D.H. Lawrence’s Ashes: What the Heck Happened To Them?

My dad told the one in which Lawrence’s widow Frieda and her Fascist Italian army officer lover left Lawrence’s ashes at a railway station platform in an excess of passionate disorganization. Some of the other stories are below.

  1. LAWRENCE was buried in the old Vence cemetery on a March 1930. His remains were exhumed in March 1935 in the presence of Mrs Gordon CROTCH, an English resident, and incinerated at Marseille on March 13. A wooden box holding a sealed zinc container in which were his ashes, was then delivered, together with the appropriate transatlantic transport authorization by the Prefecture, dated 14 March, to the former captain of Bersaglieri Angelo RAVAGLI, at that time the factotum and lover of Lawrence’s widow. His mission was to take the ashes to Taos (New Mexico) in “a beautiful vase” specially ordered by Frieda for this purpose. The ashes brought to Taos by RAVAGLI in grotesque cicumstances were cast by him into the concrete slab of a “shrine” which he built at the KIOWA ranch at San Cristobal near Taos.
  2. When Baron de HAULLEVILLE and his sister-in-law Rose NYS-de HAULLEVILLE (who knew Ravagli through the Huxleys) were Ravagli’s guests atTaos, Ravagli after partaking from a bottle of bourbon, confessed late one night to having dumped the box and ashes between Marseille and Villefranche (where he was due to sail on the Conde di Savoia), so as to avoid the expense and trouble of transporting them to the USA. When in New York he collected Frieda’s vase, mailed “to be called for” from Marseille, and put into it some locally procured ashes which he took to Taos.
  3. The following year Frieda had his body exhumed, cremated and the ashes brought to Taos. Her plan was to have the ashes housed in an urn in the memorial but Brett and Mabel Dodge Luhan wanted to scatter the ashes over the ranch (while Lawrence was alive the three women often competed for his attention). In response, Frieda dumped the ashes into a wheelbarrow containing wet cement and exclaimed, “now let’s see them steal this!” The cement was used to make the memorial’s altar. There are other stories concerning the whereabouts of Lawrence’s ashes but this one is the most widely accepted.

Oh Frieda. Oh Captain Ravagli. Oh dear.

Abu Risha, he dead.

This is a fascinating al-Jazeera news story about the new “U.S.-Friendly” Sunni alliance in Anbar, the now-dead sheikh supposed to have been in charge of the alliance, and the inevitable money and power game behind that show.

Part I riffs on Apocalypse Now in a very heavy-handed way, appropriately so.

Friday, and we’re still in Amman…

THE DAYTONA 500 MASTER RACE IS ON

“This number is very respected,” Earnhardt said. “Numbers have personalities. Numbers do talk. Numbers do kind of reach out and grab you. Some of the other options just didn’t do that.”

Junior’s taken the number 88, because his step-mom won’t give him Dad’s #8, and his grandfather had #88.

Comedy gold is about to ensue as NASCAR, Junior, and the press discover how much white supremacist neo-Nazi skinheads love that number.

The first time a gang of those guys dressed all in Juniorwear beats the hell out of gays/blacks/cops will be a fine moment for NASCAR, as they’re dragged back into the glorious past they’re trying to market their way out of.

thanks for the news item, trinnit!

My family is weird

Sometimes a series of things about us goes through my head and I just start giggling. This morning very early, lying awake and looking at the bookshelf of books signed by their authors, it was:

My father wrote a novel about an opera singer in the 1900s who could switch genders. Gender reversal or sudden gender-related surprises occur in two other novels of his.

When I was a kid, my brother made improbably huge kites out of PVC pipe and trash bags. They flew.

Because of my dad’s weird job my associations for literary figures are things like: I had to jump-start that guy’s car twice! Oh yeah, his wife called us at 3 am sobbing in Arabic about the water heater! That dude fed us lobster and played too much Eubie Blake at us! It’s not like name-dropping exactly because with a few exceptions the general public hasn’t heard of these people. But it makes me feel weird looking at book spines.

Our front door knocker is a bronze woman’s hand.

My father wrote a novel in which the love interest is a blowup doll.

My great aunt Zelda didn’t marry until retirement and was a doctor instead. She may well have been the first person to administer penicillin in Los Angeles.

My father wrote a novel in which someone is trying to complete the unfinished tenth symphony of the character in someone else’s novel.

Okay that’s enough for now. We’re weird.

My check card got owned

Noticed it by accident. There was a 1 cent charge to the amusingly named colon700.com

I called them up and they were freaking. Said they had thousands of 1 cent charges from god knows where and everyone was calling them. They promised to call me back. They didn’t sound like they were talking through their colons.

Called the bank and shut down the card before the damned Russians bought ingots, heffalumps etc with my money.

You might want to check your accounts, folks, because this one looks like a big “surge” of fraud. I bet they broke into some e-commerce outfit.