1984: Events and Inventions

Apr12

February 13, 1984. Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

February 26, 1984. United States Marines and other peacekeeping forces leave Beirut, Lebanon to be policed by local militias.

June 6, 1984. In response to militant Sikh extremists demanding their own state, Indian troops storm the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, killing an estimated 2,000 people.

August 21, 1984. Half a million people in Manila, the Philippines demonstrate against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

September, 1984. After two years of negotiations, agreement is reached for Great Britain to return Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997.

October 23, 1984. The world learns from moving BBC News TV reports that a famine is plaguing Ethiopia, where thousands of people have already died of starvation and as many as 10,000,000 more lives are at risk.

October 31, 1984. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is ambushed and assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards. Anti-Sikh riots break out. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son, becomes prime minister of India

December 8, 1984. At least 2000 people die in the Indian city of Bhopal after the US-owned Union Carbide chemical plant there has a chemical leak, releasing a huge cloud of toxic methyl isocyanate gas. Thousands more are blinded or injured.

December 10, 1984. Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against apartheid. He says, “I have just got to believe God is around. If He is not, we in South Africa have had it.”

1983: Events and Inventions

Apr11

March 23, 1983. President Ronald Reagan proposes, in a televised speech, a new missile defense system to protect the United Stats from Soviet attack. The media calls the new defense system, “Star Wars.”

April 4, 1983. First flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger, NASA’s second space shuttle. Columbia, launched in April, 1981, was the first space shuttle.

June, 1983. Thousands of people in Chile take part in nationwide protests against the rule of dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

June 9, 1983. Britain’s Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, is re-elected by a landslide majority

July 23, 1983. Riots in Sri Lanka, known as Black July. These riots, in which Sri Lankan mobs attack Tamil rebels and other Tamil citizens, leave between 400 and 3,000 Tamils dead and millions of dollars worth of their property destroyed. The riots are the beginning of a deadly Sri Lankan civil war.

August 21, 1983. Benigno Aquino, Jr., Philippines opposition leader, is assassinated in Manila as he returns from exile in the U.S. His widow, Corazon Aquino, will be inspired by her husband’s life and death to run for President of the Philippines in 1986.

August 31, 1983. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter near Moneron Island when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers on board are killed, including U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald.

October 23, 1983. Suicide truck-bombings destroy both the French and the United States Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen, 58 French paratroopers and 6 Lebanese civilians.

October 25, 1982. United States troops invade Grenada at the request of Eugenia Charles of Dominica, a member of the Organization of American States.

October 30, 1983. Argentina holds its first democratic elections after seven years of military rule. In December, Raul Alfonsin will be inaugurated as the democratically elected president of Argentina.

The Classics Club: (At Least) 50 Classics in Five Years

Apr10

classicsclubFrom the list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die:
Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. READ in 2012.
The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth.
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope.
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope.
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope.
Middlemarch by George Eliot.
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy.
Some Experiences of an Irish RM by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham.
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford.
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West. READ in 2012.
The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Living by Henry Green.
Passing by Nella Larsen.
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.
Out of Africa by Isak Dineson.
U.S.A. by John dos Passos.
The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing.
The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.
Day of the Tryffds by John Wyndham.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi.
Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor.

From Image Journal’s 100 Writers of Faith:
The Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos.
Silence by Shusaku Endo.
The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis.
All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams.
The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries.
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. READ in 2012.
A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Biographies or Autobiographies
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. 2009.
Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. 2008.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels
Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington. 1922.
Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller. 1934.
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor. 1959.
Godric by Frederic Beuchner. Finalist in 1981.
Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos. Finalist in 1996.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout. 2009.
Tinkers by Paul Harding. 2010.

Newbery Winners and Honor Books
Waterless Mountain by Laura Adams Armer. 1932 Medalist.
Winged Girl of Knossos by Erik Berry. 1934 Honor Book.
Dobry by Monica Shannon. 1935 Medalist.
Down Ryton Water by Eva Roe Gaggin. 1942 Honor Book.
The Silver Pencil by Alice Dalgliesh. 1945 Honor Book.

Other Children’s and YA Classics
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden.

If I counted right there are 52 books on the list now. I’ll add a few more as I go along, I’m sure. I plan to finish all 52 books and blog about them by April, 2017. I’m joining the Classics Club project at Jillian’s A Room of One’s Own.

Late Additions:
Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Armin.

Poem #52, Rondeau (Jenny Kissed Me) by Leigh Hunt, 1857

Apr10

“Reduced to its simplest and most essential form, the poem is a song. Song is neither discourse nor explanation.”~Octavio Paz

Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
  Jenny kissed me.

The story is that Leigh Hunt had been ill. Upon his recovery, he made a visit to his friend, Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle’s wife, Jenny, greeted Hunt with a kiss. Hunt was friends with almost all the great British literary figures of the nineteenth century. He introduced Keats and Shelley to one another. In 1828 he published a book called Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, a sort of expose of the “real Byron.” His friendship with Carlyle came a little later, in the 1830’s, after Keats and Shelley had died, and Byron and his friends scorned the poverty-stricken Hunt.

Kelly Fineman on Rondeau by James Henry Leigh Hunt.

1982: Events and Inventions

Apr10

February 2-3, 1982. The Hama massacre begins in Syria. Syrian president Hafez al-Assad orders the army to purge the city of Hama of the Muslim Brotherhood and other rebels. Ten to twenty thousand Syrians die in the ensuing massacre.

June 2, 1982. Forces under Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invade southern Lebanon in their “Operation Peace for the Galilee,” eventually reaching as far north as the capital Beirut. The United Nations Security Council votes to demand that Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

June 14, 1982. Argentinian forces that had invaded the nearby Falkland Islands in April surrender to British forces after a fierce war over control of the islands. Although Argentina still claims the island group that it calls the Malvinas, Great Britain retains control of the government of the Falklands.

August, 1982. Israeli troops drive the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of its base in Beirut, Lebanon. Yassir Arafat and other Palestinian leaders evacuate to Tunisia.

September 18, 1982. The Lebanese Christian Militia (the Phalange) kill thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps. The massacre is in retaliation for the assassination of pro-Israel president-elect, Bachir Gemayel, as well as several Palestinian massacres against Lebanese Christians.

October, 1982. Socialist Felipe Gonzales becomes prime minister of Spain.

November 12, 1982. Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev dies of a heart attack and is succeeded by Premier Yuri Andropov.

November 14, 1982. The leader of Poland’s outlawed Solidarity movement, Lech WaÅ‚Ä™sa, is released from 11 months of internment near the Soviet border.

December 2, 1982. The first operation to successfully implant an artificial heart in a human being is performed on retired dentist Barney Clark at the University of Utah Medical Center. The heart, the Jarvik-7, is named after its inventor, Robert Jarvik.

CD’s (compact discs) and CD players are first released to the public in 1982. The first album to be released on CD is Billy Joel’s 52nd Street.

1981: Events and Inventions

Apr9

January 19, 1981. United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

March, 1981. Solidarity, the Polish national trade union, stages a national strike in Poland in protest against police treatment of union activists.

March 30, 1981. President Ronald Reagan is wounded in an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C.

May 10, 1981. Socialist candidate Francois Mitterand wins the presidential election in France, promising a program of nationalization, taxes on the wealthy, and end to unemployment. (I will not draw the obvious parallel between France in 1981 and the U.S. in 2008, but it is obvious–and ominous– to me.)

May 13, 1981. Pope John Paul II is wounded in an assassination attempt as he blesses a crowd in St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

June 5, 1981. AIDS pandemic is first reported and becomes known when the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis pneumonia in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.

July 29, 1981. Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer marry in a publicly televised wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

August 12, 1981. IBM launches its new “Personal COmputer” (PC) for the home and office market. Because of the success of the IBM Personal Computer, the term PC will come to mean IBM’s personal computer and those computers that use IBM products.

October 6, 1981. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is assassinated during a military parade in Cairo. Vice-President Hosni Mubarak acts swiftly to take control of the country. The assassination is the work of army members who belong to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization; they oppose his negotiations with Israel.

December 13, 1981. Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland, to prevent the dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity.

Poetry Month: Studying the Art of Poetry

Apr9

” I know ever so many pieces of poetry off by heart—’The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and ‘dinburgh after Flodden,’ and ‘Bingen of the Rhine,’ and most of the ‘Lady of the Lake’ and most of ‘The Seasons’ by James Thompson. Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?”~Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Cindy at Ordo Amoris recommends The Art of Poetry by Christine Perrin and John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, and I have yet to read either book in its entirety.

I did read enough of the Ciardi book to see that it would be a great text for a poetry class. If I ever manage to snag a job teaching such a class at our homeschool co-op, I will be sure to use one or both of these as a guide.

Here’s a sample poem by John Ciardi:

The Happy Family

'Unidentified family, October 1951' photo (c) 2009, Center for Jewish History, NYC - license: http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/Before the children say goodnight,
Mother, Father, stop and think:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?
Have you washed their ears with ink?

Have you said and done and thought
All the earnest parents should?
Have you beaten them as you ought:
Have you begged them to be good?

And above all – when you start
Out the door and douse the light –
Think, be certain, search your heart:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?

'The Mains family' photo (c) 1890, Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest - license: http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/If they sneeze when they’re asleep,
Will their little heads come off?
If they just breathe very deep?
If – especially – they cough?

Should – alas! – the little dears
Lose a little head or two,
Have you inked their little ears:
Girls’ ears pink and boys’ ears blue?

Children’s heads are very loose.
Mother, Father, screw them tight.
If you feel uncertain use
A monkey wrench, but do it right.

If a head should come unscrewed
You will know that you have failed.
Doubtful cases should be glued.
Stubborn cases should be nailed.

Then when all your darlings go
Sweetly screaming off to bed,
Mother, Father, you may know
Angels guard each little head.

Come the morning you will find
One by one each little head
Full of gentle thoughts and kind,
Sweetly screaming to be fed.

We use hands to tighten the head screws and no ink markings, and we haven’t lost a head yet.

Links During Lent

Apr8

I was feeding my fascinations, even during my Lenten blogging break.

Book Lists:
Top 50 Books for Children by Lorna Bradbury at The Telegraph (British).

The 50 Best Books for Kids by Elizabeth Bird.

World Literature That High School Students Actually Want to Read at The Reading Zone.

John C. Wright: 50 Essential Authors of Science Fiction. I’ve read only a handful of these authors, and I don’t really feel a need to read all of them, since some sub-genres of sci-fi (cyberpunk, military sci-fi) are not to my taste. The ones I have read and can recommend on some level are Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1984 by Orwell, Brave New World by Huxley, Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky or Stranger in a Strange Land,, C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, Perelandra in particular, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, and Dune by Frank Herbert.

Historical fiction set in Russia from Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

Language:
An Indigenous Language With Unique Staying Power by Simon Romero. Mr. Romero writes about Guarani, the native language of Paraguay, which is enshrined in the Paraguayan constitution as one of two official languages along with Spanish.

Why bilinguals are smarter. I knew my Spanish was an advantage in more ways than just being able to understand what they’re saying when they think I don’t know.

Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs
Thanks go to The Headmistress and Zookeeper at The Common Room for the link to this site, Psalms in Metre, which allows one to match metrical psalm paraphrases with their tunes in a sort of mix-and-match sort of template. I love to sing psalms, and I’d like to teach my children to sing them, too.

Straight Talk:
Every single teenage girl who is considering “hooking-up” should read this post by a Catholic mom who has more courage to speak out than I have. And sometimes I’m rather blunt, but I’d have to pray for the presence of mind and courage to say what she said, even though it’s true.

Bookish and Wordie Humor:
For straight talk with a quirky and humorous bent, try this blog post about advertising roof tiles in Zambia. I can’t imagine how this advertising campaign would go over in the U.S., but it seems to be working in Zambia.

President Obama’s Young Adult Novel Economic Plan. This plan, on the other hand, could definitely work, folks.

Poem #51, Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1854

Apr8

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”~Plato

“The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. The charge was the result of a miscommunication in such a way that the brigade attempted a much more difficult objective than intended by the overall commander Lord Raglan. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague. The charge produced no decisive gains and resulted in very high casualties.” ~Wikipedia

The meaning of “honor” in 1854 was very different from the concept of “honor” in 2012. Would we honor men today who gave their lives to obey an order they knew was a mistake? Or would we call them fools?