Wendell Berry, Rest in Peace

Wendell Berry has passed.

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Thanks, Ors.

Image.

Kurt's been Up North ...

Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.

Bruce Catton, from Waiting for the Morning Train

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

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

Voice.

Interesting people often write down their thoughts in a notebook. I am very attracted by this literary genre which is the diary, or even more prosaically scattered notes written from day to day. As if things were no longer related to each other, there are only almost surreal notations left. I feel very close to this writing style today; I now realize that things never stick together and that it is up to us to pick up the pieces of a reality that constantly eludes us. When I wrote my Dalva notebooks, I couldn't count on anything except on earth, the sun, the moon and the stars. That’s all I have. You can never count on a city. On the other hand, a tree or a river will never let you down. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg speaks of “this incredible street music”, I think that if you put aside your personality, you will be more receptive to this music. The most important thing I’ve done in seven years - my life is moving in cycles of seven years - is to have abandoned my personality. Only your voice counts and, if you manage to preserve it, you have a chance to escape the torments and lamentations of everyday life. As long as I keep my voice, I know that I will never be one of those lost guys who don't know what to do with their lives.

Jim Harrison

Happy Birthday, Jacques-Louis David

David, Self-Portrait, 1794

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

Jacques-Louis David, born on this day in 1748

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Fraser

Elizabeth Fraser was born on this day in 1958.

"Wax and Wane" with The Cocteau Twins ...

Now.

On this day in 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

An excerpt ...

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Hang.

'Tis the first full week of school and cocktail hour.  Summer, mercifully, is coming to a close.  The Oyster Months are just days away and, by God, 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: RUSH, "In the End/In the Mood"" ...

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

Happy Birthday, Alex Lifeson

Alex Lifeson was born on this day in 1953.

"Xanadu" ...

Will.

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

Aldous Huxley, from The Doors of Perception

... but it will.

Happy Birthday, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Schlesinger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1831

The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born on this day 1770

Glorious.

Sweet and nutty upfront.

Sharp, a light cheddar tang.

That glorious crunch of snowflaked amino acids.

An aroma of roasted nuts, sweet butter, and the grasses of its origin.

Rubbed with a distinctive exterior coating of black pepper, unsweetened cocoa powder.

This morning Luke told me the sad news: Vella is closing.

We once were a proper civilization.

Rich.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Jorges Luis Borges

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899

Special.

Octopus Thrower has a refreshing perspective from an athlete.  From high school to the pros, this is rare ...

“There’s so much about this club that makes it so special,” Seider said. “You get reminded every time you walk into that precious building playing in front of great fans that are dying for that sport. I think that’s what I’m most excited about coming back, is playing in front of the fans.  They’ve been with us from good and bad, and hopefully we can continue to do some good.”

They don't make 'em like Mo Seider anymore.

Solitude.

For Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking—a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree—is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and super-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old Earth that is pushing forth life of every sort under your very feet or spellbound in deathlike winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that—across the dinner table, in smoking-room armchairs; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow. Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday. But this emancipation is only attained in solitude, the solitude which the unseen companions demand before they will come out and talk to you; for, be he who he may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot between shafts.

Kenneth Grahame, "The Fellow that Goes Alone"

Schubert, Symphony No. 5, D. 485

Lorin Maazel conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of the Andante con moto ...

Happy, Birthday, William Ernest Henley

Dew-Smith, William Ernest Henley, 1893

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley, born on this day in 1849

Happy Birthday, Steve Cradock

Steve Cradock was born on this day in 1969.

Backing Weller on "Shadow of the Sun"...

Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury

You’ll find out it’s little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find. I know, you’re after the broad effect now, I suppose that’s fit and proper. But you got to look at grapes as well as watermelons. You greatly admire skeletons and I like fingerprints; well, and good. Right now such things are bothersome to you, and I wonder if it isn’t because you never learned to use them. If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life.

Ray Bradbury, born on this day in 1926, from Dandelion Wine

Happy Birthday, Claude Debussy

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees; it can recount the whole history of mankind.

Claude Debussy, born on this day in 1862 

Bianca Fiorito performs Syrinx, L. 129 ...

Happy Birthday, Joe Strummer

 When I started, they told me I only needed 3 chords and the truth. It turned out I could manage with two and some vague ideas.

Joe Strummer, born on this day in 1952

"Bhindi Bhagee" with The Mescaleros ...

Ray Charles, "Shake a Tail Feather"

Happy Birthday, Ogden Nash

Free from flashiness, free from trashiness

Is the essence of Ogdenashiness.

Rich, original, rash and rational,

Stands the monument Ogdenational.

Ogden Nash, born on this day in 1902

Happy Birthday, Antonio Salieri

Mähler, Portrait of Salieri, 1815

It must be fine and inspiring for a musician to have all his pupils gathered about him, to see how each strives to give of his best in honor of the master's jubilee, to hear in all their compositions the simple expressions of Nature, free from all that eccentricity which tends to govern most composers nowadays, and for which we are indebted -- almost wholly -- to one of our greatest German musicians [Beethoven]. That eccentricity confuses and confounds, without distinguishing between them, tragic and comic, sacred and profane, pleasant and unpleasant, heroic strains and mere noise; it engenders in people not love but madness; it rouses them to scornful laughter instead of lifting up their thoughts to God. To have banned these extravagances from the circle of his pupils, and to have kept them, instead, at the pure source of Nature must be the greatest satisfaction to a musician who, following in Gluck's steps, seeks his inspiration in Nature alone, despite the unnatural influences of the present day.

Franz Schubert on Antonio Salieri, who was born on this day in 1750

Capella Cracoviensis performs the maestro's Sinfonia Veneziana ...

Happy Birthday, Meriwether Lewis

Charles Wilson Peale, Meriwether Lewis, 1807

Meriwether Lewis was born on this date in 1774.

This day I completed my thirty-first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

Meriwether Lewis, 18 August 1805, Out There

Released.

Miles Davis released Kind of Blue on this day in 1959.

"So What"...

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Love For Sale"

Happy Birthday, Sib Hashian

Sib Hashian was born on this day in 1949.

With some familiar faces bangin' out "Dreams," from 1980 ...

Pleased.

 The HUNTING of the SNARK

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--

     Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!

Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,

     The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

     Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

     A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

     Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

     "They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

     But we've got our brave Captain to thank:

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--

     A perfect and absolute blank!"

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out

     That the Captain they trusted so well

Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,

     And that was to tingle his bell.

He was thoughtful and grave--but the orders he gave

     Were enough to bewilder a crew.

When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!"

     What on earth was the helmsman to do?

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:

     A thing, as the Bellman remarked,

That frequently happens in tropical climes,

     When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,

     And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,

Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,

     That the ship would not travel due West!

But the danger was past--they had landed at last,

     With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:

Yet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,

     Which consisted to chasms and crags.

Lewis Carroll

Too.

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Great-Heartedly.

Kepler, Nova Orbis Terrarum Delineatio (detail), 1627

MAP

Flat as the table

it’s placed on.

Nothing moves beneath it

and it seeks no outlet.

Above—my human breath

creates no stirring air

and leaves its total surface

undisturbed.

Its plains, valleys are always green,

uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,

while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue

beside the tattered shores.

Everything here is small, near, accessible.

I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,

stroke the poles without thick mittens,

I can with a single glance

encompass every desert

with the river lying just beside it.

A few trees stand for ancient forests,

you couldn’t lose your way among them.

In the east and west,

above and below the equator—

quiet like pins dropping,

and in every black pinprick

people keep on living.

Mass graves and sudden ruins

are out of the picture.

Nations’ borders are barely visible

as if they wavered—to be or not.

I like maps, because they lie.

Because they give no access to the vicious truth.

Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly

they spread before me a world

not of this world.

Wisława Szymborska

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "There's A Small Hotel"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

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

THE TUBES GROUP, "Don't Want to Wait Anymore"

But first, order an extra side of ranch so the rest of the night'll be groovy, alright? ...

Definition.

Inspiration.

Kurt's text this morning sent me wandering ...

Was this the inspiration for the dance moves in The Silence of the Lambs?

Released.

The Cars released their greatest album, Panorama, on this day in 1980 (fitting for the first week of school).

"Touch and Go" ...

KYUSS, "Green Machine"

I see pretty flowers at my feet

Cool breeze, clean air, hospitality

Pretty please, pretty please, pretty please

Get the hell away from me ...

Wranitzky, Symphony in D-Major, Op.52

John Keene conducts the Freemantle Chamber Orchestra ...

Because.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Gods.

Heyn & Matzen, Clear, Lakota, 1900

These were not Methodist Indians but warriors with a lineage that owed nothing to the white man. We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them. To pity these men is to pity the gods.

Jim Harrison, from The Road Home

My Great-Grandpa Firchau was sixteen years old when this photograph was made.

Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, BWV 565

The Black Dyke Band has a go ...

Ever.

Kramer, Summer Swells, n/d

No one wants to row who has ever sailed.

Arthur Ransome, from Swallows and Amazons

Happy Birthday, Sir Walter

Lawrence, Sir Walter Scott, 1826

In the wide pile, by others heeded not,

Hers was one sacred solitary spot,

Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves contain

For moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.

The library at Osbaldistone Hall was a gloomy room, whose antique oaken shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the seventeenth century, from which, under favour be it spoken, we have distilled matter for our quartos and octavos, and which, once more subjected to the alembic, may, should our sons be yet more frivolous than ourselves, be still farther reduced into duodecimos and pamphlets. The collection was chiefly of the classics, as well foreign as ancient history, and, above all, divinity. It was in wretched order. The priests, who in succession had acted as chaplains at the Hall, were, for many years, the only persons who entered its precincts, until Rashleigh's thirst for reading had led him to disturb the venerable spiders, who had muffled the fronts of the presses with their tapestry. His destination for the church rendered his conduct less absurd in his father's eyes, than if any of his other descendants had betrayed so strange a propensity, and Sir Hildebrand acquiesced in the library receiving some repairs, so as to fit it for a sitting-room. Still an air of dilapidation, as obvious as it was uncomfortable, pervaded the large apartment, and announced the neglect from which the knowledge which its walls contained had not been able to exempt it. The tattered tapestry, the worm-eaten shelves, the huge and clumsy, yet tottering, tables, desks, and chairs, the rusty grate, seldom gladdened by either sea-coal or faggots, intimated the contempt of the lords of Osbaldistone Hall for learning, and for the volumes which record its treasures.

“You think this place somewhat disconsolate, I suppose?” said Diana, as I glanced my eye round the forlorn apartment; “but to me it seems like a little paradise, for I call it my own, and fear no intrusion."

Sir Walter Scott, born on this day in 1771, from Rob Roy

Hang.

'Tis the last Thursday cocktail hour of Summer Break.  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 Kinks, "Around the Dial" ...

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

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately, these are no longer made.

It was a quiet early afternoon in the library, and we librarians were enjoying a rather raucous chat at the circulation desk.