Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Duplicity.

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars.  The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted.  These people attracted and promoted each other.  Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.  Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters." If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.  I guess I will see them there soon.

James Angleton, from a 1985 interview with Joseph Trento

Sonny Rollins, Rest in Peace

Sonny Rollins has passed.

"St. Thomas"...

Happy Birthday, Paul Weller

Paul Weller was born on this day in 1958.

"Wild Wood"...

Thank.

Amen.

Thanks, Kurt.

Individual.

Theodore Roosevelt's Memorial Day thoughts from 1902 ...

Remember always that the independence of a tribe or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to do with the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community ... Scant indeed is the gain to mankind from the "independence" of a blood-stained tyrant who rules over abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to humanity which follows the steady though slow introduction of the orderly liberty, the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is the only sure foundation upon which national independence can be built. 

Practice.

Further thoughts on Kurt's post ...

To teach kids the quiet arts of stillness, concentration, and awareness, we take time in class to practice these things.  We simply sit, letting the mind’s habitual flight settle. This practice is not an purposeless pause or avoidance of time-on-task, but an authentic training of the heart and mind.  By sitting still, even briefly, they learn to hold their attention steady instead of scattering it across screens, noise, and the attention of other students, to notice the actual sense of a moment—the slant of light through trees, the rhythm of breath, the first faint shape of an idea—rather than rehearsing what comes next or what others expect. It's important to have a space large enough for 25 kids to spread out (we use a 20-step rule). No devices, no journals, no books, just practice being still.  Quietly.  And it takes time and patience.

At first they're miserable.  Unfortunately, at times tears have been shed, but with time and practice, the point is learned.  I learn, too.  We all learn and what it takes to get the message across changes each year, especially with the older ones.

Concentration deepens not through strain but through gentle persistence. Short breaks like these eventually evolve into longer periods of contemplation and appreciation.  Soon the kids are asking for more and some even practice on their own, outside of school. 

From that steadier ground, awareness widens; they begin to inhabit their space and their thoughts more personally, free for a little while from the endless outward seeking of validation. I can tell right away that what they write afterward carries a different weight—less performance, more lived attention—and what they carry into the rest of the day begins to take shape in a quiet confidence that they can return, again and again, to this simple, portable act.

With dedicated, deliberate practice, kids are quick to learn and appreciate.  Adults take longer, most never get there.  "It takes too much time."  This is why kids never learn -- they aren't taught.

Just a few more sentences between classes

Jim Harrison, from "Sitting Around"...

Sitting on a stump I feel a little closer to the idea that I’m a member of just one of possibly thirty million species. Some people don’t like to count bugs because they are frequently obnoxious. A stump or log seems to help me assume. Zen as a glyph for the vehicle of reality, the water that just happens to be contained by a glass and a myriad of other containers. Mistakes are made when students are led to believe that the water pipes, the steel culverts, the plumbing are the river.

Stumps and logs help me forget the world of achievement, disappointment, rewards, the illusion of being right, struggling to hold the world together, and help me shed many of the illusions that the very notion of “personality” is heir to; there is a frequent mistake here in equating personality with “ego,” which is a Freudian term and unfortunately rather Prussian. The point seems to be to rid yourself of vanities in order to understand your true character. In sitting, the host returns to the original mind while the guest dithers. Then the dithering stops.

Memory.

President Reagan's Memorial Day remarks made during ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, May 31, 1982 ...

I have no illusions about what little I can add now to the silent testimony of those who gave their lives willingly for their country. Words are even more feeble on this Memorial Day, for the sight before us is that of a strong and good nation that stands in silence and remembers those who were loved and who, in return, loved their countrymen enough to die for them.

Yet, we must try to honor them -- not for their sake alone, but for our own. And if words cannot repay the debt we owe these men, surely with our actions we must strive to keep faith with them and with the vision that led them to battle and to final sacrifice.

Our first obligation to them and ourselves is plain enough: the United States and the freedom for which it stands, the freedom for which they died, must endure and prosper. Their lives remind us that freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden. And just as they whom we commemorate were willing to sacrifice, so too must we -- in a less final, less heroic way -- be willing to give of ourselves ...

The willingness of some to give their lives so that others might live never fails to evoke in us a sense of wonder and mystery. One gets that feeling here on this hallowed ground, and I have known that same poignant feeling as I looked out across the rows of white crosses and Stars of David in Europe, in the Philippines, and the military cemeteries here in our own land. Each one marks the resting place of an American hero and, in my lifetime, the heroes of World War I, the Doughboys, the GI's of World War II or Korea or Vietnam. They span several generations of young Americans, all different and yet all alike, like the markers above their resting places, all alike in a truly meaningful way.

Winston Churchill said of those he knew in World War II they seemed to be the only young men who could laugh and fight at the same time. A great general in that war called them our secret weapon, "just the best darn kids in the world." Each died for a cause he considered more important than his own life. Well, they didn't volunteer to die; they volunteered to defend values for which men have always been willing to die if need be, the values which make up what we call civilization. And how they must have wished, in all the ugliness that war brings, that no other generation of young men to follow would have to undergo that same experience.

As we honor their memory, let us pledge that their lives, their sacrifices, their valor shall be justified and remembered for as long as God gives life to this nation. And let us also pledge to do our utmost to carry out what must have been their wish: that no other generation of young men will ever have to share their experiences and repeat their sacrifice.

Whither leadership?

Kinky Friedman, "A Dog Named Freedom"

If you want to thank a veteran, be an American worth fighting for ...

Debussy, Les parfums de la nuit

Solungga Liu performs Charles T. Griffes' transcription ...

Steal.

Kurt points me to an article indicting public education's obstruction of learning ...

It is now preventing young people from acquiring the abilities they need to learn. He agrees with others who have looked into this problem that “attention must be curriculum.”

My buddy prefers brevity and I tend to be long-winded on such things, so here are some bullet points ...

• Schooling imparts the what and how of curriculum very well.  The why was never part of the plan. See Cornel West on the cultivation of the self.
• It's been my experience, as a student and a teacher, that students are told to think, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum ... seriously).  Students are told to study, but never taught the skills (it's not in the curriculum).  Students are told that reading is essential to success, but never taught the fundamental skills required to eagerly experience reading with joy and voracity. If it's not in the curriculum, the perception of importance vs. time will loose everytime to the tyranny of the teacher's planbook.
• The love learning -- thinking, writing, and reading -- therefore, must come independently from cultures, explorations, and discoveries outside of the classroom.  Stop expecting the flawed experiment of public education's ship to right itself. Henry Miller: "Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed."
• Sir Philip Pullman strongly criticizes education for turning reading into a chore. He warns that asking students to write rigid plot summaries, dissect texts for analytical tools, or find synonyms kills their natural love for reading. He argues that the true intention of literature should first be simply to delight, enchant, and console.  Critical analysis can and will naturally come later.
• The days of a school having well-resourced libraries are over. These sacred spaces have been eviscerated and transformed (in both spirit and purpose) into media centers. The library should be the most important room in a school. It should contain a broad, unexpected collection of books, where students are given time to freely browse and discover on their own. (And don't get me started on the wasteland "Book Fairs."  I can't remember the last time I saw a classic literature title offered at one.)

The attitude of the article's author reinforces what I regularly see and hear at school: "I’m forced to think about what it would look like for me to explicitly teach students how to do what they should already know how to do. And this is pretty much the equivalent of a factory worker ‘learning to code.’ I have no idea how to code, and I don’t want to learn to code. I resent the fact that I have to ‘adapt’ to the wreckage.”

Opinions must be earned.  Opponents of the status quo lose the right to criticize what they have no solution for.

THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life? 

Mary Oliver

Our middle school students (grade 6-8) get half an hour for lunch, no recess.  There is no transition time between classes, the single bell that signals the end of one class marks the beginning of the next, travel time between three floors isn't accounted for.  My point is, from 7:30 to 2:10 these kids are pedal to the metal, time-on-task, working.  

Grinding.  

With little choice or option for how their "precious time" is spent.

I preach an underground philosophy in my Creative Writing class that the students seem to understand and appreciate.  It needs to be carefully taught because it can be misunderstood as multi-tasking. We call it "stealing time," and I guess it's based on the concept of opportunity cost.  The philosophy promotes developing and applying habits like making the choice to carry and write in a journal, to simply stop working and just quietly sit still (and if slightly more daring, closing the eyes) or the ultimate defiance, keeping a book open in the lap, under the desk, taking that book and that journal everywhere you go.  This rebelliousness still lives, but done without tact, it'll get you a detention in our school. So that time needs to be stolen because its been taken away.  Research supports the necessary benefits of all these acts of defiance, but they're not in the curriculum, so they are punished. 

Live fully.  Steal time.

With apologies for my long-windedness.

Sting, "Straight to My Heart"

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.  When I look at the map today and the weakness of this country, that is what shocks me.

James Jesus Angleron, from "Report by James Angleton," 30, box 7, folder labeled "Intelligence--Report by James J. Angleton," Richard B. Cheney files, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

Porter Wagoner, "You Ca(i)n't Make a Heel Toe the Mark"

No relation ...

Hehehe.

Happy Birthday, Richard Wagner

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved.

Richard Wagner, born on this day in 1813, from "An End of a Musician in Paris"

Musicians from the Oslo Philharmonic perform "Siegfried Idyll"...

Transmit.

GENERATION to GENERATION

In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore, we do not neglect the ceremonies
of our passage: when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children. It is not
the place of some official to hand to them
their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge
and ideals, they will lose all of us that is
wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, from Wind, Sand and Stars

Well.

Toured our nation's capitol with the eighth-graders this week; "'Twas well."

 

Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Rockwell, Boy Reading an Adventure Story, 1923

I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul- filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is! Your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! Long ere I came to my teens I had traversed every sea and knew the Rockies like my own back garden. How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so escaped him! It was an everyday emergency to have to set the prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased horses, I had shot down rapids, I had strapped on my moccasins hindforemost to conceal my tracks, I had lain under water with a reed in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to the Indian braves whom I slew in single combats, I could have stocked a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it and I was always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. It was all more real than the reality. Since those days I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared with the first time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born on this day in 1859, from "Juvenilia"

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 ...