With no Saints to honor, today is the date of the Summer Solstice, marking either the Beginning or the Middle of Summer (you decide), West Virginia Day (1863), World Refugee Day, and the birthday of our former neighbor Pam, mother of several of the Assembled who are friends with our own kids (1959).
The Summer Solstice occurs exactly when the Earth’s axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun at its maximum of 23° 26 ′ (at my locale, at 3:50 pm CDT). Except in the polar regions (where daylight is continuous for many months during the spring and summer), the day on which the summer solstice occurs is the day of the year with the longest period of daylight (fourteen hours, seven minutes at my locale). Thus the seasonal significance of the Summer solstice is in the reversal of the gradual shortening of nights and lengthening of days. In some cultures the Summer Solstice is held to start the season of Summer, while in others cultures it marks the middle of Summer. (Which is why we have Mid-Summer’s Day some three or four days after the Start of Summer.) Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied among cultures, but most recognize the event in some way with holidays, festivals, and rituals around that time with themes of religion or fertility. (And trust me, it has been summer in SouthWestCentral Louisiana for a solid month, already.) Today is West Virginia Day, celebrating when West Virginia became the thirty-fifth State of the United States. The area now encompassed by West Virginia was the western section of the State of Virginia. During the Civil War, the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond chose to join the Confederate States of America, much to the chagrin of most of the inhabitants in the trans-Allegheny region of the state who had long expressed their resentment toward the political elites in Richmond. Loyal unionists gradually pushed for the creation of a new state. After two years of legal maneuvering, West Virginia was formally admitted to the United States of America on June 20th, 1863. June 20th had been informally celebrated across West Virginia over the next six decades until the West Virginia Legislature gave the holiday formal recognition in 1927. The day has traditionally been celebrated with festivities at the state capitol complex in Charleston and at other locations across the state. The state has some of the best scenery in the world, and the worst economy; the major exports are coal, marijuana, and moonshine (not in that order). I grew up in West Virginia, along the Ohio (A-hi-a) River in Ravenswood, below Parkersburg, and was in school there from first grade (no kindergarten) through ninth grade, moving to SouthEast Louisiana in 1973. When challenged about my non-SouthWestCentral Louisiana accent, I always say, “I was born near Pittsburgh, Pa., grew up in West By Gosh Virginia, and have been in Louisiana since 1973, which means I will eat boiled crawfish, but I won’t suck the heads.” Turning to World Refugee Day, on December 4th, 2000, the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 55/76 decided that, from 2001, June 20th would be celebrated as World Refugee Day. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. African Refugee Day had been formally celebrated in several countries prior to 2000. The United Nations noted that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on June 20th. Each year on June 20th the United Nations, United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and countless civic groups around the world host World Refugee Day events in order to draw the public’s attention to the millions of refugees and Internally displaced persons worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes due to war, conflict and persecution. The annual commemoration is marked by a variety of events in more than one hundred countries, involving government officials, humanitarian aid workers, celebrities, civilians and the forcibly displaced themselves. And today is the birthday of our former neighbor Pam, mother of several of the Assembled who are friends with our own kids (1959).
Last night I finished reading The Leper of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters.
Richard fed the cats, and I woke up at 8:00 am. I posted to Facebook that today was the Summer Solstice, posted to Facebook that today was West Virginia Day (1863), and posted to Facebook that today was World Refugee Day. Richard went to drink coffee and to go see his friend down in Lafayette. I did my Book Devotional Reading, then I did my Book Review for this weblog and for my Goodreads account for The Leper of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters. I brought in the United States Flag, ate my breakfast toast and read the Thursday papers on the porch, did my Internet Devotional Reading, and did a bit of watering on the porch. I then watched Inside Out (2015). Richard came home; his friend in the nursing home is doing much better. I then did a couple of Advance Daily Update Drafts for this weblog while eating some cantaloupe. I then continued reading Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong. The Summer Solstice arrived at 3:50 pm, we watched Jeopardy!, made lasagna (with half and half beef and pork, and with tomatoes and squash from the farmer’s market), and watched News. We ate the lasagna with garlic knots for dinner, and watched Gigi (1958), which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography – Color, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Scoring of a Musical Picture and Best Song. And I will now finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed.
Tomorrow is the Memorial of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious (died 1591). I plan to wake up early and work on my plants. And I may go down to Lafayette tomorrow.
Our Parting Quote on this Thursday evening comes to us from Andrew Sarris, American film critic (died 2012). Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, his parents were Greek immigrants, and Sarris grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. He graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and then served for three years in the Army Signal Corps before moving to Paris for a year, where he befriended Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Upon returning to New York’s Lower East Side, Sarris briefly pursued graduate studies at his alma mater and Teachers College, Columbia University before turning to film criticism as a vocation. After initially writing for Film Culture, he moved to The Village Voice where his first piece. a laudatory review of Psycho, was published in 1960. Around this time, he returned to Paris where he was present at the premiere of such French New Wave films such as Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961). The experience expanded his view of film criticism. Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the United States and coining the term in his 1962 essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” which critics writing in Cahiers du Cinéma had inspired. Sarris wrote the highly influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (1968), an opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. The book influenced many other critics and help raise awareness of the role of the film director and, in particular, of the auteur theory. In the book Sarris listed what he termed the “pantheon” of the fourteen greatest film directors who had worked in the United States: the Americans Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles; the Germans Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg; the British Charles Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and the French Jean Renoir. He also identified second and third tier directors, downplaying the work of Billy Wilder, David Lean, and Stanley Kubrick, among others. Sarris married fellow film critic Molly Haskell in 1969. For many years he wrote for both NY Film Bulletin and The Village Voice. During this part of his career, he was often seen as a rival to the New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael, who had originally attacked the auteur theory in her essay “Circles and Squares.” He was a Member of the ‘Official Competition’ jury at the 37th Venice International Film Festival in 1980. In his 1998 book You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927–1949, Sarris upgraded the status of Billy Wilder to pantheon level and apologized for his earlier harsh assessment. He continued to write film criticism regularly until 2009 for The New York Observer, and was a professor of film at Columbia University (where he earned an M.A. in English in 1998), teaching courses in international film history, American cinema, and Alfred Hitchcock until his retirement in 2011. Sarris was a co-founder of the National Society of Film Critics. Film critics such as J. Hoberman, Kenneth Turan, Armond White, Michael Phillips, and A.O. Scott cited him as an influence. His career was discussed in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, first with other critics discussing how he brought the auteur theory from France, and then by Sarris himself explaining how he applied that theory to his original review of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (died 2012): “I was a solipsist and a narcissist and much too arrogant. I have a lot more compassion now, but it took a long time.”
From The Recamier 