Now.

...[T]o think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.

Frederick Buechner

Thank you, Kurt.

Done.

Done and done.

Nobody-But-Yourself.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e.e. cummings, born on this day in 1894

Listen.

Entire.

The entire sixty-five episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater.

Then.

Monteverdi, Beatus vir, SV 268

Perrine Devillers sings with some other people ...

Energy.

Ari Weinzweig on the magic in behaving like a human being ...

Done regularly, the 10/4 Rule increases energy, improves inclusion, and could even enhance the health of everyone involved (yes, both the person greeted and the greeter). Erich Fromm writes that in a modern sense, we can experience resurrection in a nonreligious form as “the transformation of this reality in the direction of greater aliveness.” The 10/4 Rule is just that. It is regenerative in the literal sense of the word. Because the lives of all involved are enhanced by doing it, the 10/4 Rule literally creates energy!

In that sense, the 10/4 Rule is a manifestation of what business writer and creative thinker Carol Sanford says is the value of knowing about what she calls “nodes.” In Sanford’s systems thinking, nodes are

those places within a specific system where the introduction of new energy or a different quality of energy will enable an evolution and expression of its potential … Nodes are about energization, like acupuncture points rather than superhighway cloverleafs. … the fundamental approach is the same regardless of the size of what you are thinking about ...

The 10/4 Rule is a great example. In the scheme of all we do, it seems tiny. And yet, done well, it opens channels of organizational energy and connection that have an enormous impact.

One of the beauties of the 10/4 Rule is that once one starts doing it … well, we will almost all end up doing it all day. The other evening, working the floor at the Roadhouse, I tried to keep track of how many times I 10/4’d (as one might say in “Zinglish”) in an hour, but I gave up after I got to about 40 in the first 15 minutes. The point is you can get a LOT of reps in a relatively short time. In truth, many people who have worked here for a while will tell you that they soon start practicing the 10/4 Rule everywhere they go. This means that the impact of implementing it is far bigger than I could ever have originally conceived. Decades of doing it here at Zingerman’s has likely impacted the energy of the whole Ann Arbor ecosystem.

Done mindfully, the 10/4 Rule is not boring or tiring. As poet Gary Snyder says, “Repetition is not necessarily an enemy. Because every time you do something it’s different.” In this sense, doing the 10/4 Rule is like an all-day practice of purposefulness. Poet Marie Howe writes that “every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.” Reflecting on all this in recent weeks, the 10/4 Rule strikes me as the silence somewhere in the center of a poetic approach to customer service. Not in the physical sense of being “at the center,” but rather in the spirit of poet and potter MC Richards who writes about “centering” as “the discipline of bringing in … rather than of leaving out.”

Writer Seth Godin shared this in his morning missive the other day:

I worked with [science fiction author] Arthur C. Clarke at the very beginning of my career. He’s most famous for saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Magic isn’t such a bad thing. …

Fire's.

Thomson, Maple Saplings, October, 1915

OLD OCTOBER

Hail, old October, bright and chill,

First freedman from the summer sun!

Spice high the bowl, and drink your fill!

Thank heaven, at last the summer's done!

Come, friend, my fire is burning bright,

A fire's no longer out of place,

How clear it glows! (there's frost to-night,)

It looks white winter in the face ...

Be mine the tree that feeds the fire!

Be mine the sun knows when to set!

Be mine the months when friends desire

To turn in here from cold and wet!

The sentry sun, that glared so long

O'erhead, deserts his summer post;

Ay, you may brew it hot and strong:

"The joys of winter" - come, a toast!

Thomas Constable

Released.

U2 released their last excellent album, October, on this day in 1981.

"Rejoice" ...

Joy.

There are two kinds of joy. There’s expressive joy, the joy you experience and communicate because that’s how you feel. But there’s also therapeutic joy, the joy you will yourself to feel in order to protect yourself against negative emotions ... 

We will not be intimidated. We will not be traumatized. We will not be defined by our enemies. We will live with the threats and even laugh at them because what we can laugh at, we cannot be held captive by ... It’s about surviving, and beyond that, thriving, even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Yearned.

Over the years I've yearned for wisdom.

What have I learned?

Not much; even the dog leads when we go for a walk.

Jim Harrison

Howling.

Kelley, Untitled, 1990

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch’s token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes and the good people of Sleepy Hollow, as they sat by their doors of an evening, were often filled with awe at hearing his nasal melody, “in linked sweetness long drawn out,” floating from the distant hill, or along the dusky road.

Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!

But if there was a pleasure in all this, while snugly cuddling in the chimney corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards. What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! And how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Follin, Sylvius Leopold Weiss, 1765

Sylvius Leopold Weiss was born on this day in 1687.

Anna Wiktoria Swoboda performs the Sonata in A ...

Exalted.

With great cheese comes great responsibility ...

Cheese

My forthcoming work in five volumes, “The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature” is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: “If all the trees were bread and cheese”—which is, indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to “breeze” and “seas” (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say, “Cheese it!” or even “Quite the cheese.” The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient—sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella—artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if, let us say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior substance), we shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith's Soap or Brown's Soap, sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith's Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown's soap. There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, with great rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I knew I could get many other things besides bread and cheese. I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and left England behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that, instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits. Biscuits—to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits—to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

G.K. Chesterton, from Alarms and Discursions

Oktoberfest.

The first Oktoberfest was held in Munich on this day in 1810.

Some appropriate get-it for the hi-fi.

I love the accordion.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Accuracy.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.  In poetry, what our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Wallace Stevens

Just.

The Francis Mallmann episode from YesChef ...

He's just a guy sitting on a rock, with a dog, and a fire.

The modern world has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything. 

G. K. Chesterton

Education.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Spudman.

I'm a spudman, I got eyes all around ...

Work.

Jamie Wyeth at work on Inferno ...

This is where the internet shines the brightest.

Turned.

Wyeth, Witch Country, Cushing, 1973

The SCARECROW

Once I said to a scarecrow, “You must be tired of standing in this

lonely field.”

 

And he said, “The joy of scaring is a deep and lasting one, and I

never tire of it.”

 

Said I, after a minute of thought, “It is true; for I too have

known that joy.”

 

Said he, “Only those who are stuffed with straw can know it.”

 

Then I left him, not knowing whether he had complimented or belittled

me.

 

A year passed, during which the scarecrow turned philosopher.

 

And when I passed by him again I saw two crows building a nest

under his hat.

Kahlil Gibran

Benediction.

Sloane, Cornwall Bridge, n/d

IN OCTOBER

Now comes the sunset of the verdant year,

Chemic fires, still and slow,

Burn in the leaves, till trees and groves appear

Dipped in the sunset's glow.

 

Through many-stained windows of the wood

The day sends down its beams,

Till all the acorn-punctured solitude

Of sunshine softly dreams.

 

I take my way where sentry cedars stand

Along the bushy lane,

And whitethroats stir and call on every hand,

Or lift their wavering strain;

 

The hazel-bush holds up its crinkled gold

And scents the loit'ring breeze--

A nuptial wreath amid its leafage old

That laughs at frost's decrees.

 

A purple bloom is creeping o'er the ash--

Dull wine against the day,

While dusky cedars wear a crimson sash

Of woodbine's kindled spray.

 

I see the stolid oak tree's smould'ring fire

Sullen against emerald rye;

And yonder sugar maple's wild desire

To match the sunset sky.

 

On hedge and tree the bittersweet has hung

Its fruit that looks a flower;

While alder spray with coral berries strung

Is part of autumn's dower.

 

The plaintive calls of bluebirds fill the air,

Wand'ring voices in the morn;

The ruby kinglet, flitting here and there,

Winds again his elfin horn.

 

Now Downy shyly drills his winter cell,

His white chips strew the ground;

While squirrels bark from hill or acorned dell--

A true autumnal sound.

 

I hear the feathered thunder of the grouse

Soft rolling through the wood,

Or pause to note where hurrying mole or mouse

Just stirs the solitude.

 

Anon the furtive flock-call of the quail

Comes up from weedy fields;

Afar the mellow thud of lonely flail

Its homely music yields.

 

Behold the orchards piled with painted spheres

New plucked from bending trees;

And bronzèd huskers tossing golden ears

In genial sun and breeze.

 

Once more the tranquil days brood o'er the hills,

And soothe earth's toiling breast;

A benediction all the landscape fills

That breathes of peace and rest.

John Burroughs

Showers.

Happy Birthday, Stinson

Tommy Stinson was born on this day in 1966.

A Replacements set from September of '81 (Stinson would have been 15 here)  ...

Mozart, Serenate ex C, "Ganz kleine Nachtmusik," K. 648

Classic FM reports on newly discovered Mozart compositions ...

The music was found in the collection of the Leipzig Municipal Library while researchers were completing a new edition of the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works.

Composed for string trio, the seven-movement piece is believed to have been written in the mid to late 1760s, when Mozart was a teenager. The manuscript features dark brown ink on off-white laid paper, with the title Serenate ex C.

Elisabeth Zimmermann, Vincent Geer, and David Geer of the youth symphony orchestra of the Leipzig School of Music "Johann Sebastian Bach" perform the piece ...

The Highwaymen, "The Last Cowboy Song"

Introduced.

The world was introduced to Killing Joke on this day in 1980.

"Wardance"

Released.

Led Zeppelin released III on this day in 1970.

"Celebration Day"...

Happy Birthday, Johnson

Of course Brian Johnson was born in October!

"Put the Finger on You" ...

Fine.

Kelley, A Fine Autumnal Day, 1990

It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the bark of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory-nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble field. 

As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty-pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Tea-Tray.

From the latter weeks of October to Christmas-Eve, therefore is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in my judgement, enters the room with the tea-tray.

Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Happy Birthday, Diderot

Levitzky, Denis Diderot, 1773

But who, he used to ask, can ever boast of having enough experience? Has even he who flatters himself on being the most experienced of men never been fooled? And then, what man is there who is capable of correctly assessing the circumstances in which he finds himself? The calculations which we make in our heads and the one recorded on the register up above are two very different calculations.

Denis Diderot, born on this day in 1713, from Jacques the Fatalist

Oct.

Rustling.

Rockwell, Grandpa and Me Raking Leaves, 1948

GATHERING LEAVES

Spades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop?

Norman Rockwell

Greg Landry, Rest in Peace

My first sports hero, Greg Landry, has passed (I'm assuming it was a completion).

Kris Kristofferson, "You Show Me Yours (And I'll Show You Mine)/Stranger"

Store.

Take all summer,

your ember

from the sun,

its walking meditation.

Store it in small

vaults of light

to keep

the rest of us

when winter seals

around each day.

We’ll flicker

to the table.

We’ll gather

to your orange flame.

Leah Naomi Green

Thank you, Walter.

Kris Kristofferson, "The Best of All Possible Worlds"

Hang.

'Tis Autumn.  The weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to these ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Light.

Happy Birthday, Bonnard

Bonnard, The Terrace, 1918

Pierre Bonnard was born on this day in 1867.

Charles Baudelaire had this to say about Bonnard's art...

He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained in the tumult of human liberty. He gazes at the landscapes of the great city, landscapes of stone, now swathed in the mist, now struck in full face by the sun.

What a compliment.

Kris Kristofferson, "Why Me, Lord"

Published.

I remember I used to half-believe and wholly-play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense?  Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Beatrix Potter, who published her book Peter Rabbit on this day in 1902

Pointed.

Left to choose the leper with the most fingers.