A. E. Housman, John McCrae and Siegfried Sassoon
It's Sunday afternoon, November 12, 2023, 17:25, and I've updated this Web page a bit with a link to the audio archive of this program, a program note, and with a correction regarding how long ago World War Ⅰ ended. More to come. The slightly amended original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked a lot about the end of the fighting in World War Ⅰ on this program. That occurred with the armistice that took effect on November 11, 1918. This program is airing on the 105th anniversary of that event. I'm always reminded of the final scene of the movie All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) where Lew Ayres' character, the German soldier named Paul, reaches for the butterfly. Pickles of the North read three poems, one of which may still be in copyright. I'll be posting the two that are in the public domain later on. We also talked about a really tragic situation in alabama where a small town mayor and local sky pilot was driven to suicide by anti LGBT+∞ pressures. I'll be updating this Web page with more about that and other things, so check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 8, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This will be the first meeting of the 13th WBAI LSB. It might be a wild time, given some of the things that people are saying on the LSB mailing list.
We had a LSB meeting on Wednesday November 8, 2023. It was the last meeting of the 12th WBAI LSB. For the second LSB meeting in a row I did not get to give an oral Treasurer's Report but the written version of the report is here. We had an objection about the phrasing of an agenda item, and then we were supposed to have had a report from the station's General Manager, but his phone didn't work right and after some time was spent on trying to get it to work we went on to the next agenda item which involved going into executive session. And as we tried to do that we were told that the General Manager was trying to get on the call. And then the discussion turned to the General Manager needing 15 minutes to get on and another member got on the call. A motion to go into executive session was mentioned but not made and then we went to another agenda item, but then the General Manager got on the call and delivered his report instead. We never did get to that executive session. The LSB is supposed to do an annual Management evaluation but we seem to have lost that in the agenda mess.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
•
Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
•
WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
•
Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
•
Program note: we are preempted for a fund raising special next week. We are scheduled to return on November 25, so we're wishing you all a merry Thanksgiving now. A further note is that we are recording this program in our bedroom instead of in our our living room. We're having to do this because the toner cartridge ran out on our printer and we can't print anything out and bring it into the living room. So we're going to be keeping track of things by looking at computer monitors. We're hoping there aren't any extra noises on this recording, like our neighbors fighting, their many cats jumping around and making noise and doors slamming very loudly.
•
This program aired on the 105th* anniversary of the armistice that effectively ended the fighting in World War Ⅰ on November 11, 1918. We talked about the failure of the War to End All Wars
to have had that effect on the world. There are even a couple of pretty big wars going on right now.
Pickles of the North read some poems written about World War Ⅰ while it was still going on. Two of the poets were gay, Siegfried Sassoon and A. E. Housman. Sassoon was a famous poet during World War Ⅰ. Another poet whose work Pickles read was John McCrae, whose poem In Flanders Fields
was very famous, and that poem might even be familiar to some people today.
* Unfortunately, I said on the air that it was the 115th anniversary. Blame that blunder not on the fog of war but on the fog in my brain when we were recording the program. I'm sorry for the error.
•
The CDC Web site isn't giving us all that much information about COVID-19 in America, and this week they appear to be not giving us new numbers at all. The numbers regarding death in America from COVID-19 are the same as they were for the last program a week ago. I guess I need to look into what's happening with the CDC Web site more deeply.
The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We're getting or have gotten our new shots, we don't want to get this disease.
•
There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
•
Back to the Back of the Book page
Back to my home page.
The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2023, R. Paul Martin.
