Spirit.

Reflect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.

Seneca, from Letters from a Stoic

Those were heady days.

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

The title cut ...

Happy Birthday, Joe Jackson

Joe Jackson was born on this day in 1954.

"I'm the Man"...

Liszt, Deux Légendes, S. 175

Ingrid Carbone performs No. 1, "St. Francis of Assisi: The Sermon to the Birds"...

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Love Me or Leave Me"

Routine.

Tom.

A long lost partner-in-crime.  We lived in Park Hall back in 1984.  Most nights he had a routine that I could easily get talked into:

1. Watch Letterman
2. Slap Idol's Rebel Yell on the hi-fi
3. Order pizza from Catfish Biff's
4. Get outside and skate the parking garage on 11th while we waited for our feast.

There were many nights when I noticed the eastern sky brightening as we made our way back to the dorm.

We were in that garage last time I saw Tom.

I got an email from him today and he was reminiscing about those heady days.

Here's to Tom and my long-lost Makaha ...

The South Campus Mix (put it in your Walkman Sport and run your headphone cord up through the back of your shirt)

1. Idol, "Blue Highways
2. Wall of Voodoo, "Lost Weekend"
3. Black Uhuru, "Darkness"
4. Furs, "Run and Run"
5. Killing Joke, "Let's All Go (To the Fire Dances)"
6. Steel Pulse, "Ravers" ... Woops outside your head
7. New Order, "Chosen Time"
8. The Specials, "It's Up to You"
9. The Police, "No Time this Time"
10. Birthday Party, "Zoo Music Girl"
11. Ronald Koal & The Trillionaires, "Destination Zero"
12. Adam & The Ants, "Antmusic" and "Killer in the Home"
13. Bunny Wailer, "Rootsman Skanking"
14. Third World, "1865 (96º In The Shade)"
15. English Beat, "Rotating Head"
16. INXS, "Old World New World"
17. The Cult, "Spirit Walker"
18. U2, "I Will Follow." "Out of Control," "Rejoice," and "Treasure"
19. Joy Division, "Disorder" and "Isolation"
20. Talking Heads, "Mind" and "What a Day That Was"
21. Bauhaus, "The Spy in the Cab" (still makes me laugh)
22. Clash, "Hitsville U.K.," "Police On My Back," "Sean Flynn," and "Ghetto Defendant"
23. Echo & The Bunnymen, "My Kingdom"

Don't forget to save a buck to get a gyro from Apollo's on the way back.

The Kinks, "Last of the Steam Powered Trains"

Too.

In silence between writer and reader a memory of words and hands takes form.

We learn substance and worth through others’ eyes.

Cloth, flesh, ink, skin, paper, dust.

These are but material forms in which ideas dwell.

In the roar of a crowded shelf of books, desert sun and Arctic night, distant seas of thought awaken, mingle, and are still.

Minds meet where the reading hand grasps the void and inks its passage in empty margins.

Lost, forgotten, thumbed, split.

We beat the scars of patient decades and centuries’ dreams.

Whose hands will next hold me, I do not know.

The book, too, reads its readers in real time.

Henry Wessells, from The Private Life of Books

Happy Birthday, Ian Anderson

Ian Anderson was born on this day in 1947.

"The Secret Language of Birds"...

Yes, "Wonderous Stories"

Certain.

Remember.

Remember, though: don't think about it, just do it. 

Don't pause and be philosophical, 

... because from a philosophical standpoint, it's dreary.

Philip K. Dick, from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Under a Blanket of Blue"

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Come Dance With Me"

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

... to prioritize victory over rather than coexistence with the communist threat.

Rare.

The best books look like they've been run over by a truck, but they have to been run over by the right truck.  As a general matter, rare is rare for a reason and it's not because everybody in the world wants it.  Usually the people who appreciate something rare in the realm of books are just as rare as the the things themselves, usually.

Beirut, "The Rip Tide"

So the waves and I 

Found the rolling tide ...

Yes, "Wonderous Stories"

Inventing.

Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly.

Jean Piaget

Happy Birthday, Izaak Walton

Huysmans, Walton, 1672

Oh the gallant Fisher's life,

It is the best of any,

'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,

And 'tis belov'd of many:

Other joyes

are but toyes,

only this

lawful is,

for our skill

breeds no ill,

but content and pleasure.

In a morning up we rise,

Ere Aurora's peeping,

Drink a cup to wash our eyes,

Leave the sluggard sleeping:

Then we go

to and fro,

with our knacks

at our backs,

to such streams

as the Thames,

if we have the leasure.

When we pleas to walk abroad

For our recreation,

In the fields is our abode,

Full of delectation.

Where in a brook

with a book,

or a Lake,

fish we take;

there we sit,

for a bit,

till we fish intangle.

Izaak Walton, born on this day in 1593

Live.

Borrell, Escaping the Critics, 1874

To live sincerely is to live your own life, not your father's life or your mother's life or your neighbor's life; to spend soul on large concerns, not to waste your life as a kind of human ant carrying around small burdens; and finally, to live sincerely is to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," as Thoreau declares in Walden.  

That may require unsociability.  Thoreau noticed that at a certain age boys remain in shadows and corners of rooms, look a little wild, make up their minds about a given grown up in a second, and may come to supper or not.  Thoreau values that unsociability in both boys and girls.  But those moments soon disappear, replaced by an old anxiety to please.

Robert Bly, from The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau

Mahler, Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Adagietto ...

Antidote.

Tyler VanderWeele from The Human Flourishing Program (hmmm) at the Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences of Harvard University (whew!) has an antidote to the echo chamber ...

In the past decades, there has been concern expressed over an increasing lack of intellectual or viewpoint diversity within academic settings. It is sometimes argued that our academic contexts are now too dominated by liberal or progressive perspectives, and thus that viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas have been stifled. For example, one recent paper tracked the liberal-to-conservative faculty ratio as changing from 2.3-to-1 in 1989 to 5-to-1 in 2017 to 7-to-1 today. Attention to these matters has been given in psychology, in law, and more generally, along with the potential implications. Claims have been made that conservatives are being discriminated against, that the environment has become too hostile, and that a culture of self-censorship has become dominant. There is, of course, a political dimension to these matters, but also an intellectual dimension. If we are not engaging with others with different perspectives, it can become easier to exist in our own echo chambers; it can be more difficult to understand others, to come up with new ideas, and to find common ground.

Of course, what to do, if anything, about these matters, is complex. Academic disciplines pride themselves on their rigorous disciplinary standards and on their autonomy. Proposals to “force” viewpoint diversity can sometimes seem to compromise academic standards and the autonomy of academic institutions. In a paper recently published by the Human Flourishing Program, I put forward proposals to attempt to strengthen engagement with a diverse range of views while also preserving the scholarly standards and the relative autonomy of disciplines and departments. For example, instructors might try to ensure coverage of the range of views present in society, but also critically describe the best reasons for, and against, those views. If many people in society hold one view, and many others do not, then the strongest arguments for and against the view should be provided. Students can likewise, in essay writing or in debates, be asked to attempt to provide the strongest arguments for the positions they do not hold, before proceeding with their own positions or potential refutations. The scholastic practice of disputation—illustrated in, for example, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae—required one to present the strongest arguments of the opposing view first, and such approaches could also be employed within classrooms today.

Ari Weinzweig continues with what he calls, "taking the long view"...

In a world being trained by social media to be increasingly fixated on immediate gratification, a renewed focus on the long term has the potential for significant positive impacts. Author Peter Schwartz, whose 1991 book, The Art of the Long View, had a huge influence on me when I read it shortly after it came out, says,

If you look at your life as a tiny, yet influential part of history, then you can begin to know who you really are, and you will start to know that what you do professionally and how you impact the lives of others has more meaning. … We make our decisions about the future based on our own mental maps about how the world works. And we are very much prisoners of those mental maps. … How do we challenge those mental maps that we see about how people behave, how organizations work and how institutions evolve?

Pärt, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten

Conductor Kent Nagano leads the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra

Published.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, published on this day in 1854

Happy Birthday, Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.

The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. The great danger today is of slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thought. We have to be able to resist individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is proven and what is not.

So we need pupils who are active; who learn early to find out by themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partly through material we set up for them, and who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them.

Jean Piaget, born on this day in 1896, from Eleanor Duckworth's "Piaget rediscoved"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Heady.

1981.

Sly & Robbie (It's often said that if you heard ten reggae songs, at least five of them would have Sly and Robbie on the record.)

The Wildcatetts weren't allowed do to a routine to this.

Grace, "Pull Up to the Bumper"...

Those were heady days.

Thanks, Shelli.

Don't.

Don’t immanentize the eschaton!

Happy Birthday, Charles Bulfinch

Bulfinch, Tontine Crescent, 1794

Charles Bulfinch was born on this day in 1763.

"Building Boston: The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch," a lecture presented by Joseph Cornish, architectural historian and director of Design Review of the Boston Landmarks Commission ...

Rachmaninoff, Symphony No. 2 in E-Minor, Op. 27

Eivind Gullberg Jensen conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra ...

Frank Sinatra, "She's Funny That Way"

Nice goin', dad ...

We were once a proper civilization.

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Baubles, Bangles And Beads"

More.

Put out more flags ...

Greta Van Fleet, "Play Your Games"

Learn.

THE WAKING

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, a good Saginaw boy

Knob.

First into the pan goes a generous knob of butter, followed by the chicken breasts and legs, a large onion cut into quarters, a dozen or so sliced champignons de Paris—those small, tightly capped white mushrooms—a couple of cloves of garlic en chemise, crushed but not peeled, and a bouquet garni of herbs. When the color of the chicken has turned to deep gold, a large glass of white wine is poured into the pan and allowed to reduce before half a liter of crème fraîche is added. The bird is cooked for thirty minutes, the sauce is strained through a fine sieve, the dish is seasoned to taste, and there you have it.

Peter Mayle, from French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew

Sir Ray, "Shangri-La"

Furs, "Run and Run"

 

Wondering.

When I look so far away

Please don't wake me from my daze

I'm just wondering who I could be

If I lived inside my dreams

Right.

When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time. Worrying never made a sailor.

Arthur Ransome, from Swallowdale

Learn.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.

Shunryū Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Steve has more.

We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.

Never.

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "You're The Top"

Sssssssssstones, "Monkey Man"

'Tis August and 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 this: The Ssssssssstones, "Monkey Man," featuring The Rooster Cam ...

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

Lie.

Pensive.

Firchau, Amsterdam, 2007

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,

Where China’s gayest art had dyed

The azure flowers that blow;

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima, reclined,

Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;

The fair round face, the snowy beard,

The velvet of her paws,

Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,

She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide

Two angel forms were seen to glide,

The genii of the stream;

Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue

Through richest purple to the view

Betrayed a golden gleam ...

Thomas Gray, from "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes"

Thanks, Buff.

Hand-Crafted.

St. George's Hall in Liverpool hides one of the finest Victorian floors in the world, over 30,000 hand-crafted Minton tiles, usually kept covered and only uncovered for a few weeks each year ...