Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Environment.

Chef Marco Pierre White's address at Oxford Union ...

The most important aspect of any restaurant is the environment we sit in, not what’s on the plate. When I go home, my favourite supper is a ham sandwich with pickled onion and a cup of tea. I’m that simple. But when it comes to having dinner, it’s about sitting with people I love.

Alone.

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.

Thomas Merton, from No Man Is an Island

Pictured: The day The Hammock Papers was initiated.

Happy Birthday, Erik Satie

What is furnishing music? A pleasure! Furnishing music replaces waltzes and operas.  Do not be mistaken, it is something else! No more false music but musical furniture! Furnishing music completes your belongings, it allows for everything; it is worth gold; it is new; it does not disturb habits; it is not tiring; it does not run out; it is not boring. To adopt it is to do better! Listen at ease!  Talk! Move around! Don’t listen!  I beg you not to listen!

Erik Satie, born on this day in 1866

Grisel Petruchelli performs the first Gnossienne on the bandoneón ...

Released.

DEVO released their best album, Freedom of Choice, on this day in 1980.

"Girl U Want"...

Basket.

On this day in 1996, at the 1:15 mark of double overtime in Game Seven of the Western Conference Semifinals, then St. Louis Blues forward Wayne Gretzky lost the handle in the neutral zone and, The Captain, Steve Yzerman, collected the loose puck, skated toward the blue line, and put the biscuit in the basket from sixty feet away ... 

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Notice.

Eric Church recently gave the commencement speech at the University of North Carolina ...

Six strings. Six strings of life and willingness to keep them in tune. Six principles. Six pillars. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord your life makes is full and resonant and true. All six will drift. Not one or two. All six in their own time, in their own season. 

Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a way only the people who love you most can complicate things.  You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out and your resilience will wear thin.  Your community will start to feel like an obligation and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are. 

This is not failure. This is not weakness. It's the inevitable universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn't stop to let us tune up. And the difference between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise is whether you stop and listen. Whether you're honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices, because you will notice. The part of you that knows what the chord should sound like will always notice.  It will not let you go. Life won't be right until it is tuned. Trust what your heart hears and is telling you about your song.

Thank you, Hayden. 

Arrival.

The arrival of Spring ...

Hang.

'Tis Spring 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, order an extra side of ranch for the chicken nachos and listen to Faces, "That's All You Need" ...

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, David Byrne

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way.  I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

David Byrne, born on this day in 1952

Invention.

Happy Birthday, George Braque

Braques, Violin and Candlestick, 1910

Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better. 

Georges Braque, born on this day in 1882

Happy Birthday, Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin was born on this day in 1888.

Men at Work, "Down By the Sea"

Professional.

I'm a home cook now, not a professional ...

One-Bite-Wonder.

Saveur has the one-bite-wonder ...

Transcontinental.

Russell, Joining of the Rails at Promontory Point, 1869

On this day in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.

From C-SPAN's American History TV, Stephen Ambrose on his book, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 ...

Peace.

My Mum instilled in me an appreciation for books and reading, art, music, and stillness.  She taught me how to cook.

She lived the importance of faith and patience, skills I still aspire to.

 

A mother is the truest friend we have. When trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Washington Irving

Today I'll raise a small glass ("not too much") of Johnny Walker Red, and toast her smile, her compassion, and her loving encouragement and patience.

Happy Mother's Day, Mum.

Flourish.

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, 1599

The Oxford Student makes a plea for poetry in the age of AI ...

You may ask: why poetry? Of all the creative forms, why ought one write a poem? While all forms of creativity are worthy instruments against such a challenge, poetry is particularly worth defending, as it is irreducibly and messily human. Its meaning is inseparable from its form. It is not reduced to its output. It must be lived. It does not exist only to persuade or entertain; it may do both or neither. It does not ask of its writer fine-arts expertise or an index of accolades. It does not even ask to be good, as Mary Oliver reminds us. While AI lives in the centre, the statistically probable, poetry lives on the edge and finds comfort in the uncertain and in what resists resolution. 

This is why I ask of you: write poetry. Be a poet, for anyone who writes a poem is a poet. Write badly. Write slowly. Write dirty. Sit in discomfort.  As poet Rainer Maria Rilke urges, we must “live the questions” rather than resolve them too quickly. Write for fun, not just for marks. Contradict yourself. It is quite fun; it is entirely awful; do it anyway. Reject convention and syntax? Break the line and glue it back together, never the same as before, always changed. Use an em-dash — mean it. Write from the margins, from which AI was never trained, and was never meant to see. Find the friction, make it your home too. It is within the mess and anarchy of poetry that innovation and creativity flourish. 

Anonymous, Kyrie

From The Old Hall Ladymass, performed by Trio Mediæval, accompanied by Catalina Vicens' organetto ...

Sneak.

Davis, Ethan Allen's Capture of Fort Ticonderoga, 1875

On this day in 1775, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys captured the British-held fortress at Ticonderoga, N.Y.

American Battlefield Trust has the details ...

During the American War for Independence, several engagements were fought at the five-pointed star-shaped Fort Ticonderoga. The most famous of these occurred on May 10, 1775, when Ethan Allen and his band of Green Mountain Boys, accompanied by Benedict Arnold, who held a commission from Massachusetts, silently rowed across Lake Champlain from present-day Vermont and stormed the fort in a swift, late-night sneak attack. 

Months later, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, sent one of his officers, Colonel Henry Knox, to gather the artillery left at Ticonderoga and bring it to Boston. Knox organized the transfer of the heavy guns over frozen rivers and the snow-covered Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Mounted on Dorchester Heights, the guns from Ticonderoga compelled the British to evacuate the city of Boston in March of 1776. 

The Ticonderoga episode of The Revolutionary War in Four Minutes ...

"No Quarter!", a 250th anniversary vignette of the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga ...

Preservation Hall Jazz Band, "Shake It and Break It"

Lead.

Lead, follow, ...

... or get out of the way.

Ted Turner

Jerry Jeff Walker, "Stoney"

Merciful Father, if we send you Chris Stapleton, Shooter Jennings, and Tyler Childers, can we have Scamp back?

Ol' Stoney was a liar, a bullshitter, ain't no doubt about it.

It was just the way he told things made you never want to doubt him

'Cause he kept you going when the road got rough

Brought you through the lean times by making it up ...

It's sandwich time.

Common.

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they," the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. 

Friedrich A. Hayek, from The Road to Serfdom

If.

If you're a human being, you won't get the jokes ...

Gary Snyder, Things to Do Around a Lookout

 ... Wrap up in a blanket in cold weather and just read. 

Happy Birthday, J.M. Barrie

How comely a thing is affliction borne cheerfully, which is not beyond the reach of the humblest of us. What is beauty? It is these hard-bitten men singing courage to you from their tent; it is the waves of their island home crooning of their deeds to you who are to follow them. Sometimes beauty boils over and them spirits are abroad. Ages may pass as we look or listen, for time is annihilated. There is a very old legend told to me by Nansen the explorer--I like well to be in the company of explorers--the legend of a monk who had wandered into the fields and a lark began to sing. He had never heard a lark before, and he stood there entranced until the bird and its song had become part of the heavens. Then he went back to the monastery and found there a doorkeeper whom he did not know and who did not know him. Other monks came, and they were all strangers to him. He told them he was Father Anselm, but that was no help. Finally they looked through the books of the monastery, and these revealed that there had been a Father Anselm there a hundred or more years before. Time had been blotted out while he listened to the lark.

That, I suppose, was a case of beauty boiling over, or a soul boiling over; perhaps the same thing. Then spirits walk.

J.M. Barrie, born on this day in 1860, from "Courage," the rectorial address delivered at St. Andrew's University, May 3, 1922.

Together.

FOR the CHILDREN

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

    stay together
        learn the flowers
                go light

Gary Snyder

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Gary Snyder

ON TOP

All this new stuff goes on top

turn it over, turn it over

wait and water down

from the dark bottom

turn it inside out

let it spread through

Sift down even.

Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.

Gary Snyder, born on this day in 1930

Happy Birthday, Johannes Brahms

Study Bach, there you will find everything.

Johannes Brahms, born on this day in 1833

Nikolaus Harnoncourt conductsVienna Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a performance of the maestro's grand and glorious, Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45.  

My introduction to Brahms came by way of this piece being played at a firepit in Naperville in August of 1989.  It stuck.  Thanks, Gayle.  Thank you, Annie.

Heady days.

Ted Turner, Rest in Peace

Ted Turner has passed.

Fair winds and following seas, skip.

Uselessness.

The Compton Oak ...

We shall never fully understand nature or ourselves, and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

John Fowles, from The Tree

Put usefulness first, and you lose it. Put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is.  The carpenter scorns the massive, crooked oak: Its trunk is so distorted, no one can get a straight plank out of it.  It’s not a timber tree—there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old.  A crooked tree lives its years in peace; a straight one is the first to be cut down.

Chuang Tzu, from Zhuangzi

Capacity.

People predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins.  People to whom Nature has denied the capacity for such enjoyment, on the other hand, have long faces, noses, and eyes; no matter what their height, they seem to have a general air of elongation about them. They have flat dark hair, and above all lack healthy weight; it is undoubtedly they who invented trousers, to hide their thin shanks.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, from The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy by Brillat-Savarin

Something.

Away he ran, and for a moment he left the wind behind; but the wind blew a little faster, and overtook him, and they raced along together, like two wild things, till Bevis began to pant. Then down he sat on the turf and kicked up his heels and shouted, and the wind fanned his cheek and cooled him, and kissed his lips and stroked his hair, and caressed him and played with him, till up he jumped again and danced along, the wind always pushing him gently.

"You are a jolly old Wind," said Bevis, "I like you very much; but you must tell me a story, else we shall quarrel. I'm sure we shall."

"I will try," said the wind; "but I have forgotten all my stories, because the people never come to listen to me now."

"Why don't they come?" said Bevis.

"They are too busy," said the wind, sighing; "they are so very, very busy, just like you were with Kapchack and his treasure and the war, and all the rest of the business; they have so much to do, they have quite forsaken me."

"I will come to you," said Bevis; "do not be sorry. I will come and play with you."

"Yes, do," said the wind; "and drink me, dear, as much as ever you can. I shall make you strong. Now drink me."

Bevis stood still and drew in a long, long breath, drinking the wind till his chest was full and his heart beat quicker. Then he jumped and danced and shouted.

"There," said the wind, "see, how jolly I have made you. It was I who made you dance and sing, and run along the hill just now. Come up here, my darling Sir Bevis, and drink me as often as ever you can, and the more you drink of me the happier you will be, and the longer you will live. And people will look at you and say: 'How jolly he looks! Is he not nice? I wish I was like him.' And presently they will say: 'Where does he learn all these things?'

"For you must know, Bevis, my dear, that although I have forgotten my stories, yet they are all still there in my mind, and by-and-by, if you keep on drinking me I shall tell you all of them, and nobody will know how you learn it all. For I know more than the brook, because, you see, I travel about everywhere: and I know more than the trees; indeed, all they know I taught them myself. The sun is always telling me everything, and the stars whisper to me at night: the ocean roars at me: the earth whispers to me: just you lie down, Bevis love, upon the ground and listen."

So Bevis lay down on the grass, and heard the wind whispering in the tufts and bunches, and the earth under him answered, and asked the wind to stay and talk. But the wind said: "I have got Bevis to-day: come on, Bevis," and Bevis stood up and walked along.

"Besides all these things," said the wind, "I can remember everything that ever was. There never was anything that I cannot remember, and my mind is so clear that if you will but come up here and drink me, you will understand everything."

"Well then," said Bevis, "I will drink you—there, I have just had such a lot of you: now tell me this instant why the sun is up there, and is he very hot if you touch him, and which way does he go when he sinks beyond the wood, and who lives up there, and are they nice people, and who painted the sky?"

The wind laughed aloud, and said: "Bevis, my darling, you have not drunk half enough of me yet, else you would never ask such silly questions as that. Why, those are like the silly questions the people ask who live in the houses of the cities, and never feel me or taste me, or speak to me. And I have seen them looking through long tubes——"

"I know," said Bevis; "they are telescopes, and you look at the sun and the stars, and they tell you all about them."

"Pooh!" said the wind, "don't you believe such stuff and rubbish, my pet. How can they know anything about the sun who are never out in the sunshine, and never come up on the hills, or go into the wood? How can they know anything about the stars who never stopped on the hills, or on the sea all night? How can they know anything of such things who are shut up in houses, dear, where I cannot come in?

"Bevis, my love, if you want to know all about the sun, and the stars, and everything, make haste and come to me, and I will tell you, dear. In the morning, dear, get up as quick as you can, and drink me as I come down from the hill. In the day go up on the hill, dear, and drink me again, and stay there if you can till the stars shine out, and drink still more of me.

"And by-and-by you will understand all about the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the earth which is so beautiful, Bevis. It is so beautiful, you can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Do not listen, dear, not for one moment, to the stuff and rubbish they tell you down there in the houses where they will not let me come. If they say the earth is not beautiful, tell them they do not speak the truth. But it is not their fault, for they have never seen it, and as they have never drank me their eyes are closed, and their ears shut up tight. But every evening, dear, before you get into bed, do you go to your window—the same as you did the evening the owl went by—and lift the curtain and look up at the sky, and I shall be somewhere about, or else I shall be quiet in order that there may be no clouds, so that you may see the stars. In the morning, as I said before, rush out and drink me up.

"The more you drink of me, the more you will want, and the more I shall love you. Come up to me upon the hills, and your heart will never be heavy, but your eyes will be bright, and your step quick, and you will sing and shout——"

"So I will," said Bevis, "I will shout. Holloa!" and he ran up on to the top of the little round hill, to which they had now returned, and danced about on it as wild as could be.

"Dance away, dear," said the wind, much delighted. "Everybody dances who drinks me. The man in the hill there——"

"What man?" said Bevis, "and how did he get in the hill? just tell him I want to speak to him."

"Darling," said the wind, very quiet and softly, "he is dead, and he is in the little hill you are standing on, under your feet. At least, he was there once, but there is nothing of him there now. Still it is his place, and as he loved me, and I loved him, I come very often and sing here."

"When did he die?" said Bevis. "Did I ever see him?"

"He died about a minute ago, dear; just before you came up the hill. If you were to ask the people who live in the houses, where they will not let me in (they carefully shut out the sun too), they would tell you he died thousands of years ago; but they are foolish, very foolish. It was hardly so long ago as yesterday. Did not the brook tell you all about that?

"Now this man, and all his people, used to love me and drink me, as much as ever they could all day long and a great part of the night, and when they died they still wanted to be with me, and so they were all buried on the tops of the hills, and you will find these curious little mounds everywhere on the ridges, dear, where I blow along. There I come to them still, and sing through the long dry grass, and rush over the turf, and I bring the scent of the clover from the plain, and the bees come humming along upon me. The sun comes too, and the rain. But I am here most; the sun only shines by day, and the rain only comes now and then.

"But I am always here, day and night, winter and summer. Drink me as much as you will, you cannot drink me away; there is always just as much of me left. As I told you, the people who were buried in these little mounds used to drink me, and oh! how they raced along the turf, dear; there is nobody can run so fast now; and they leaped and danced, and sang and shouted. I loved them as I love you, my darling; there, sit down and rest on the thyme, dear, and I will stroke your hair and sing to you."

So Bevis sat down on the thyme, and the wind began to sing, so low and sweet and so strange an old song, that he closed his eyes and leaned on his arm on the turf. There were no words to the song, but Bevis understood it all, and it made him feel so happy. The great sun smiled upon him, the great earth bore him in her arms gently, the wind caressed him, singing all the while. Now Bevis knew what the wind meant; he felt with his soul out to the far-distant sun just as easily as he could feel with his hand to the bunch of grass beside him; he felt with his soul down through into the earth just as easily as he could touch the sward with his fingers. Something seemed to come to him out of the sunshine and the grass.

Richard Jefferies, from Wood Magic: A Fable

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Luther, Christ lag in Todtesbanden

Paula Bär Giese, soprano, and Hein Hof, organ, perform ...

Persistent.

Traditions tell us that the free and solitary self writes in order to overcome mortality. I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuous but persistent, is for some version of survival.

Harold Bloom, from The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Released.

New Order released Power, Corruption, and Lies on this day in 1983.

"Your Silent Face"...

Ray Bradbury, "If Only We Had Taller Been"

Short man, large dream, I send my rockets forth between my ears,

Hoping an inch of good is worth a pound of years ...

Whitman.

It's all Whitman ...

Questioning.

Ari Weinzweig on questioning questions ...

It comes as no coincidence that the most creative people—the people I’ve learned the most from over the years—are those who are themselves asking better questions. One of them is On Being’s Krista Tippett, who has been doing this for decades now on her award-winning podcast, and who offers some great insights into the power and significance of asking better questions:

I also find a question to be a mighty form of words, and I have learned a few things about questions. I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness—that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all experienced it. It’s very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. It’s almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true: it’s hard to resist a generous question. This is a skill that needs relearning.

Graupner, Overture in G-Major, GWV 460

The Musical Garden performs the Chaconne ...

Openings.

Freedom, in a poem, must mean freedom of meaning, the freedom to have a meaning of one’s own.  The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior texts as openings for its own totalizing and unique interpretations.

Harold Bloom, from Poetry and Repression

Ever-Continuous.

Sargent, Villa Torina Fountain, 1907

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind without ceasing a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight, and everything that is to be seen, the power of selection will follow. Be continually making mental notes, make them again and again, test what you remember by sketches until you have got them fixed. Do not be backward at using every device and making every experiment that ingenuity can devise, in order to attain that sense of completeness which nature so beautifully provides, always bearing in mind the limitations of the materials in which you work.

John Singer Sargent, from a letter to J.B. Manson in 1901

Argument.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey