Let's Write about the "spirits" in Christmas

Maureen Dowd writing from Washington DC in The New York Times: An echo Christmas essay

Said Dowd..... — I had always been a bah humbug sort of person about Christmas.

By Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"A Christmas Carol", was first published on December 19, 1843, with the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve. By 1844, the novella had gone through 13 printings and continues to be a robust seller

Maureen Dowd continues.....Christmas! It seemed like a season of stress, as my parents scrambled to find the money to buy presents for five kids and have a big feast. I didn’t like the materialism or the mawkishness. Why should there be one week of the year when we were all supposed to be Hallmark happy?

“You’re weird,” my mother told me.

Then I took a course on Charles Dickens at Columbia University with the estimable Prof. James Eli Adams, and I began to fathom the magic. As Dickens said in his sketch, “A Christmas Tree,” published in his journal “Household Words” in 1850, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me.” His biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote that “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.”

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we’ve thrown away and the bad values — selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money — that infiltrate the heart.

Ebenezer Scrooge is the protagonist of Charles Dickens's 1843, novella "A Christmas Carol". At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas. The tale of his redemption by three spirits has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.

Dickens became an outsider looking in when his middle-class life got disrupted by cold, grinding reality: His father went to debtors’ prison and, at 12, Dickens had to leave school to work in a bootblacking factory in London.

During a childhood in which he sometimes felt deprived and isolated, he put his faith in fairies. He found a portal to an ensorcelling (i.e. "bewitched")  invisible world, an Ali Baba’s cave of magical transformations and mythical kingdoms, and became a Victorian Scheherazade.  Indeed, Dickens was one of England’s greatest defenders of fairy tales because he believed these “nurseries of fancy” could teach positive values and imbue life, for children and adults, with transcendence; he also felt the macabre side of fairy tales — evil stepmothers, menacing monsters and big, bad wolves — was just as valuable for socialization as the reassuring side. His obsessions were the things at the core of fairy tales: clear-cut heroes and villains, defenseless children and hyper-dysfunctional families.

“I always think of make-believe as a way of making beliefs,” Maria Tatar, a folklore and mythology expert at Harvard, told me. “He understood the deep human need for myth, fantasy, imagination.”

In “A Christmas Tree,” Dickens wrote, “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” As Tatar explained: “She is the child in the woods who is the ultimate victim of the predatory. She is an innocent, powerless girl preyed upon by the rich and powerful. So you can think of Dickens as the first charter member of the MeToo movement.”

Ebenezer Scrooge resonates just as strongly now because we remain absorbed with the comeuppance of the 1 percent. Elda Rotor, a vice president and publisher for Penguin Classics, said that Dickens is a steady seller and that “A Christmas Carol” perfectly fits the definition of a classic book, acting as a bridge from how you relate to the past to how you forge forward.

Paul Giamatti played Scrooge in a Verizon ad this month; Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell starred in “Spirited,” a new rendition of the novella, first published on Dec. 19, 1843, now on Apple TV+; Steve Martin and Martin Short did a takeoff on the tale for a recent “S.N.L.”; The New Yorker offered a humorous take on Scrooge’s Instagram; and Jefferson Mays has gotten raves for his one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in which he plays all 50 characters, as well as a boiling potato. 

Dickens is also a fairy godfather hovering over Hallmark Christmas movies: There are Dickens festivals, the characters quote Dickens to each other, and one movie’s heroine has a dog named Charles, after the writer.

I asked Mays why Dickens endures. “His sense of social outrage, his descriptions of misery are balanced by a celebration of the zest, the fun of life,” he replied. “Eating, drinking, dancing, loving. And that’s as important today as it has always been.”

As Mitch Glazer, who co-wrote “Scrooged,” the hilarious 1988, movie with Bill Murray, put it: “Dickens hits us with the setup: regret, loss, mistakes, missed love, wasted life, and then the punchline: ‘It’s not too late!’ In every version from his novella to Mr. Magoo to ours, I always get emotional when Scrooge is reborn.”

Dickens has taught me that it’s not too late to focus on the sweet memories, like the time my mom somehow bought me a doll’s kitchen I longed for that my parents couldn’t afford, or the way she would be aghast if we didn’t wear red and green.

The magic is there, if you look. So on this Christmas, as Tiny Tim said, God bless us, every one!

Let's write about evil: "...everyone has a chance to choose between good and evil"

In Ukraine, Russia, China and the U.S., ‘where is the evil one?’

An echo opinion published in the Catholic News Herald, Charlotte, North Carolina:

By Jon Gauthier

Why is it whenever someone asks “Where is God?” they almost never ask, “Where is the evil one?”

This isn’t an argument of semantics, but one of whether we recognize there are two sides in life’s battle.

Evil can be present in Ukraine, in Russia, in China, and in the United States, because everyone has a chance to choose between good and evil.

In science, the proof of something is not always in the positive. For example, one can seek proof that the world is flat, and yet, the proof is that the world is not flat. Or one may wish to prove that light travels at a certain speed and is not just “on” or “off.” By watching light stream to us from the stars, we learn we are seeing the past because light must have time to travel to us, and what is happening on the star right now is not yet visible to us.

In Jesus’ life, we learn in Matthew’s Gospel, 4:8-9, “The devil then took Him up a very high mountain and displayed before him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, promising ‘All these will I bestow on you if you prostrate yourself in homage before me.’” Jesus chose not to, but how can we be so sure that others on Earth have not given themselves to the evil one? For the love of money, power and control? In Ukraine, in Russia, in China, and in the U.S.?

We have a beautiful example of the graces provided to those who do not give up when they see evil in the world and choose to act and pray. St. Monica, learning of her son Augustine’s sinful ways, prayed and prayed for his return to the faith. 

In the end, St. Augustine’s conversion and then his autobiography, “Confessions,” would become one of the greatest philosophical and spiritual treasures of the Church and humanity.

When we hear of bad news in the world, are we only looking for God? Or do we acknowledge the work of the evil one and reconfirm our part to promote peace and love?

In our homes, is there someone we need to forgive, or perhaps someone we need to ask for forgiveness? Or at work, is there someone who needs our help? Or someone we have taken advantage of? In the world, is there evil we have yet to pray for its end? Have we acted to help others to pray? Do we even know that prayers matter? Especially in prayerful repetition, such as when praying the rosary?

It is not enough to ask where God is. We must recognize that He expects us to help. And He grants free will to everyone, so it is not as simple as just any one of us changing our minds. We must act to help others change their minds, and to help one another. And strangely, in prayerful actions in faith, we will find God is present – in Ukraine, in Russia, in China, and in the U.S. Even when we cannot see Him. All the time.

Jon Gauthier is a member of St. Matthew Church in Charlotte and the author of “Embracing Goodness: How Life Works.”

Let's write about handwriting

An echo essay published in The New York Times by John McWhorter:  

It’s quaint to read how common it was in the late 1920s, when sound had just come to the movies, to assume it was just a fad. More than a few people thought films had been better without sound — that actors had been more expressive, that sound was intrusive upon the artistic illusion and so on.

I suspect that complaints these days that students are not learning cursive will look similar in a hundred years.
It seems as if students are learning cursive ever less. 

I now teach a generation of students who not only never knew the 20th century and think of CDs as quaint, but mostly they do not write in cursive. The idea behind this, at least implicitly, is that so much writing now takes place on the keyboard that cursive, designed for handwriting, is no longer essential. I remember one of my daughters coming home in second grade in 2016, and complaining that she couldn’t read one of her teachers’ comments because they were written in what she called “scrip,” seeming to process it as some exotic writing system like cuneiforms (ie,the oldest form of writing known). And she indeed, while able to read it, does not write in it now.

Even as an “old soul” who values things about the past on various levels, I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever.
I never even liked “scrip” — my mispronunciation was calling it “cursiff” for a good while — even though as a 1970s kid I was immersed in it early on. It always felt like being made to drive too fast. What was supposed to be more efficient by precluding the need to lift the pencil off the page always felt too prone to slips of the finger, to messiness that would make it hard for the reader to decode. Cursive always seemed a tad laborious to me.

I got used to it, but I had a history teacher in 10th grade who was especially good, and one day while taking notes as he lectured, I started writing in little capital letters because it was easier and allowed me to follow him more closely. For the first time, physical writing felt good to my hand and brain, and I never looked back. (That teacher was Gene Kerrick at Friends’ Select in Philadelphia, who has recently celebrated his 100th birthday!).

For one, I no longer worried about the mess. Cursive’s nonstop flow encourages a certain, shall we say, freedom — one falls into abbreviative little habits, one flattens, one extends. It’s a short step from that to the notoriously opaque signatures of people like the founders and various presidents. Think of the father of our country “George Wafhapter” (take a look at his signature!); the four-term steward of the New Deal, “Franklin A. Gorsuch” (or something quite close!); and the man who became president in 2016, “Sousle S. Sanford.” Cursive may be easier to write than print — for many, at least — but it’s harder to read.

And besides, because so many cursive letters differ significantly from their printed equivalents, they entail a learning burden that would be better spent on other, more useful tasks. The cursive capital G, for instance, is a lovely thing, but really? Given that our writing system already makes kids learn the difference between H and h, B and b, G and g, E and e, and so on, why must we saddle them with even more variations like the cursive capital I and S?
Many argue that writing in cursive encourages memorization, but it is unclear whether it is cursive specifically or handwriting itself that lends this benefit. 

I understand that handwriting imprints the memory better — I notice it even in adulthood — but I am skeptical that there is a reason the handwriting is better done in cursive. Especially given that other problem, of cursive’s tendency toward mess — the two Presidents Bush were, epigraphically Messrs. Cug Binch and Gzw Bul.  (Maine Writer - So I looked up the word "epigraphically":  the study of inscriptions.)

I am similarly unmoved by the argument that not learning cursive will leave old documents written in it unavailable to future readers to any significant degree. A vast majority of documents written in cursive that most people will ever need to consult have long been transliterated into print, and this includes a great many documents less consulted. As a scholar who occasionally needs to dip into obscure medieval manuscripts, I would need only one hand to count the number of times the handwriting was tough and there was no print version available somewhere in a library or online to consult.
Of course, this would not be the case for hard-core scholars of antiquity, and other people would occasionally run up against handwritten sources that presented a challenge. But niche scholarship and the blue-moon occasion do not justify a universal policy of childhood education. Rather, decoding “scrip” should become a skill imparted to aspiring specialists. There are already smart apps that decode cursive writing for the curious, perhaps not perfectly but well enough to serve general purposes.

By my lights, it is about as important for modern kids to learn cursive as it is for them to know their Roman numerals. The latter are kind of fun, and you have to know them to … well, for me they were for reading what the year was on “Looney Tunes” opening credits, and I guess one might want to be able to know what year a building was constructed without having to ask someone. But just as those aren’t enough to impose learning Roman numerals on all schoolchildren, cursive’s time is up, now that all people will spend so much less time writing by hand.

Is it possible that part of the reason many don’t want to see the eclipse of cursive is that it’s pretty? I get that. But so were Gilded Age ball gowns and fondue, and yet here we are. Or LP record jackets. Despite retaining about 150 LPs today out of obstinate nostalgia, I vastly preferred CDs to the scratchable, space-hogging things that LPs were, with their limit of about 25 minutes a side if you wanted good sound all the way, and wearing down after too many plays. I miss the artwork on the big cardboard square packages, but not so much as to miss the general inconveniences.
I march unconcerned, then, into the new world of no “scrip.” My children will prefer writing on keyboards, as I myself long have. 

I hope that the time once devoted to teaching cursive can now be diverted to teaching students about the content of their writing rather than its physical form. In a nutshell, handwritten English, to the extent that we need it, should simply parallel printed letters.   

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.

Let's write about earthquakes!

 Predicting the Earthquake That Could Wreck New York

A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region. An echo report published in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath.


Every now and then, the ground trembles, in some places more often and more dramatically than in others. New York is no California. Still, Brooklyn chimneys toppled and windows shattered in the summer of 1884, when a quake struck near Coney Island: magnitude 5, or thereabouts. (Seismometers were not then in wide circulation.) Anything larger, amid today’s infrastructure, would cause quite a bit of damage. But we have scant records about how frequently such a quake occurs. “Every thousand years, every ten thousand years, every million years?,” William Menke, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty observatory, wondered recently, with the potential destruction of the metropolitan region in mind. “It makes a difference!” Many major earthquakes have occurred on the East Coast, he explained. We just don’t know when.

Menke was hiking up a mountain in Harriman State Park, beside the Ramapo Fault, to try to fill in the gaps. He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread. “That was the one that started me thinking about this,” he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. “That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.” A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. “Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,” Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious.

The two continued climbing, in search of ever more precariously perched boulders. Some were too small to rule out human intervention. “You can see somebody moved those hefty rocks into a bench configuration,” Menke noted of one arrangement, near the remains of a campfire. Another boulder, intriguingly top-heavy, sat in a crack, making it harder to dislodge, and therefore unworthy of scrutiny. Menke crouched beside others to sketch their contours in a notebook and measure the slopes of the underlying bedrock, using a carpenter’s level and an inclinometer, for which he’d paid eight dollars at Lowe’s. “Most of the stuff I do is pretty low tech,” he said. “I have occasionally lost things in the field and then found them six months later, a little rusty.”

Earthquakes happen every day all over the world, along both tectonic plate edges and interiors. Earthquakes occur along faults, which are fractures between blocks of rock that allow the blocks to move relative to one another.

Menke’s gray hair was untrimmed and, like some of the stones he examined, in seeming defiance of gravity. His fixation on the geology was such that he failed to notice a buck galloping past, though he called attention to a small discoloration in the bedrock at one point. “See the surface here? Something was protecting this from erosion. Was there a boulder there that rolled off? Where is it?” Using some back-of-the-envelope physics, he estimated the amount of gravitational acceleration required to send various candidates in his notebook sliding downhill. “The last one we did was on a more gentle slope, and it was about point three of gravity,” he said. “So that would be about a seven-and-a-half magnitude.” By contrast, a giant sea-turtle-shaped rock on a steeper slope seemed likely to ski with a magnitude 7. “So that, actually, is an interesting number,” Menke said. “If you can rule out that there have been any earthquakes of magnitude 7 since the end of the Ice Age, that actually is pretty important in terms of New York’s seismic risk.”


Proper science would require his following up with sophisticated camera technology, for photogrammetry and 3-D computer modelling. “I’ll tell you a funny story about a Greek dude,” Menke said, referring to the astronomer Aristarchus, who attempted to estimate the distance from the earth to the sun. “He did a pretty good job, but there was a critical piece of info he needed to know, and that was the angular diameter of the sun. It’s half a degree, and he guessed that it was two degrees. Had he been careful to measure things, he would have gotten the right number.” 

For now, though, Menke took comfort in what the naked eye was telling him. Then again, a magnitude 7 earthquake is a thousand times more powerful than a magnitude 5. Think of Haiti in 2010, instead of Coney Island in 1884.

Pausing for a water break before beginning his descent, Menke ran his hand over another boulder and broke off a piece of crusty rock tripe, or lichen. “Very low nutritional value,” he said. “But if faced with a choice between eating rock tripe and dying, you eat rock tripe.” 

Margorie Taylor Greene is politically toxic- Kevin McCarthy alert!

Kevin McCarthy isn't hearing his mother tell him to watch out who is friends are.  By selling his political soul to Margorie Taylor Greene, he risks becoming a "green queen puppet"

Despite Trump’s Lobbying, McCarthy’s Speaker Bid Remains Imperiled on the Right.  

Catie Edmunson Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni reporting for The New York Times. 

Representative Kevin McCarthy is dealing with a group of right-wing detractors who appear impervious to negotiation, and who have yet to be moved even by the entreaties of the former president.

Representative Kevin McCarthy is facing a razor-thin majority and a battle to become the speaker of the House.

Satire from The Borowitz Report
Kevin McCarthy Amazed by Incredible New Invention Called Tape Recorder

“It’s the darnedest gizmo,” the congressman said. “You speak into it, and then it can play your voice back, clear as day. I can’t for the life of me figure out how it works.”  By Andy Borowitz April 27, 2022!

Kevin McCarthy is building his campaign to be the House speaker on granting requests to investigate "just because he can".  This strategy is no way to win a majority vote to become the Speaker of the House.  In fact, by creating non stop investigations, he will cause an implosion of traditional Republican party politics. 

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump is working the phones, personally pitching right-wing lawmakers on voting to make Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader he has called “My Kevin,” the speaker of the House. (OMG- Just as I thought. Kevin McCarthy is the dummy come alive and the ventriloquist is the cult leader.)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the most outspoken far-right member of his conference, is publicly vouching for Mr. McCarthy.  (OMG- Kevin McCarthy did not hear his mother when she advised him to watch out who his friends are! MTG is an idiot!)

The California Republican has made private entreaties and public promises to win over his critics, including floating the impeachment of a member of President Biden’s cabinet.

And yet, Mr. McCarthy, who is toiling to become speaker next year when the G.O.P. assumes the majority, has so far been unable to put down a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his bid for the top job.

Mr. McCarthy has embarked on the kind of grueling campaign that lawmakers in both parties jockeying for the post have sometimes been forced to perform. But some of the hard-right lawmakers with whom he is attempting to bargain do not appear to have a price, and most care less about legislating than shrinking the federal government — or upending it completely.

“This is why we came to Congress,” Representative Bob Good of Virginia said. “This is why we’re here. We’ve got a chance to tip over that apple cart here on January 3, when we elect a new speaker.”

Their top demand has been that Mr. McCarthy agree in advance to a snap vote to get rid of the speaker at any time, something he has refused to accept.

John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who was run out of the speaker post by the far right, famously described the approach of this faction as “legislative terrorism.” And with a razor-thin majority that only allows him to lose a few votes in the election for speaker, it could be a recipe for disaster for Mr. McCarthy.

Even Mr. Trump, perhaps the most influential voice in the hard-right faction of the party, has had little success to date in moving lawmakers over to Mr. McCarthy’s side. 

But, Trump, who announced he is running for president again in 2024, has been calling members who are ambivalent, at best, about Mr. McCarthy’s bid for the speakership and trying to persuade them that he is (somehow- OMG!) the best option, according to three people familiar with the calls. (OMG did I forget to say this?  Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot!)

According to people close to him, Trump is not entirely sold on the notion of Mr. McCarthy as a strong speaker. But, he considers Mr. McCarthy better than the alternative, including improbable scenarios in which the job instead might go to a moderate who can draw some votes from Democrats, or in which a handful of Republicans defect and help to elect a Democratic speaker.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

There is little evidence that the former president has swayed any skeptics.

Thirty-six lawmakers voted against Mr. McCarthy in a secret ballot vote last month nominating him for the speakership, and four have already vowed to oppose him during the official vote on the House floor on Jan. 3, in which he needs to win a majority of those present and voting — 218 if every member participates.

Mr. McCarthy has expressed confidence in his ability to secure the votes, pointing out that a plausible challenger has yet to emerge.

“We’ve been making a lot of progress,” he told reporters on Tuesday, adding: “I think people are in a much better place, and I think we’ll all find a place to get together.”

Should he fail to win a majority when the new Congress convenes, members would take successive votes until someone — Mr. McCarthy or a different nominee — secured enough supporters to prevail.

But Republicans agitating against him have insisted that Mr. McCarthy would not be able to win election on the floor, warning that more defectors would emerge in the coming weeks.

“I don’t think he has a plan, other than to hope that conservatives fold,” Russ Vought, the president of the right-wing Center for Renewing America, said of Mr. McCarthy in an interview. “And this is not the part of the Republican conference that folds.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a radical right wing Trumpzi groupie!

If Mr. McCarthy does have a plan, he has not shared it with members of his leadership team, whom he has cut out of his deliberations about the speakership race in what some regard as a display of paranoia. Instead, he has been spotted in recent days around the Capitol and the Republican National Committee headquarters nearby with Jeff Miller, a Republican lobbyist who is among his closest confidants.

It was not clear whether Mr. McCarthy enlisted Trump to help his campaign, or if Trump was simply working on his own. The former president has spoken with Eli Crane, an incoming Republican congressman from Arizona, and Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, among others. Mr. Crane and Mr. Norman were part of a group of seven current and incoming Republican lawmakers who signed a letter with a list of concessions they are demanding from their leaders in the next Congress, including making it easier to force a vote to remove the speaker — something that Mr. McCarthy has so far resisted.

Mr. Norman, who has described himself as a “hard no” against Mr. McCarthy, declined to discuss his call with Mr. Trump, describing it as a “private conversation.” He said he was still undecided about whom he would support for speaker. Mr. Crane did not respond to requests for comment.

When Nancy Pelosi in 2018 found herself about a dozen votes short of what she would need to secure the speaker’s gavel, she quietly picked off defectors, methodically cutting deals to capture exactly enough support to prevail. Ms. Pelosi, renowned for her ability to arm-twist and coax, won seven votes by agreeing to limit her tenure, picked up another eight by promising to implement rules aimed at fostering more bipartisan legislating, and won over her sole would-be challenger by creating a subcommittee chairmanship for her.

For Mr. McCarthy, there are likely fewer deals to be made.

The California Republican has already made a series of pledges in an effort to appease the right flank of his party. He traveled to the southern border and called on Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings. 

Unbelievable, he promised Ms. Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments for making a series of violent and conspiratorial social media posts before she was elected, a plum spot on the Oversight Committee.

He has threatened to investigate the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, promising to hold public hearings scrutinizing the security breakdowns that occurred. He is quietly meeting with ultraconservative lawmakers in an effort to win them over. And on Monday night, he publicly encouraged his members to vote against the lame-duck spending bill to fund the government.  (OMG- SIASD!)

Those entreaties have fallen flat for some of the ultraconservative members of his conference.

In an opinion essay, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, who is running as a protest candidate in the speaker race, noted that Mr. McCarthy had said before the midterm elections that he did not see grounds for impeaching any Biden administration officials. Mr. Biggs dismissed Mr. McCarthy’s more recent threat against the homeland security secretary.

“That’s adding at least a little thickener to weak sauce,” Mr. Biggs wrote, “but it’s not good enough.”

Four lawmakers have said they would oppose Mr. McCarthy: Matt Rosendale of Montana, who called him a “weatherman” rather than a leader; Mr. Good of Virginia, a self-described “biblical conservative” who defeated a Republican congressman in 2020 in part by capitalizing on outrage after the incumbent officiated at the same-sex wedding of two of his former campaign volunteers; Mr. Biggs, the former Freedom Caucus chairman; and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

More could be on the way, including the seven sitting and incoming lawmakers who last week issued Mr. McCarthy a list of old demands, warning that “any G.O.P. speaker candidate must make clear he or she will advance rules, policies, and an organizational structure” that would ensure a “‘check’ on the swamp and reform the status quo.”

On his podcast, Mr. Gaetz said the changes were needed “because we don’t trust Kevin McCarthy to deliver on any changes to the rules that he promises.”

“There is an amazing red-line reticence on the part of Kevin, because he doesn’t want to be held accountable,” Mr. Biggs replied.

Securing conservative buy-in was going to be hard, Mr. Vought said.

Mr. McCarthy “is symbolically the definition of the cartel speaker,” he added. “He’s not making it easy for them, and he’s making it hard on himself.”

Emily Cochrane contributed to this reporting.

Let's write about Emily Dickinson on her December 10 birthday

Poet the Bard of Amherst (b. 1830- d. 1886)

A Book: poem by Emily Dickinson

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
Emily Dickinson

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, in full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, (born December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 15, 1886, Amherst), American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. 

With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.

Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Devoted to private pursuits, she sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number to herself. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of high polish.

Early years:  The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. For her first nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a forceful and prosperous Whig lawyer who served as treasurer of the college and was elected to one term in Congress. 

Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, from the leading family in nearby Monson, was an introverted wife and hardworking housekeeper; her letters seem equally inexpressive and quirky. 

Both parents were loving but austere, and Emily became closely attached to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. 

Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door. The highly distinct and even eccentric personalities developed by the three siblings seem to have mandated strict limits to their intimacy. “If we had come up for the first time from two wells,” Emily once said of Lavinia, “her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say.” Only after the poet’s death did Lavinia and Austin realize how dedicated she was to her art.

Emily Dickinson house in Amherst Massachusetts

As a girl, Emily was seen as frail by her parents and others and was often kept home from school. She attended the coeducational Amherst Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students alike for her prodigious abilities in composition. She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. A class in botany inspired her to assemble an herbarium containing a large number of pressed plants identified by their Latin names. She was fond of her teachers, but when she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, she found the school’s institutional tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year.
At home as well as at school and church, the religious faith that ruled the poet’s early years was evangelical Calvinism, a faith centered on the belief that humans are born totally depraved and can be saved only if they undergo a life-altering conversion in which they accept the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have retained a belief in the soul’s immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude specification is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal definition. In this she was influenced by both the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy. These influences pushed her toward a more symbolic understanding of religious truth and helped shape her vocation as poet.
Development as a poet:  Although Dickinson had begun composing verse by her late teens, few of her early poems are extant. Among them are two of the burlesque “Valentines”—the exuberantly inventive expressions of affection and esteem she sent to friends of her youth. Two other poems dating from the first half of the 1850s draw a contrast between the world as it is and a more peaceful alternative, variously eternity or a serene imaginative order. All her known juvenilia were sent to friends and engage in a striking play of visionary fancies, a direction in which she was encouraged by the popular, sentimental book of essays Reveries of a Bachelor: Or a Book of the Heart by Ik. Marvel (the pseudonym of Donald Grant Mitchell). Dickinson’s acts of fancy and reverie, however, were more intricately social than those of Marvel’s bachelor, uniting the pleasures of solitary mental play, performance for an audience, and intimate communion with another. It may be because her writing began with a strong social impetus that her later solitude did not lead to a meaningless hermeticism (people that don't often communicate with those who live outside).

Emily Dickinson took an envelope addressed to "Mrs. Edward Dickinson and family" and she carefully tore away parts of it to form this unique shape.  The poem exists in no other drafts. 
"The Way Hope Builds His House" by Emily Dickinson:

The way

Hope builds his

House

It is not with a sill —

Nor Rafter -

But only Pinnacle

Abode in as supreme

These superficies

As if it were of Ledges smit

Of mortised with the laws....

(Analysts refer to the meaning of this poem as dealing with a bank founded by Henry Hope named Hope & Co.)

Until Dickinson was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters, and a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward have been preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin, or to friends of her own sex, especially Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these generous communications overflow with humour, anecdote, invention, and sombre reflection. In general, Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. On occasion she interpreted her correspondents’ laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or even betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Much of her writing, both poetic and epistolary, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching effort to deny, overcome, or reflect on a sense of solitude.
Dickinson’s closest friendships usually had a literary flavour. She was introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson by one of her father’s law students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons, a gifted college student. Two of Barrett Browning’s works, “A Vision of Poets,” describing the pantheon of poets, and Aurora Leigh, on the development of a female poet, seem to have played a formative role for Dickinson, validating the idea of female greatness and stimulating her ambition. Though she also corresponded with Josiah G. Holland, a popular writer of the time, he counted for less with her than his appealing wife, Elizabeth, a lifelong friend and the recipient of many affectionate letters.

In 1855 Dickinson traveled to Washington, D.C., with her sister and father, who was then ending his term as U.S. representative. On the return trip the sisters made an extended stay in Philadelphia, where it is thought the poet heard the preaching of Charles Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian minister whose pulpit oratory suggested (as a colleague put it) “years of conflict and agony.” Seventy years later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, claimed that Emily had fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was married, and then grandly renounced him. The story is too highly coloured for its details to be credited; certainly, there is no evidence the minister returned the poet’s love. Yet it is true that a correspondence arose between the two and that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst about 1860 and again in 1880. After his death in 1882, Dickinson remembered him as “my Philadelphia,” “my dearest earthly friend,” and “my Shepherd from ‘Little Girl’hood.”
Always fastidious, Dickinson began to restrict her social activity in her early 20s, staying home from communal functions and cultivating intense epistolary relationships with a reduced number of correspondents. 

In 1855, leaving the large and much-loved house (since razed) in which she had lived for 15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her family moved back to the dwelling associated with her first decade: the Dickinson mansion on Main Street in Amherst. Her home for the rest of her life, this large brick house, still standing, has become a favorite destination for her admirers. 

She found the return profoundly disturbing, and when her mother became incapacitated by a mysterious illness that lasted from 1855 to 1859, both daughters were compelled to give more of themselves to domestic pursuits. Various events outside the home—a bitter Norcross family lawsuit, the financial collapse of the local railroad that had been promoted by the poet’s father, and a powerful religious revival that renewed the pressure to “convert”—made the years 1857 and 1858 deeply troubling for Dickinson and promoted her further withdrawal.

Mature career of Emily Dickinson:  In summer 1858, at the height of this period of obscure tension, Dickinson began assembling her manuscript-books. She made clean copies of her poems on fine quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold. Over the next seven years she created 40 such booklets and several unsewn sheaves, and altogether they contained about 800 poems. No doubt she intended to arrange her work in a convenient form, perhaps for her own use in sending poems to friends. Perhaps the assemblage was meant to remain private, like her earlier herbarium. Or perhaps, as implied in a poem of 1863, “This is my letter to the world,” she anticipated posthumous publication. Because she left no instructions regarding the disposition of her manuscript-books, her ultimate purpose in assembling them can only be conjectured.

Dickinson sent more poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a cultivated reader, than to any other known correspondent. Repeatedly professing eternal allegiance, these poems often imply that there was a certain distance between the two—that the sister-in-law was felt to be haughty, remote, or even incomprehensible. Yet Susan admired the poetry’s wit and verve and offered the kind of personally attentive audience Dickinson craved. On one occasion, Susan’s dissatisfaction with a poem, “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” resulted in the drafting of alternative stanzas. Susan was an active hostess, and her home was the venue at which Dickinson met a few friends, most importantly Samuel Bowles, publisher and editor of the influential Springfield Republican. Gregarious, captivating, and unusually liberal on the question of women’s careers, Bowles had a high regard for Dickinson’s poems, publishing (without her consent) seven of them during her lifetime—more than appeared in any other outlet. From 1859 to 1862 she sent him some of her most intense and confidential communications, including the daring poem “Title divine is mine,” whose speaker proclaims that she is now a “Wife,” but of a highly unconventional type.

In those years Dickinson experienced a painful and obscure personal crisis, partly of a romantic nature. The abject and pleading drafts of her second and third letters to the unidentified person she called “Master” are probably related to her many poems about a loved but distant person, usually male. There has been much speculation about the identity of this individual. One of the first candidates was George Henry Gould, the recipient in 1850 of a prose Valentine from Dickinson. Some have contended that Master was a woman, possibly Kate Scott Anthon or Susan Dickinson. Richard Sewall’s 1974 biography makes the case for Samuel Bowles. All such claims have rested on a partial examination of surviving documents and collateral evidence. Since it is now believed that the earliest draft to Master predates her friendship with Bowles, he cannot have been the person. On balance, Charles Wadsworth and possibly Gould remain the most likely candidates. Whoever the person was, Master’s failure to return Dickinson’s affection—together with Susan’s absorption in her first childbirth and Bowles’s growing invalidism—contributed to a piercing and ultimate sense of distress. In a letter, Dickinson described her lonely suffering as a “terror—since September—[that] I could tell to none.” Instead of succumbing to anguish, however, she came to view it as the sign of a special vocation, and it became the basis of an unprecedented creativity. A poem that seems to register this life-restoring act of resistance begins “The zeroes taught us phosphorus,” meaning that it is in absolute cold and nothingness that true brilliance originates.
Though Dickinson wrote little about the American Civil War, which was then raging, her awareness of its multiplied tragedies seems to have empowered her poetic drive. As she confided to her cousins in Boston, apropos of wartime bereavements, “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.” In the hundreds of poems Dickinson composed during the war, a movement can be discerned from the expression of immediate pain or exultation to the celebration of achievement and self-command. Building on her earlier quest for human intimacy and obsession with heaven, she explored the tragic ironies of human desire, such as fulfillment denied, the frustrated search for the absolute within the mundane, and the terrors of internal dissolution. She also articulated a profound sense of female subjectivity, expressing what it means to be subordinate, secondary, or not in control. Yet as the war proceeded, she also wrote with growing frequency about self-reliance, imperviousness, personal triumph, and hard-won liberty. The perfect transcendence she had formerly associated with heaven was now attached to a vision of supreme artistry.
In April 1862, about the time Wadsworth left the East Coast for a pastorate in San Francisco, Dickinson sought the critical advice of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose witty article of advice to writers, “A Letter to a Young Contributor,” had just appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Higginson was known as a writer of delicate nature essays and a crusader for women’s rights. Enclosing four poems, Dickinson asked for his opinion of her verse—whether or not it was “alive.” The ensuing correspondence lasted for years, with the poet sending her “preceptor,” as she called him, many more samples of her work. In addition to seeking an informed critique from a professional but not unsympathetic man of letters, she was reaching out at a time of accentuated loneliness. “You were not aware that you saved my Life,” she confided years later.
Dickinson’s last trips from Amherst were in 1864 and 1865, when she shared her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross’s boardinghouse in Cambridge and underwent a course of treatment with the leading Boston ophthalmologist. She described her symptoms as an aching in her eyes and a painful sensitivity to light. Of the two posthumous diagnoses, exotropia (a kind of strabismus, the inability of one eye to align with the other) and anterior uveitis (inflammation of the uvea, a part of the iris), the latter seems more likely. In 1869 Higginson invited the poet to Boston to attend a literary salon. The terms she used in declining his invitation—“I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town”—make clear her refusal by that time to leave home and also reveal her sense of paternal order. When Higginson visited her the next year, he recorded his vivid first impression of her “plain” features, “exquisitely” neat attire, “childlike” manner, and loquacious and exhausting brilliance. He was “glad not to live near her.”

In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged 35 poems a year and conducted her social life mainly through her chiseled and often sibylline written messages. Her father’s sudden death in 1874 caused a profound and persisting emotional upheaval yet eventually led to a greater openness, self-possession, and serenity. She repaired an 11-year breach with Samuel Bowles and made friends with Maria Whitney, a teacher of modern languages at Smith College, and Helen Hunt Jackson, poet and author of the novel Ramona (1884). Dickinson resumed contact with Wadsworth, and from about age 50 she conducted a passionate romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the supreme court of Massachusetts. The letters she apparently sent Lord reveal her at her most playful, alternately teasing and confiding. In declining an erotic advance or his proposal of marriage, she asked, “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”
After Dickinson’s aging mother was incapacitated by a stroke and a broken hip, caring for her at home made large demands on the poet’s time and patience. After her mother died in 1882, Dickinson summed up the relationship in a confidential letter to her Norcross cousins: “We were never intimate Mother and Children while she was our Mother—but…when she became our Child, the Affection came.” The deaths of Dickinson’s friends in her last years—Bowles in 1878, Wadsworth in 1882, Lord in 1884, and Jackson in 1885—left her feeling terminally alone. But the single most shattering death, occurring in 1883, was that of her eight-year-old nephew next door, the gifted and charming Gilbert Dickinson. Her health broken by this culminating tragedy, she ceased seeing almost everyone, apparently including her sister-in-law. The poet died in 1886, when she was 55 years old. 

The immediate cause of her death was a stroke. The attending physician attributed this to Bright’s disease, but a modern posthumous diagnosis points to severe primary hypertension as the underlying condition.