Mind.

And what about your mind

Your insipid record collection

President.

Ceaseless.

I am the bird that hears the worm,

or, my cousin said, the pulse of a wound

that probes to the opposite side.

I have abandoned alcohol, cocaine,

the news, and outdoor prayer

as support systems.

How can you make a case for yourself

before an ocean of trees, or standing

waist-deep in the river? Or sitting

on the logjam with a pistol?

I reject oneness with bears.

She has two cubs and thinks she

owns the swamp I thought I bought.

I shoot once in the air to tell her

it's my turn at the logjam

for an hour's thought about nothing.

Perhaps that is oneness with bears.

I've decided to make up my mind

about nothing, to assume the water mask,

to finish my life disguised as a creek,

an eddy, joining at night the full,

sweet flow, to absorb the sky,

to swallow the heat and cold, the moon

and the stars, to swallow myself

in ceaseless flow.

Jim Harrison

Enlightened.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. 

Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Telemann, Fantasia No. 2 in A Minor, TWV 40

Pavlo Titiaiev performs the Allegro ...

Friendship.

All That is Sacred made me think of the friendship of the clan's deepest thinkers and greatest artists, Harrison and Chatham.

Jim Harrison: Entre Chien et Loup (Chatham enters at 42:25) ...

I did thirty-three cloves of garlic in a rigatoni because I've got a cold.

Sacred.

 All That is Sacred has been released ...

Now-Discovered.

DOING IS BEING

Doing is being.

To have done's not enough;

To stuff yourself with doing—that's the game.

To name yourself each hour by what's done,

To tabulate your time at sunset's gun

And find yourself in acts

You could not know before the facts

You wooed from secret self, which much needs wooing,

So doing brings it out,

Kills doubt by simply jumping, rushing, running

Forth to be

The now-discovered me.

To not do is to die,

Or lie about and lie about the things

You just might do some day.

Away with that!

Tomorrow empty stays

If no man plays it into being

With his motioned way of seeing.

Let your body lead your mind—

Blood the guide dog to the blind;

So then practice and rehearse

To find heart-soul's universe,

Knowing that by moving/seeing

Proves for all time: Doing's being!

Ray Bradbury

Bozza, Scherzo

The Camargo Guarnieri Woodwind Quintet performs ...

Controlled.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do. That is why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest, the greatest and the most spectacular.  I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work. Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.

Donald J. Trump, from Trump: The Art of the Deal

Moggs Motel, "Apple Pie"

I see a million stars while lying on my bed

Oh, it’s etched in anaglypta and it swirls around around my head

I see Marco Polo on the Silk Road trail

And the cursed Captain Ahab now he's fishing for a whale ...

Cared.

We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.

William F. Buckley Jr., from Happy Days Were Here Again

Perseverance.

"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."

C.S. Lewis, from Perelandra

I'm grateful to Kurt for stoking my rage.  The Founding Fathers, our ancestors, and our children are watching.  

I loathe a son-of-a-bitch who disrespects The Flag, its procession through history, its glorious wave a grand symbol of valor, purity, and perseverance.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

Rebecca Solnit, from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Thank you, Jess.

Happy Birthday, Eakins

Eakins, Mending the Net, 1881

A teacher can do very little for a pupil and should only be thankful not to hinder him.  The greater the master, mostly the less he can say.

Thomas Eakins, born on this day in 1844

Cruttwell-Reade, Three Etudes for Piano and Flower Pots

Potist Tim Williams performs with Benjamin Powell ...

Happy Birthday, Knox

Stuart, Henry Knox, 1806

They start as from a dream, and ask what has been the Cause of our delusion? What is to afford us security against the violence of lawless men? Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property. We imagined that the mildness of our government and the virtue of the people were so correspondent, that we were not as other nations requiring brutal force to support the laws—But we find that we are men, actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him ...

Henry Knox, born on this day in 1750, from a letter to George Washington, October 23, 1786

Released.

 AC⚡DC released Back in Black on this day in 1980.

"Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" 

Rock and roll ain't no riddle, man ...

 Good morning.

I'm.

Thanks, Kurt.

Absorbing.

We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to so train the minds of the new generation as to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own day.

Barry Goldwater, from The Conscience of the Conservative

I'm.

Thanks, Kurt.

Be.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations

Spohr, Six German Songs for Soprano, Clarinet, and Piano, Op. 103

Charlotte Wajnberg (no offense) and some other people perform ...

 Earth lay before me in a spring dream

 Suffused with warmth and light,

 And drunk with joy I wafted through space,

 Blossoms burst forth from my breast;

 Love's springtime awakened in me.

 Now frost shudders through me; in my soul it is night.

 Be still, my heart, and give it no thought:

 This now is reality, the rest was delusion.

 

 Out of sunshine and flowers I built myself

 A bridge through life

 Passing over which, laurel-crowned,

 I devoted myself to the noblest of strivings.

 Man's gratitude was my finest reward;

 The crowd laughs aloud now with impudent scorn.

 Be still, my heart, and give it no thought:

 This now is reality, the rest was delusion.

Good morning.

Beyond.

The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled The True Believer. Hoffer's theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong.

John D. MacDonald, from Reading for Survival

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.

Andrew Graham-Dixon, from Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane

Crowning.

Raphael, The School of Athens, 1511

A few years ago, I took flack at school for emailing this article ...

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Nothing's changed. I know colleagues who tell me they hate reading.

Simple.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Ronald Reagan, from his speech, "A Time for Choosing"

Already.

Students, voters, bloggers ... You don't need a wise man on a hill to tell you what you already know.

Thanks, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, MacDonald

There are a lot of them running loose these days, I thought, fattening themselves on the sick business of whipping up such fear and confusion that they turn decent men against their decent neighbors in this sad game of think-alike.

John D. MacDonald, born on this day in 1916, from A Deadly Shade of Gold

Eat.

Peter Ackroyd on his written procession of mystics and evangelists, heretics and headbangers ...

On the wall beside his desk are portraits of some of his other subjects: John Milton, Oscar Wilde (in whose voice he wrote a novel), the Elizabethan occultist John Dee. “You develop an affinity and eventually a sort of companionship, when you get to know them well enough,” he says. “Of course, that’s an illusion. But it’s something which spurs you forward.”

He says there is a fleeting quality to these friendly obsessions that puzzles him, though he doesn’t interrogate it too closely. “Most writers, I presume,” he says, “keep a sort of a memory of events and details of people’s lives when they write a biography. But in my case, it just completely vanishes once the book is done.”

He wouldn’t be much use in a pub quiz?

“It would be embarrassing. The things I wouldn’t be able to remember about Dickens, say [subject of a 1,000-page plus Ackroyd bestseller]. I can now hardly remember who he was married to or the names of any of his children or the order the books came in.”

He likens his methods to “a form of intellectual bulimia: you eat a great deal of knowledge. And you sick it up. And then you start again.”

Confidence.

Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1603

If one really has confidence in oneself, one doesn’t feel the need to boast. It’s because one’s feeling of inferiority is strong that one boasts. One feels the need to flaunt one’s superiority all the more. There’s the fear that if one doesn’t do that, not a single person will accept one “the way I am.” 

Ichiro Kishimi, from The Courage to Be Disliked

Seek.

MIDSUMMER

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,

the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes

and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer

and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones

leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.

The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,

marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,

buildings in cities far away.

On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,

but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.

The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off

but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,

sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,

but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.

But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,

fate would be a different fate.

At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.

After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,

then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet

and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,

we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.

And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.

The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,

worrying about the ones who weren’t there.

And then finally walk home through the fields,

because there was always work the next day.

And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,

eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.

And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.

One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.

The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.

And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.

Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.

And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,

wanting the heat to break.

Then the heat broke, the night was clear.

And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.

And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down,

practicing all those things you were learning in the water.

And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,

there was no substitute for that person.

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.

And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:

You will leave the village where you were born

and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,

but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though

you can’t say what it was,

and eventually you will return to seek it.

Louise Glück

R.E.M., "Nightswimming" ...

Introduced.

The world was introduced to Elvis Costello on this day in 1977.

"Mystery Dance"...

Something.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley

Culture.

Don't bother with churches, government buildings, or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.

Ernest Hemingway

Revenge.

Squibs interview Morrissey and Marr ...

...[T]hey really have to treat their pupils with maximum care because, who knows, in the future, all the pupils of the world could sign to record companies and get their revolting revenge.

Happy Birthday, Davies

Rick Davies was born on this day in 1944.

"From Now On" ...

Invention.

The natural history and application of the Gin and Tonic ...

From The National Library of Medicine National Center for Biotechnology Information, "The history of Gin and Tonic; the infectious disease specialist long drink. When gin and tonic was not ordered but prescribed"...

ABSTRACT

Winston Churchill statement promoting Gin and Tonic as a life saver during British Empire extension hides many truths. As a matter of fact, the modern cocktail is thought to be born in India where it was widely distributed by Royal Navy for its anti-malarial properties. The aim of the present work is to review and unveil the history of Gin and Tonic through the centuries. As a matter of facts, primitive Gin and Tonic protective effects were well understood by physicians far before the advent of the “germ theory” and its fortunate invention is one of the most fascinating approaches in the history of preventive medicine. Indeed, quinine, a compound with protective effects on the replicative cycle of Plasmodium spp was discovered in 18th Century and since 19th it become the main compound of tonic beverages such as Schweppe’s ones. Interestingly, it was administered to British expatriates’ seamen and soldiers in order to prevent febrile paroxysms. Soon after, British military doctors demonstrated that the addition of lime or lemon peels to tonics was effective in preventing scurvy. While, addition of alcoholic beverages and gin contributed to make more enjoyable the bitter and unpleasant taste of this beverages.

RESULTS

The spectacular voyage of Gin and Tonic teaches us that a popular recreational drink of our Century was a powerful prophylaxis which certainly helped British colonial expansion.

Saveur has "The Miracle Cure".

Sipsmith on the fours eras of the G & T (beware of letting "your creativity" spoil greatness [for those who don't habla, stop it with the cucumbers and rosemary]).

Have you ever heard of genever?

A note from the Editor ... There are three gins: Tanqueray, Plymouth Navy Strength, and Heminway's favorite, Gordon's (I know what you're thinking, but it doesn't matter.  He was a professional).  One tonic, and one tonic only, please: Schweppe's.

Thanks, Mum.

Responsible.

Holbein, the Younger, Martin Luther, undated

You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.

Martin Luther

Art.

NOTES on the SACRED ART of LOG SITTING

Approach the log cautiously with proper reverence as if you were entering a French cathedral or the bedroom of your lover.

If it’s over 60 degrees, inspect the lower sides of the log for Mohave rattlesnakes.

Now examine the log closely for the most comfortable place to sit, usually away from the sun.

Sit down.

Empty your mind of everything except what is in front of you—the natural landscape of the canyon.

Dismiss or allow to slide away any aspect of your grand or pathetic life.

Breathe softly. Avoid a doze.

Internalize what you see in the canyon: the oaks and mesquites, the rumpled and grassy earth, hawks flying by, a few songbirds.

Stay put for forty-five minutes to an hour. When you get up bow nine times to the log. Three logs a day is generally my maximum.

Jim Harrison

Happy Birthday, Lazarus

Johnson and Kurtz, Emma Lazaraus, 1889

The NEW COLOSSUS

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus, born on this day in 

Cupola.

Cupola Bar, Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island Michigan

35 Day Dry-Aged Wagyu Beef Tartare, Pickled Quail Egg, Smoked Aioli, Crispy Shallot, Garlic Crostini

Unless.

SONNET

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

and after this one just a dozen

to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,

then only ten more left like rows of beans.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here wile we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,

take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Billy Collins

"Iambic bongos."

Márquez, Danzón No. 2

Gustavo Dudamel, leads the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra ...

Released.

R.E.O. Speedwagon released Nine Lives on this day in 1979.

"Only the Strong Survive" ...

Go.

GO PANTHER-PAWED WHERE ALL THE MINED TRUTHS SLEEP

Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;

Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep

To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth

So in your wake a weltering of wealth

Springs up unseen, ignored, and left behind

As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.

On your return along the jungle path you've made

Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed;

The small truths and the large have surfaced there

Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware

Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined

In easy game of pace and pounce and find;

But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce.

Attention must be paid, but by the ounce.

Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile

And metaphors like cats behind your smile

Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride,

Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside,

Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake

Turned anteloping elephants that shake

And drum and crack the mind to awe,

To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.

Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty's mole,

Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.

This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,

Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths

sleep.

Ray Bradbury

Feeling.

Watching trout ...

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy, from The Road

Hemingway from "Big Two-Hearted River"

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current. 

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory.  As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current. 

Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. 

Prepare.

Ray Bradbury on feeding and keeping a muse (beginning on page 38)...

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange—we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in. The Muse, to belabor the point then, is there, a fantastic storehouse, our complete being. All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth. And yet we know it is not as easy as that. We know how fragile is the pattern woven by our fathers or uncles or friends, who can have their moment destroyed by a wrong word, a slammed door, or a passing fire-wagon. So, too, embarrassment, self-consciousness, remembered criticisms, can stifle the average person so that less and less in his lifetime can he open himself out. 

Let's say that each of us has fed himself on life, first, and later, on books and magazines. The difference is that one set of events happened to us, and the other was forced feeding. 

If we are going to diet our subconscious, how prepare the menu?

Well, we might start our list like this ...

Couperin, Les Barricades Mystérieuse

Paul Cho does it all ...

Muses.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy.  Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.

Edgar Degas