Happy Birthday, Auguste Rodin

Steichen, Rodin and The Thinker, 1902

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

Auguste Rodin, born on this day in 1840

Chardin, Young Student Drawing, 1738

Harmony.

Mola, Young Musician with a Viola da Gamba, 1666

IN COMMENDATION OF MUSIC

When whispering strains do softly steal

With creeping passion through the heart

And when at every touch we feel

Our pulses beat and bear a part;

When threads can make

A heartstring shake,

Philosophy

Can scarce deny

The soul consists of harmony.

When unto heavenly joy we feign

Whate’er the soul affecteth most,

Which only thus we can explain

By music of the wingéd host,

Whose lays we think

Make stars to wink,

Philosophy

Can scarce deny

Our souls consist of harmony.

O lull me, lull me, charming air,

My senses rock with wonder sweet;

Like snow on wool thy fallings are,

Soft, like a spirit’s, are thy feet:

Grief who need fear

That hath an ear?

Down let him lie

And slumbring die,

And change his soul for harmony.

William Strode 

Alive.

Whitefish Review interviews Harrison ...

EP: Is writing easier now in your life because there are fewer distractions?

JH: I don’t know if there are any less distractions. I have been out here in this studio every morning since my wife’s death and I must say I haven’t got much done. Rene Char, a French poet says, “You have to be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.” You just gotta keep doing it. It’s like being a photographer—you got to drive around until something catches your eye. Like [Russell] Chatham, when bird hunting, and I can remember him just standing there looking at the landscape. We’re supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

Wonder.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. 

Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. 

In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 

Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

Words often bring with them the illusion of transparency, as though they allowed us to understand everything, control everything, put everything in order. Modernity is talkative because it is proud, unless the converse is true. Is our incessant talking perhaps what makes us proud?

Cardinal Robert Sarah, from The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

Soldier.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter

Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet

Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer

Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer

Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician

Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,

Who serves beneath the flag,

And whose coffin is draped by the flag,

Who allows the protester to burn the flag. 

Charles Michael Province

Big Fitz, Rest in Peace

At this hour, on this day fifty years ago, the ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald was lost with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior.

The storm that brought the ship down contained sustained winds of nearly 70 miles per hour, producing waves over 25 feet.

Drink your glasses empty to "Big Fitz" ... rest in peace, boys.

The lastest documentary, Gales of November: The Final Voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald ...

Defines.

Speech characterizes man.  Silence is what defines him.

Robert Cardinal Sarah, from The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

No, Cardinal Sarah does not have a blog.

Humbling.

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam …

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan, born on this day in 1934, from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Gordon Lightfoot, "Restless"

The lake is blue, the sky is gray, the leaves have turned to gold

The wild goose will be on her way, the weather's much too cold

When the muskie and the old trout too have all gone down to rest

We will be returning to the things that we love best ...

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, "King's Highway"

Under a big ol' sky out in a field of green ...

It's sandwich time.

Learn.

Poortvliet, Vigil, 1973

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Bram Stoker, born on this day in 1847, from Dracula

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Released.

The Stones released Undercover on this day in 1983 and I got my copy at Singing Dog.

"Wanna Hold You"...

It's pizza time.

Necessary.

Collaboration.  When all else fails, it becomes necessary to look to the healing power of brute force.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Finger.

Saveur on the history and traditions of fondue ...

Combining a moderately moist cheese, such as Gruyere, with a fattier cheese like Vacherin Fribourgeois helps create a balanced blend (see The Building Blocks of Fondue); Appenzeller, a firm yet creamy cows' milk cheese with tiny holes, works just as well in place of the Fribourgeois. But each region believes its local cheeses make the best fondue, and the choice is entirely up to the cook. James Beard once praised an American homemaker for substituting cheddar and bourbon for the customary Swiss cheeses and kirsch. Perhaps fondue resonates so well with the Swiss because variations unite the regions around the pot: a mirror of a nation of four official languages within 16,000 square miles.

A few suggestions ... 

• Appenzeller is the best cheese for fondue (what's not to love about a cheese whose rind is washed in apple cider?)
• Crush a head of garlic into the cheese as it's melting, per pound of cheese
• Our ratio of cheese to wine is about a 1/3 -1/2 a bottle per pound of cheese (look for a minerally white, we like Ferrari-Carano Fumé Blanc; drink the rest straight from the bottle as the fondue is prepared)
• Use the best bread you can procure, torn off the loaf as needed.
• Other dippables include, thinly-sliced Speck, hard-boiled eggs, cornichon, course ground pork sausages, your finger.

Beyond.

I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as an unscientific fiction. And people of this scientistic cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the “transcendental” and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them.

Sir Roger Scruton, from "Effing the Ineffable"

Happy Birthday, Marie Curie

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.  Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be achieved.

Marie Curie, born on this day in 1867

Tabakova, Moreni for Clarinet, String Quartet, and Piano

Off the Beaten Path perform ...

Honest.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Richard Feynman, from his commencement speech, Caltech, 1974

Grainger, “Over the Hills and Far Away” -

The United States Marine Band Marine Band performs ...

Happy Birthday, Philips Koninck

Koninck, A Panoramic Landscape With a Country Estate, 1649

Philips Koninck was born on this day in 1619.

Groucho Marx, "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"

Your proposition may be good

But let's have one thing understood:

Whatever it is, I'm against it

And even when you've changed it or condensed it

I'm against it ...

Happy Birthday, Guido Reni

Reni, Fighting Putti, 1625

I would have liked to have had an angelic brush and forms from Paradise in order to design the Archangel and to see it in heaven; but I could not ascend so high and in vain I sought it on earth; therefore I sought out the form in the concept I had established.

Guido Reni, born on this day in 1575

Happy Birthday, Walker Evans

Evans, Shadow Self-Portrait (Right Profile), Juan-les-Pins, France, 1927

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

Walker Evans, born on this day in 1903

Beauty.

Chardin, Still Life with Copper Pot, Cheese, and Eggs, 1735 

We have learned from Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. Everyday life will charm you once you have absorbed Chardin’s painting for a few days like a lesson. Then, having understood the life of his painting, you will have discovered the beauty of life.

Marcel Proust, from "Chardin: The Essence of Things"

Believe.

John Brown delivered his famous speech to the court at his trial on this day in 1859, in Charles Town, Virginia ...

This Court acknowledges too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of GOD. I saw a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that, "All things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them." It teaches me further, to "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, I have done no wrong, but right.

Enter.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

E. M. Forster

Happy Birthday, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Chardin, A Green Neck Duck with a Seville Orange, 1730

How many attempts, now happy, now unhappy!  He who has not felt the difficulties of his art does nothing that counts.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, born on this date in 1699

Happy Birthday, Russell Chatham

Chatham, Nightfall in September, 1991

Russell Chatham was born on October 29, 1939.

Winter Above Deep Creek: The Making of an Original Lithograph ...

Sustain.

As it has been written, so it shall be.  Here are ten stouts and porters to sustain you through the gales of November ...

• Anchor Brewing Porter
• Alaskan Brewing Smoked Porter
• Anderson Valley Brewing Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout
• Bell's Brewing Expedition Stout
• Founders Brewing Breakfast Stout
• Great Lakes Brewing Edmund Fitzgerald Porter
• Guinness Extra Stout
• Left Hand Brewing Milk Stout Nitro
• Rogue Brewing Mocha Porter
• Short's Brewing Publican Porter

Thanks for the inspiration, Kurtastrophe.

Better.

Wyeth, November First, 1950

MY NOVEMBER GUEST

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,

     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

     She talks and I am fain to list:

She’s glad the birds are gone away,

She’s glad her simple worsted grey

     Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

     The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

     And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

     The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

     And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost

Checker'd.

Spenser, The Shepherd's Calendar: November, 1579

The SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR: NOVEMBER

The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;

And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face

Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,

When done the journey of her nightly race,

Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.

For days the shepherds in the fields may be,

Nor mark a patch of sky - blindfold they trace,

The plains, that seem without a bush or tree,

Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.

The timid hare seems half its fears to lose,

Crouching and sleeping 'neath its grassy lair,

And scarcely startles, tho' the shepherd goes

Close by its home, and dogs are barking there;

The wild colt only turns around to stare

At passer by, then knaps his hide again;

And moody crows beside the road forbear

To fly, tho' pelted by the passing swain;

Thus day seems turn'd to night, and tries to wake in vain.

The owlet leaves her hiding-place at noon,

And flaps her grey wings in the doubling light;

The hoarse jay screams to see her out so soon,

And small birds chirp and startle with affright;

Much doth it scare the superstitious wight,

Who dreams of sorry luck, and sore dismay;

While cow-boys think the day a dream of night,

And oft grow fearful on their lonely way,

Fancying that ghosts may wake, and leave their graves by day.

Yet but awhile the slumbering weather flings

Its murky prison round - then winds wake loud;

With sudden stir the startled forest sings

Winter's returning song - cloud races cloud,

And the horizon throws away its shroud,

Sweeping a stretching circle from the eye;

Storms upon storms in quick succession crowd,

And o'er the sameness of the purple sky

Heaven paints, with hurried hand, wild hues of every dye.

At length it comes along the forest oaks,

With sobbing ebbs, and uproar gathering high;

The scared, hoarse raven on its cradle croaks,

And stockdove-flocks in hurried terrors fly,

While the blue hawk hangs o'er them in the sky.-

The hedger hastens from the storm begun,

To seek a shelter that may keep him dry;

And foresters low bent, the wind to shun,

Scarce hear amid the strife the poacher's muttering gun.

The ploughman hears its humming rage begin,

And hies for shelter from his naked toil;

Buttoning his doublet closer to his chin,

He bends and scampers o'er the elting soil,

While clouds above him in wild fury boil,

And winds drive heavily the beating rain;

He turns his back to catch his breath awhile,

Then ekes his speed and faces it again,

To seek the shepherd's hut beside the rushy plain.

The boy, that scareth from the spiry wheat

The melancholy crow - in hurry weaves,

Beneath an ivied tree, his sheltering seat,

Of rushy flags and sedges tied in sheaves,

Or from the field a shock of stubble thieves.

There he doth dithering sit, and entertain

His eyes with marking the storm-driven leaves;

Oft spying nests where he spring eggs had ta'en,

And wishing in his heart 'twas summer-time again.

Thus wears the month along, in checker'd moods,

Sunshine and shadows, tempests loud, and calms;

One hour dies silent o'er the sleepy woods,

The next wakes loud with unexpected storms;

A dreary nakedness the field deforms -

Yet many a rural sound, and rural sight,

Lives in the village still about the farms,

Where toil's rude uproar hums from morn till night

Noises, in which the ears of Industry delight.

At length the stir of rural labour's still,

And Industry her care awhile forgoes;

When Winter comes in earnest to fulfil

His yearly task, at bleak November's close,

And stops the plough, and hides the field in snows;

When frost locks up the stream in chill delay,

And mellows on the hedge the jetty sloes,

For little birds - then Toil hath time for play,

And nought but threshers' flails awake the dreary day.

John Clare

Spattered.

Kelley, The Schoolhouse, Being Deserted, Soon Fell to Decay, and Was Reported to be Haunted by the Ghost of the Unfortunate Pedagogue, 1991

The next morning the old horse was found, without his saddle and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master’s gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast; dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the school-house and strolled idly about the banks of the brook but no schoolmaster. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs, deeply dented in the road and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a spattered pumpkin.

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Tremendous.

Kelley, Just Then He Saw the Goblin Rising in His Stirrups, and in the Very Act of Hurling his Head at Him, 1991

The hair of the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head with terror. What was to be done? To turn and fly was now too late; and besides, what chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin, if such it was, which could ride upon the wings of the wind? Summoning up, therefore, a show of courage, he demanded in stammering accents, “Who are you?” He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides of the inflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth with involuntary fervor into a psalm tune. Just then the shadowy object of alarm put itself in motion, and with a scramble and a bound stood at once in the middle of the road. Though the night was dark and dismal, yet the form of the unknown might now in some degree be ascertained. He appeared to be a horseman of large dimensions and mounted on a black horse of powerful frame. He made no offer of molestation or sociability, but kept aloof on one side of the road, jogging along on the blind side of old Gunpowder, who had now got over his fright and waywardness.

Ichabod, who had no relish for this strange midnight companion, and bethought himself of the adventure of Brom Bones with the Galloping Hessian, now quickened his steed in hopes of leaving him behind. The stranger, however, quickened his horse to an equal pace. Ichabod pulled up, and fell into a walk, thinking to lag behind; the other did the same. His heart began to sink within him; he endeavored to resume his psalm tune, but his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and he could not utter a stave. There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless! but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle. His terror rose to desperation, he rained a shower of kicks and blows upon Gunpowder, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip; but the spectre started full jump with him. Away, then, they dashed through thick and thin, stones flying and sparks flashing at every bound. Ichabod’s flimsy garments fluttered in the air as he stretched his long lank body away over his horse’s head in the eagerness of his flight.

They had now reached the road which turns off to Sleepy Hollow; but Gunpowder, who seemed possessed with a demon, instead of keeping up it, made an opposite turn and plunged headlong down hill to the left. This road leads through a sandy hollow shaded by trees for about a quarter of a mile, where it crosses the bridge famous in goblin story, and just beyond swells the green knoll on which stands the whitewashed church.

As yet the panic of the steed had given his unskillful rider an apparent advantage in the chase; but just as he had got halfway through the hollow the girths of the saddle gave away and he felt it slipping from under him. He seized it by the pommel and endeavored to hold it firm, but in vain, and had just time to save himself by clasping old Gunpowder round the neck, when the saddle fell to the earth, and he heard it trampled under foot by his pursuer. For a moment the terror of Hans Van Ripper’s wrath passed across his mind, for it was his Sunday saddle; but this was no time for petty fears; the goblin was hard on his haunches, and (unskilled rider that he was) he had much ado to maintain his seat, sometimes slipping on one side, sometimes on another, and sometimes jolted on the high ridge of his horse’s back-bone with a violence that he verily feared would cleave him asunder.

An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopes that the church bridge was at hand. The wavering reflection of a silver star in the bosom of the brook told him that he was not mistaken. He saw the walls of the church dimly glaring under the trees beyond. He recollected the place where Brom Bones’ ghostly competitor had disappeared. “If I can but reach that bridge,” thought Ichabod, “I am safe.” Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a tremendous crash; he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider passed by like a whirlwind.

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Special.

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.

Ray Bradbury, from The Halloween Tree

Bach, Passacaglia e Thema Fugatum d'apres, BWV 582

L'Accademia dei Dissonanti perform ...

Falconieri, "La suave melodia"

Performing are Xenia Gogu, violin, Teresa Madeira, cello, and Víctor García García, five-string cello piccolo ...

Kapsperger, Passacaglia in A

Xavier Díaz-Latorre performs ...

Luck.

Celebrating.

Scourings.

Rockwell, Ichabod Crane, 1937

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent millpond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.

From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

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", found among the papers of the late Dietrich Knickerbocker in Geoffrey Crayon's Sketchbook

Music.

The boy stepped out under a moon of archaic bone, a paper bag of golden kernels, bulky and cool against his hip, were stolen treasure. 

October 30, and the town had already begun to forget itself. Porch lights burned low as banked coals. The parchemnet of fallen leaves scraped the sidewalks in small, hurried flutterings of pages. The air was perfumed with the gardens he had passed—turned earth, the sweet-sour breath of the tomatoes, cabbages, and squshes still rooted there— the air itself tasted of matches struck and then blown out.  

He was twelve, or at least he was at supper. That night he was something older, thinner -- a wire pulled taut between the kitchen door he closed and the dark at the end of the block. His friends waited by the ancient oak that leaned like a eavesdropping man. Their whispers were no louder than the rustle of their satchels of munitions. One of them carried a pocket full of soap. Another carried a length of string and the bright, nervous idea of it. The kernels in his paper sack would provide abundant opportunities.

The night opened the way a book opens for a thumb. Lawns were pale roads. Windows were eyes that had not yet decided whether to see. Somewhere a dog barked twice and then thought better of it. The boy felt the particular pride of being uncaught: the cold climbed his wrists, the laugh that wanted to live in his throat forever and was told, for now, to stay. He cradled a handful of corn in his sweaty palm. For a moment it was only corn, ordinary, smooth, light. Then it left his hand and became constellations of small, pale comets. The stars shattered, exploding against the aluminum siding of the house with a sound like a battle drum. Porch lights flared. Somewhere a voice called a name that was not his. Exulted, the rebels scattered into the deepest murkiness provided between houses, and the shadows enveloped them without judgment.

Fifty years later he remembered the joyous adventure that lived in the running—the way his lungs burned clean, temples thundered, every shadow looked like a friend, until it wasn’t. Danger lived in the stopping, but laughter made even walking difficult.  

In the sudden quiet after the mischievous music had been made, the thought came forward, sharp as the first frost, that someone would have to rake it all up in the morning, and that the hand that gathered it, may belong to a man who remembered and did not curse the memory or the boy. 

The moon watched. It had seen this every year and still favors the stealthy.  

By the time he slipped back through the kitchen door his fingers smelled of the grains he robbed. His mother, still reading. She did not look up. On the table pumpkin pie awaited with an ice-cold glass of milk.

Outside, the town settled, floting in the golden wreckage of the night. The boy stood very still and listened to his own blood, which had not yet decided whether it has been changed ... or wanted to.

Unflinching.

Deiker, Rabbits in a Cabbage Field, 1864

THE SCARECROW

The Scarecrow

All winter through I bow my head

beneath the driving rain;

the North Wind powders me with snow

and blows me black again;

at midnight 'neath a maze of stars

I flame with glittering rime,

and stand above the stubble, stiff

as mail at morning-prime.

But when that child called Spring, and all

his host of children come,

scattering their buds and dew upon

these acres of my home,

some rapture in my rags awakes;

I lift void eyes and scan

the sky for crows, those ravening foes,

of my strange master, Man.

I watch him striding lank behind

his clashing team, and know

soon will the wheat swish body high

where once lay a sterile snow;

soon I shall gaze across a sea

of sun-begotten grain,

which my unflinching watch hath sealed

for harvest once again.

Walter de la Mare

Thanks for the image, Kurt ... don't neglect the sidebar.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Jethro Tull, "No Lullabye"

Keep your eyes open

And prick up your ears

Rehearse your loudest cry.

There's folk out there

Who would do you harm

So I'll sing you no lullaby.

There's a lock on the window;

There's a chain on the door:

A big dog in the hall.

But there's dragons and beasties

Out there in the night

To snatch you if you fall ...

Good morning.