uniformed national guardsmen armed with submachine guns at every possible point of entry. It was intimidating as hell, but we did feel safe. As safe as one can feel, I guess, in any situation that requires armed military personnel for safety. America’s very weird right now, that is, if you’re an American. In other words, this is a weird situation for Americans. We had a smooth uneventful flight, which is another current oddity. There is no such thing as an uneventful flight right now.

We were in for a weekend of paying respects. My uncle passed away at 75 on September 18th, 2001. I wasn't able to find a reasonable ticket price to get to the funeral, which was that following Saturday. I’d just started a new job in August, and we’d moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania, so a lot was happening. Much going on, many visits, my son in a new school, trying to stay in touch with family and friends back in The Commonwealth, Our Muse looking for work here in OH – lots going on. Then they blew up the Towers. And everything already disrupted was disrupted further.

So, when a week later my youngest sister sent me an email to tell me that my uncle was in the hospital, followed shortly by another telling me that he’d died, I guess I just kind of went numb. I tried to get a flight into Manhattan for a reasonable rate, but it just didn’t pan out. I didn’t want to drive to New York, the Muse didn’t want me to go alone, and, frankly, at the time, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, either. I was trying to fill some positions in my department, and had some interviews scheduled for Friday, which would get me flying into New York Friday night at best, or Saturday morning at worst, and, either way, basically going to the funeral and turning around and flying back home. I couldn’t get my brain around it. Most of the rest of my family – my mom, five out of my six sisters, my brother -- were able to make it in, which made me feel guilty, but better because at least my aunt wasn’t alone. Plus she had a lot of friends, and so did my uncle. So, while everyone in my family drove in, except my brother, who somehow found a decent non-stop flight in from Columbus, Ohio, the Muse and I stayed in town, and wound up having dinner with my sister and brother-in-law and their two kids, in nearby Akron.

To be honest, I might have been able to find a flight if I’d started really looking as soon as I got the bad news about my uncle, but I couldn’t pull it off. The attacks have really thrown me off. I’ve been way distracted by the news, and have allowed myself to become a bit obsessed with keeping up to date on everything, as in up to the hour, almost. I’ve spent lots of time digging into the news, using search engines like Metacrawler to troll the internet for alternative media sources of information, things like the World Conflict Server, Jane’s Information Group, The Middle East Media and Research Institute. Glum stuff, mostly all of it. Even found an online Afghanistan newspaper -- "Welcome To Dharb-i-Mumin Web-Station (Pakistan's Largest Weekly Newspaper)" -- which was packed with chilling anti-Western diatribes, with the U.S. as the primary target of abuse. Pretty scary stuff, and I’m generally not oner to be affected by blatant propaganda, regardless of how inflammatory the language. After the American military response started, I found that I couldn’t access the site anymore. I wasn’t real surprised, but I had to wonder whether access had been restricted on our end, or theirs. Like, were the jihad wackos restricting American internet access to their news, or was the U.S. restricting access to overseas media? For all I knew, it could have been something as simple as the location of the server it was hosted on being blown out of existence by NATO forces. But the times were nothing if not suited to suspicious theories and speculation. And, somehow, information can act as a balm of sorts.

Since my uncle died, I’d been using the web to try to locate his obituary in some New York publication. I never found one, but I did run across an online memorial page put up by a club which my uncle had helped found. The club is called the "Sons of the Desert," and it’s a social club for fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the old-time film comedy duo. Old-time as in these boys started out doing silent pictures, and ushered in the age of “talkies.” The website consisted of a single page, which simply showed a stage curtain in black and white, with the words “In Memoriam” displayed over my uncle’s name. Some text at the bottom of the page said that their next meeting was taking place on October 12th, and that “the evening will be dedicated to our dear friend,” my uncle. I got the idea that The Muse and I might go up for the weekend, attend the meeting, spend some time with my aunt, pay our respects and the like. I ran it by The Muse, and she thought it was a nice idea, so we spent a little time online and were able to track down a weekend package that included roundtrip flights for the two of us, plus a hotel from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon for a half decent price, so we booked it that evening. I’d check with my boss to make sure I could have the day, and we’d fly out of Cleveland on Friday morning, and get into New York early afternoon with more than enough time to get from the airport to our hotel near Times Square. Aside from our itinerary, it was a little exciting, despite the not unwarranted national mood of general anxiety. On September 11, 2001, over 5,000 people were killed, suddenly and without warning, in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. The terrorists used planes to do it, just simply high-jacked them with box cutters, terrorized the respective crews and passengers, and flew them into both of the World Trade Centers in New York City, the Pentagon, and field outside a small town about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Fucking box cutters, they used, and they threatened the passengers, said they had bombs, and slashed the flight attendants, and told everyone they were going back to the airport, to remain calm and they’d be ok. This is what we have been told by the journalists and the authorities, and I believe them, what they tell us, though I don’t know if it’s because it’s credible, or if it’s because they’re very good at what they do. Or if I just really want to believe it, to believe anything that might lead us to think that someone out there is in control, is somehow in charge, has things under control. Aren't we in America? This shit can’t happen here. But it has.

They killed over 4,000 people that morning, in less than 45 minutes. In America.
  • As of 12/27/01, the official count has been reduced to under 3,000. - Ed.
  • As of 1/3/02, the victim count is 2,936, according to CNN. - Ed.
So goddamn them to all hell, and now there’s another fucking war going on, if you can call it war when the world’s mightiest financial and military power decides to launch full-scale attacks on a so-called nation that has no GNP to speak of, unless you can consider starvation a GNP, and then, well, whoa, we’re talking some kind of Super Power. Frankly, it’s hard to tell really who’s crazier. The enemy of the day, today, is this whacked out group of fanatics (they claim to be Islamic fundamentalists) who call themselves the Taliban (means “students”), who live to rid Saudi Arabia, land of the two holy places (Mecca and Medina), of the corrupting influences and presence of Western society, such influences taking the form of our instant-gratification-money-driven-godless-heathen-pagan-economy and presence in the form of American forces in Saudi Arabia, the sick residue of the Persian Gulf war of the early ’90’s, when the bad guy was Sadaam Hussein, and our interest was oil rights. What a twisted mess that was.

So we decided to go to New York because my uncle died, to see my aunt. This in the midst of ongoing threats of more attacks, even as the FBI was warning US citizens that “further terrorist events should be anticipated.” We were on “high alert” during the time we travelled, and we still are. We were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan (and we still are), plowing a steady stream of missiles into the bomb-shot waste of a nation already decimated by thirty years of civil war, most recently with Russia (itself formerly America's sworn enemy No. 1) which, before withdrawing in defeat, had pretty much reduced the entire place to rubble. I think a lot of what we’re doing now is turning rocks into more sand. And we have militant radical groups everywhere calling us terrorists, and denouncing the American military response, calling this a jihad or holy war, accusing the US of using the whole thing as its latest excuse to wage an all-out attack against Muslims everywhere. It’s all pretty confusing. But, we were going to New York, the greatest city on earth, The Muse and I, and I’d be a liar if I denied that there was some appreciable level of spite involved. I think I’m pretty liberal, but lately I’ve had thoughts like, “no third-world underbelly whacko is gonna tell me when I can and can’t fly in my country.” Fear does weird things to your brain.

We picked up our bag, called for a shuttle and then sat down to wait. Not a bad wait, but long enough to be greeted by the face of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (now Rudy Giuliani, KBE), having a news conference (when did they stop calling it a press conference??) to announce that an NBC News staffer – a woman named Erin, or Aaron, I think, an assistant to Tom Brokaw, had been exposed to and had contracted the anthrax virus from a piece of mail that had been sent to the studio. ......guess so -- didn't hear until this morning, while waiting in LaGuardia Airport for a flight back in to Cleveland......spent the weekend in Manhattan, saying goodbyes and being a good nephew and citizen........had dinner with my aunt -- was good to see her, and spend some time with her....they really loved him.......was good to hear their stories, and how they felt about him........(he also was for years *the* Santa Claus for the Daily News, when they were still in business)........they meet in this wonderful place called the Players Club (in the Gramercy Park section -- used to be Edwin Booth's house (brother of John Wilkes Booth)).........very historic -- packed with memorabilia from Booth's acting career, and paintings and portraits of other famous members, like Mark Twain, John Barrymore, Eugene O’Neill, Helen Hayes, Jane Pauley, Jack Lemmon, Walter Cronkite and James Earl Jones – none of whom were present this particular evening – but very interesting, nonetheless.

......Saturday, spent the day just walking the city, riding the subways......our hotel was in the same block -- right around the corner, actually -- from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Dave Letterman does his show, so we were about four blocks from downtown........had lunch in Chinatown, and then went down to the site......I think you have to.....I can't imaginec how anyone could go to Manhattan today and not go........just the thought of it......all of those souls.....I think they are still calling to us....I can't even attempt to explain it, so I won't even try.....when we flew in, we could see it below us........like a grey hole in the middle of this amazing metropolis........it's part of you as soon as you get there -- the whole city smells slightly of wet ash from burnt paper.....how could we not be breathing in some atomic residue of the victims?......it's ok......I wanted to feel like I could take some of them away from it....suffice it to say that it is, truly, the saddest thing I have ever seen........the pictures, and the notes........the sight of it all is poignant and terribly heartbreaking.....it really, really makes you angry, but you're crying within about two minutes or so of paying your respects.....and no one messes with you, no one gives you looks.....everyone leaves you alone, because they know.....for once, everyone knows the same thing..........we left flowers, shook hands with as many law and other official types as I could reach.......it is a different city today..........how could anyone do this........we were glad to have been able to be witnesses, though........kind of makes you feel closer to the heart of our nation.....more a part of the American family, maybe.....but this is truly so heartbreaking........I plan to return when they reopen the site, or a memorial....as the case may be......I will never forget the starkness of it all.........elderly new yorkers stopping as they pass openings in the blocks, where you used to be able to look up at the towers......they're prolly on their daily walk to the newstand, or fruit grocer, something they've done for the past 50 years.....this was, still is, their neighborhood.......Deniro lives here....Lou Reed......the Tribeca area........they stop, and look, and just shake their heads, and drop their faces and continue walking........what amazing people......I felt like I loved them all -- even the wild-eyed freaks, cursing invisible people who they think offended them..........stopped in for a much needed beer, and on a whim called an old high school buddy of mine, who I haven't seen for at least 15 years, knowing he lived in the area, and he stopped into this 50-year-old corner bar, and we had a few pints.....was very good to see him.....he lives three blocks from the site, and works nearby.....saw the whole thing from his office.......has a wife, a 9-mo-old son......all are fine, thank god.......said when you see shots of the site on the Fox news, they're shooting from the office next door to his...........

.....home now......son, asleep.....lover, asleep.......cat's a little nuts.........stay safe.....keep in touch..........peace.......rune