"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

19 March 2024

Anywhere.

Daubigny, Spring Landscape, 1862


SPRING MORNING

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow-
Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Where am I going? The clouds sail by,
Little ones, baby ones, over the sky.
Where am I going? The shadows pass,
Little ones, baby ones, over the grass.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,
You'd sail on water as blue as air,
And you'd see me here in the fields and say:
"Doesn't the sky look green today?"

Where am I going? The high rooks call:
"It's awful fun to be born at all."
Where am I going? The ring-doves coo:
"We do have beautiful things to do."

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
"That's where I wanted to go today!"

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

A.A. Milne

Vanishing.

Sargent, Val d'Aosta (A Stream over Rocks), 1909 


THE NIGHT, THE PORCH

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing —
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Mark Strand

18 March 2024

Obligation.


We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

Right.

Decide.


The idea of a revolution in the workplace may, to cynics, sound overstated or maybe even wholly irrelevant, in a world where we all have a million things to do. I’d like to say the stakes are small. After all, what’s one more bit of philosophical framing or another “organizational recipe” in a company like Zingerman’s that already has an abundance of both? And yet, I have become convinced that dignity would make an enormous difference.

I am not alone in this belief. Twenty years ago, Wendell Berry published an essay entitled “Imagination in Place”:
We are destroying [our country] because of our failure to imagine it. … This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Dignity, learned from the courage of people in Ukraine resisting the Russian invasion, has given me a new way to “imagine it.” The idea of a revolution of dignity in the 21st-century workplace is my attempt to offer, and adopt, a different and much more positive path forward. The choice, as Berry says, is ours to make. In the Epilogue of the pamphlet, I share this quote from Anastasia, one of the protestors on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013-4, as shared in historian Marci Shore’s wonderful book, The Ukrainian Night: 
Everyone needs to decide… It’s necessary to believe and it’s necessary to act. Today it seems to me a time of responsibility for every person, every person concretely. Every person is responsible for our future. Every one. Every person needs to decide.
If we don’t make that decision, it seems clear that, as Wendell Berry has written, we will be destroying so much of what we have created and failing to fulfill what we could become. It is, after all, a dearth of dignity that leads to misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, malice, and maliciousness. Whenever dignity is absent, antipathy is sure to follow.

David Gilmour, "5 A.M."

17 March 2024

Happy Birthday, Gorham


Scott Gorham was born on this day in 1951.

Thin Lizzy, "Rosalie" ...

Happy Birthday, Oudry

Oudry, Still-Life with Hare, Duck, Wine, Bread,and Cheese (detail), 1742


Jean-Baptiste Oudry was born on this day in 1686.

Quality.


We are witnessing the leveling down of all ranks of society, and at the same time the birth of a new sense of nobility, which is binding together a circle of men from all former social classes. Nobility arises from and exists by sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of duty to oneself and society, by expecting due regard for itself as a matter of course; and it shows an equally natural regard for others, whether they are of higher or lower degree. We need, all along the line, to recover the lost sense of quality and a social order based on quality. Quality is the greatest enemy of any kind of mass-leveling. Socially it means the renunciation of all place-hunting, a break with the cult of the "star", an open eye both upwards and downwards, especially in the choice of one’s more intimate friends, and pleasure in private life as well as courage to enter public life. Culturally it means a return from the newspaper and the radio to the book, from feverish activity to unhurried leisure, from dispersion to concentration, from sensationalism to reflection, from virtuosity to art, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Letters from Prison

Rani.

Hania Rani in a live performance of music from her album, On Giacometti ...

Done.


Done and done.

Thanks, Walker's Arms.

16 March 2024

Echo & The Bunnymen, "My Kingdom"

Forty years ago ...


William Alfred Sergeant is, indeed, a god.

Abstractions.


“Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession,” wrote David Brooks not long ago, citing a study that found that more than half of writers at The New York Times attended one of the 29 most selective institutions in the country; “we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.”

The result is that contemporary journalists have a relationship to ideas that is more or less the opposite of the old school’s. It begins before they even get to campus. Students at elite colleges are drawn overwhelmingly from the upper classes, with roughly two-thirds coming from the top 20% of the income distribution. (Given the kinds of starting salaries that journalism pays, it’s fair to assume that those who go on to join the field skew even more heavily toward the higher end of the scale.) They grow up not only having little contact with ordinary people, but amidst the class of experts. Their parents—and their friends’ parents and their parents’ friends—are doctors, lawyers, bankers, executives, policy professionals, professors: people who work with abstractions and symbols, not things. They learn to see the world from the point of view of experts, to have faith in expertise, to speak its language and accept its values. Their epistemology is top-down: they start with ideas and come to tangibilities, to concrete facts, only later, through their lens.

Then comes college—and not just college, but the college of today. The college of Critical Theory and “studies” departments. This isn’t liberal arts school, either. You do not start with texts, with philosophy and literature and history, and see what they have to teach you. You start with theories and impose them on texts. You do not argue and debate; you write down what the teacher says. (If you ever do “debate,” you are careful to do so within the parameters laid down by Theory, by the ideology.) You do not think; you are handed a set of abstractions—patriarchy, intersectionality, late capitalism, and so forth—and let them do your thinking for you. Your institution’s goal is to teach you to be not a skeptic, an intellectual, but an activist.

High-Agency.


In our class, we often use the analogy of baby birds for passive approaches to exploration and discovery, the goal being to leave the reliance of the nest and become independent, intellectual raptors.

Changer.

 Execupundit on relationships ...

Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.

I can recall off-hand conversations from long ago that seriously affected my life and even my world view.

You never know, but that raised eyebrow, that quiet reassurance, that brief pat on the back may be another person's life changer.

Don't hide away. Get out among 'em.

There is a student in our school, Clementine, who stops by my classroom every single morning for a brief chat before heading upstairs to her homeroom.  We aren't in any classes together, but in the past I've had her siblings, Ruby, Olive, and Violet (no joke).  Clementine makes my day with her smiles, her corny jokes, and the fact that she usually brings a friend in tow, a student that, most likely, I'd never have gotten the chance to meet.  Some of Clementine's friends have begun Clementine's routine on their own, so now I'm meeting drama club kids, skater kids, kids who cook, new kids who don't speak a word of English, kids whose siblings are classroom legacies, kids who teach me dances, handshakes, and suggest good books I should read.

This year, walking the hallways is quite a different experience.  Kids rule!

(Oh! I've been told by these kids that saying "Good morning" to students I don't know is creepy and they won't respond [this happens].  Instead, they've taught me to say, "'Sup" [it works].  We often discuss what I call "reading the room"; they call it "matching energy." We're both learning.)

Thanks to Clementine and Mr. Wade.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...


Jerry Jeff Walker was born on this day in 1942.

"Contrary to Ordinary" with John Inmon in 1984 ...

Find.


There was something heavy in me.  I wasn’t doing the right thing. I was just trying to copy exactly everything I had learned. And I think that happens in every craft in life. You’re young. You have a master. You want to emulate them, do what they do. But at some point in life, you have to turn around and say I have to find my own way in my own language.

Francis Mallmann

Thanks to Steve for pointing me in this direction.

15 March 2024

Thin Lizzy, "For Those Who Love to Live"

Beyond.

O'Keeffe, Tent Door at Night, 1916


I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known. By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Indespensible.

Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1810


I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.

Caspar David Friedrich

It's sandwich time.

Beware.

Poynter, The Ides of March, 1883


[Music.]
SOOTHSAYER.
Caesar!

CAESAR.
Ha! Who calls?

CASCA.
Bid every noise be still.--Peace yet again!
[Music ceases.]

CAESAR.
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry "Caesar"! Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.

SOOTHSAYER.
Beware the Ides of March.

CAESAR.
What man is that?

BRUTUS.
A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March.

CAESAR.
Set him before me; let me see his face.

CASSIUS.
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.

CAESAR.
What say'st thou to me now? Speak once again.

SOOTHSAYER.
Beware the Ides of March.

CAESAR.
He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.

William Shakespeare, from Julius Caesar

Beware.


One must beware of the gaggle of amateur therapists who have recently come to life. Whether it’s your alcohol, cigarettes, or food, they are going to try to piss in it.

Jim Harrison

Beware.


We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.

Sir Winston Churchill

14 March 2024

Dexter Gordon, "Loose Walk (or Walk Loosely)"

Released.


Encomium was released on this day in 1995.

That summer I was playing this album in a bar I managed and an old, grizzled Ian Anderson-looking guy came up to me and said this is the greatest bar album ever.

G'on an' argue 'at, too.

STP, "Dancing Days" ...

Introduced.


The world was introduced to Def Leppard on this day in 1980 (one more album and then it was all over).

Side One, Track One ...


Resolved: Def Leppard, Cheap Trick, and Scorpions were ruined by MTV.

Happy Birthday, Murphey


Michael Martin Murphey was born on this day in 1945.

"Cosmic Cowboy" with some Lost Gonzo Boys ...


Hats matter.

This Mortal Coil, "Song to the Siren"

Beyond.


Music at its best is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us-beyond language, to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Rev. Dr. Cornel West

Happy Birthday, Einstein


Physicist Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879.  It is said that he had a sign in his office that read …
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Happy Birthday, Telemann

Preisler after Schneider, Georg Philipp Telemann, 1750


Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae said this of birthday-boy, Georg Philipp Telemann (1681)
Yet who is this ancient, who with flowering pen, full of holy fire, the wond’ring temple charms? Telemann, none but thou, celestial music’s sire.

Frans Brüggen plays the Fantasie No. 3 ...

13 March 2024

Schubert, Trio No. 2, Op. 100

Ambroise Aubrun, violin, Maëlle Vilbert, cello, Julien Hanck, piano, perform the Andante con moto ...

Learn.

Any.


Thanks, KJH.

Reward.


I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Virginia Woolf

Giant.


No holograms, no troupes of dancers, just a giant light-up trident descending from the ceiling.

12 March 2024

Denigrate.


Channeling Bob Newhart ...
I don't like rap music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like rap music, denigrate means "put down".

Possibilities.


In what may be the best-known study of the importance of self-control, psychologist Walter Mischel and colleagues found that hungry 3- to 5-year-olds who were able to distract themselves from a delectable treat beckoning them from a table right in front of them not only received a later reward, but performed better academically and socially in adulthood than the children who immediately stuffed their faces.

"Self-control" and "grit" are today's buzzwords in education. There's no question that they are important for learning and achievement. But educators underappreciate how much daydreams of a more enticing future can fuel grit by increasing our ability to inhibit more fleeting, momentary desires.

Turning attention away from the external world can also allow us to tap into our wellsprings of creativity. Many highly creative writers, artists, and scientists were major daydreamers as children. The long list of highly accomplished daydreamers includes Einstein, Newton, the Brontë family, W. H. Auden, and C. S. Lewis.

Some of the most creative ideas of all time leaped out of a daydream. A number of studies show that our best creative ideas don't emerge when we are focused intensely on a goal. Instead, they arise in those moments when our mind has wandered away from the task at hand to other worlds and possibilities. The Aha! moment typically arises when we make an unexpected connection between offline musings and a problem we've been working on.

Always keep a tin whistle or recorder nearby. 

Gift.


It's a gift to appreciate.

Thanks, again, Steve.  More logs for the sixth-grade fire.

Act.


All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.


Pictured: Jasper Hill Farm's Bayley Hazen Blue

11 March 2024

Supertramp, "From Now On"

Play hide and seek
Throughout the week

My life is full of romance ...


Beaming.

Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield, 1860


MARCH NOSEGAY
 
The bonny March morning is beaming
In mingled crimson and grey,
White clouds are streaking and creaming
The sky till the noon of the day;
The fir deal looks darker and greener,
And grass hills below look the same;
The air all about is serener,
The birds less familiar and tame.

Here's two or three flowers for my fair one,
Wood primroses and celandine too;
I oft look about for a rare one
To put in a posy for you.
The birds look so clean and so neat,
Though there's scarcely a leaf on the grove;
The sun shines about me so sweet,
I cannot help thinking of love.

So where the blue violets are peeping,
By the warm sunny sides of the woods,
And the primrose, 'neath early morn weeping,
Amid a large cluster of buds,
(The morning it was such a rare one,
So dewy, so sunny, and fair,)
I sought the wild flowers for my fair one,
To wreath in her glossy black hair.

John Clare

10 March 2024

Happy Birthday, Scholz


Tom Scholz was born on this day in 1947.

"Foreplay/Long Time" ...


Order an extra side of ranch for your chicken nachos.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Follow.

Richard Butler and Chris Frantz talk ...
BUTLER: Follow what you love. If you're a painter, look through the entire pantheon of art and look at the things that you love and affect you and then use those as a base to create your own stuff.  Originalities are very strange thing, it's a very Western concept, you know, it didn't apply in the Renaissance, it doesn't apply in Chinese, Japanese, ancient art.  You always built on the back of Masters and, though people these days claim that originality is the be all and end all, it really isn't because they're building on past Masters, too. So don't worry about originality.  If you follow your own direction and your own love, you will find an originality.

Remember.

Clausen, A Winter Morning in London, 1924 


WINTER MORNING

When I can no longer say thank you
for this new day and the waking into it,
for the cold scrape of the kitchen chair
and the ticking of the space heater glowing
orange as it warms the floor near my feet,
I know it’s because I’ve been fooled again
by the selfish, unruly man who lives in me
and believes he deserves only safety
and comfort. But if I pause as I do now,
and watch the streetlights outside flashing
off one by one like old men blinking their
cloudy eyes, if I listen to my tired neighbors
slamming car doors hard against the morning
and see the steaming coffee in their mugs
kissing chapped lips as they sip and
exhale each of their worries white into
the icy air around their faces—then I can
remember this one life is a gift each of us
was handed and told to open: Untie the bow
and tear off the paper, look inside
and be grateful for whatever you find
even if it is only the scent of a tangerine
that lingers on the fingers long after
you’ve finished peeling it.

James Crews

Remain.


Nature's Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d'hôte shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year's full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship. One gets unsettled, depressed, and inclined to be querulous. Why this craving for change? Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly? You don't know this hotel out of the season, and what fun we have among ourselves, we fellows who remain and see the whole interesting year out. All very true, no doubt, the others always reply; we quite envy you—and some other year perhaps—but just now we have engagements—and there's the bus at the door—our time is up! So they depart, with a smile and a nod, and we miss them, and feel resentful. The Rat was a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land, and, whoever went, he stayed; still, he could not help noticing what was in the air, and feeling some of its influence in his bones.

Kenneth Grahame, from The Wind in the Willows

Heard.


We are all wound up in lies and illusions and as soon as we begin to think and talk, the machinery of falsity operates automatically.  No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude

Synthesis.


There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention.  Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface.  Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world.  An acorn.  The geometry of a beehive.  The complexity of whale song.  The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize.  Of course it does.  The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills.  Not unless you do your part.  You must choose to meet her halfway.  And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real.  It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

Jarod K. Anderson

Thank you, Steve.  That's good.  The sixth-graders'll get a taste of this tomorrow.