Bodacious cowboys
Such as your friend
Will never be welcome here
31 July 2022
Ceremony.
Under what circumstances do we eat -- that is, what, if any ceremony prevails? Is it sitting or standing, walking down the street, in the car while driving? While watching television? At a meal with others, and if so, is it stressful or enjoyable? Is there a meal prayer? The saying of grace? Do we offer thanks, gratitude, blessings? Or is eating merely an opportunity to fill up the tank as quickly as possible so as to get on with the day? Or perhaps it's an opportunity for numbing, dispelling the gnawing inside? Ceremony or ritual can structure our awareness to be awake and aware, to be alert, knowing that without our conscious focus, we could find ourselves prone to disorder, to being swept away. Having ceremony can mean having a place at the table, and feeling welcome there can be an immense gift.
Lacking any formal or traditional ceremony, we often generate our own unconscious habits, such as eating while driving or in front of the television. And often these habits fall short of providing the well being that the greater structure of more traditional ceremony provides. Our default behavior gets us through without necessarily nourishing the body, mind, and spirit. What's nourishing about ceremony is not just the food, but our kind, caring, respectful awareness attuned to the activities that give life to life.
Thirty years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that "even canned corn stumps modern cooks." The article described how one company took the directions off their canned corn but then got so many complaints that they put the directions back: "Put the corn in a saucepan on heated burner." One friend queried me further: Do you drain the corn or not? A companion article discussed how people will pay not to cook -- that is, to have the same raw ingredients already prepared for you. The conclusion was that people would pay three to five times as much. By now it's probably a great deal more.
Ceremony? Put the food in the oven or microwave and listen for the timer to go off. Again, it's ceremony on the fly that does not provide the opportunity to learn how to stabilize and focus our awareness on relating with the material world; instead we fall prey to expediency.
Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice
Stan Getz, "On Green Dolphin Street"
With Kenny Barron, Yasuhito Mori, and Ben Riley.
The perfect summer Sunday tune ...
Form.
Morse, Portrait of Lafayette, 1825
I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.
Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette
When.
Scheffer, Marquis de Lafayette (detail) , 1822
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
Shaking.
I am an old-school humanist intellectual, and so I believe that the classroom is a place where you thoroughly unsettle people. You unnerve and unhouse them. I guess when the younger generation talks about safe spaces, they have in mind that they want to be respected. And I do think that we ought to respect each other’s perspectives, but at the same time if they feel that they don’t want their views to be violated, then I’m critical of that.
Education is very much about the shaking of whatever convictions we have. You know what Nietzsche says: It’s not just the courage of having your convictions, it’s a matter of mustering the courage to attack your convictions, too. That doesn’t mean that you have to give them up in the end, but they need to be seriously scrutinized. So in that sense, safe space for me means respect for perspective, and then robust Socratic energy.
Rev. Dr. Cornel West
Remember.
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.
Primo Levi
Functionaries.
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Primo Levi
Billy Thorpe, "Children of the Sun"
Rodeniser called. She left the case of Little Kings in the tree by the parking lot near the auditorium.
Thank you, Kurt, for that trip down memory lane.
Forget.
One purpose of poetry is to forget about what you know, and think about what you don’t know. There is an old idea that only by leaving the body can a man think. Such a leaving concerns the body of knowledge as well as the physical body. After all, as Montale says, if the purpose of poetry lay in making oneself understood, there would be no purpose in writing it.
The fundamental world of poetry is the inward world. The poem expresses what we are just beginning to think, thoughts we have not yet thought. The poem must catch these thoughts alive, holding them in language that is also alive, flexible and animal-alike as they.
The poem with images is therefore like a lion about to come into existence. A person meets the poem among trees at night. On the path in front of him, he sees a lion who does not know he is there. The lion is changing from his old ancient substance back into a visible body. So far the tip of the tail, the ears, the eyes, and perhaps a paw or two have come.
Robert Bly
Happy Birthday, Levi
Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.
Primo Levi, born on this day in 1919, from Survival in Auschwitz
Universal.
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Christopher Hitchens
Telemann, Cantata TWV 1:100, Auf Gott will ich mich stets verlassen
Capella Sollertia performs, featuring Flore Van Meerssche, soprano, and Sebastian Myrus, bass ...
Swear.
Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French nobleman, was made a major-general in the American Continental Army on this day in 1777.
30 July 2022
Hoops.
6:05
Outside the stadium
Special delivery
For Hoops McCann
Brut and charisma
Poured from the shadow where he stood
Looking good
He's a crowd pleasing man
One on one
He's schoolyard superman
Crashing the backboard
He's Jungle Jim again
When it's all over
We'll make some calls from my car
We're a star
Enjoyment.
Edward espouses enjoyment ...
Too often the rigorous aspects of mind demand overcompliance, insisting that there will be no lightness. These aspects also imply that our inherent being lacks wisdom or any sense of beauty and consequently needs to be kept in line, restrained, tamed, subdued. For most of us, as we get in touch with our inner aesthetic, we learn to set aside what is not in accord with it. When we stop beating ourselves up, we begin to notice our inherent sweetness of heart.Many problems that arise in the pursuit of pleasure are due to a lack of devotion, to not being fully enough committed to pleasure, to connection. We put the problem on the object by labeling it sinful or decadent rather than acknowledging how we lose ourselves. Which bite of chocolate cake is no longer pleasurable? Which swallow of wine is bringing us down instead of up? Sure, restraint and discipline are needed, but not to deny pleasure, rather to curb excitement and greed when it runs away with us. Use restraint as needed for braking, rather than keeping the brakes on as a way of life!Please enjoy your food. When pleasure or enjoyment are harshly forbidden, we look for stupor, for unconsciousness, which is the closest we can get to relief from the misplaced drive to discipline and restraint and overriding admonition not to have fun. "Watch yourself! If I catch you having fun, I'll make you pay for it." Most often we come by these negative admonitions honestly through or early experiences in life. Still, it is not too late to change, to enjoy our food.
Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice
Jim agrees ...
Throughout the day we mulled over the not-exactly-metaphysical question of why we never, for more than a moment, allowed ourselves to be hungry. Could this possibly be why we were both seriously overweight? But only a fool jumps to negative conclusions about food, especially before dinner. Cuisine minceur notwithstanding, the quality of food diminishes sharply in proportion to negative thinking about ingredients and, simply put, the amount to be prepared. There is no substitute for Badia a Coltibuono olive oil. Period. Or the use of salt pork in the cooking of southwest France. Three ounces of chablis are far less interesting and beneficial than a magnum of Bordeaux. I have mentioned before that we are in the middle of yet another of the recurrent sweeps across our nation of the "less is more" bullies. When any of these arrive in my yard, I toss a head of iceberg lettuce and some dog biscuits off the porch.Let's all stop for a moment in our busy day and return to some eternal verities. It's quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and, quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly. You tend to eat badly when you become inattentive to all but the immediate economic necessities, real or imagined, and food becomes an abstraction; you merely "fill up" in the manner that you fill a car with gasoline, no matter that some fey grease-slinger has put raspberry puree on your pen-raised venison. You are still a nitwit bent over a trough.Jim Harrison, from "Hunger, Real and Unreal"
Happy Birthday, Vasari
No one ever became excellent in any exercise whatsoever without beginning from his childhood to endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and other discomforts; wherefore those men are entirely deceived who think to be able, at their ease and with all the comforts of the world, to attain an honorable rank. It is not by sleeping but by waking and studying continually that progress is made.
Giorgio Vasari, from The Lives of Artists
From Andrew Graham-Dixon's masterful Travels with Vasari ...
An exploration of the extraordinary achievement of the chronicler of the Italian Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari, author of the monumental Lives of the Artists.On a spectacular journey through Renaissance Italy, Andrew Graham-Dixon searches for the shadowy figure who wrote one of the most important books on art and looks at some dazzling works, including masterpieces of the early Renaissance by Giotto, Masaccio and Donatello.
Part One
Part Two
But.
THE WRITER’S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES
- Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
- Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
- In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
- Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
- Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
- Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
- Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
- Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
- Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be weeks.
- Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
- Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
- Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
- The work is the death mask of its conception.
Walter Benjamin
29 July 2022
Reposes.
Now we’re ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck,
riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf.
No it isn’t a gull.
A gull always has a raucous touch about him.
This is some sort of duck,
and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn’t cold,
and he is thinking things over.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic,
and he is a part of it.
He looks a bit like a mandarin,
or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.
But he has hardly enough above the eyes
to be a philosopher.
He has poise, however,
which is what philosophers must have.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves,
because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you?
He sits down in it!
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity
– which it is.
He has made himself a part of the boundless
by easing himself into just where it touches him.
I like the duck.
He doesn’t know much,
but if only I could listen
He teaches me all I need to know.
Donald Babcock
Perfect.
Drive west on Sunset
To the sea
Turn that jungle music down
Just until we're out of town
This is no one night stand
It's a real occasion
Close your eyes and you'll be there
It's everything they say
The end of a perfect day
Distant lights from across the bay
Improvement.
van Gogh, The Starry Night (detail), 1889
The whole creation will appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
William Blake, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
Choice.
Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice
Wise.
Ode 1.11
You should not ask, it is unholy to know, for me or for you what end the gods will have given, O Leuconoe, nor Babylonian calculations attempt. Much better it is whatever will be to endure, whether more winters Jupiter has allotted or the last, which now weakens against opposing rocks the sea Tyrrhenian: be wise, strain your wines, and because of brief life, cut short long-term hopes. While we are speaking, envious will have fled a lifetime: seize the day, as little as possible trusting the future.
Horace
Test.
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.
Walt Whitman, from "Song of the Open Road"
Amplitude.
The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
Walter Benjamin
28 July 2022
Upward.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hang.
"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."
Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington"
For best results, listen to this ... AC⚡DC, "Shot Down in Flames" ...
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
Vigorously.
CACIO e PEPE
serves 4
Ingredients
- Kosher salt, to taste
- 1 lb. pasta, preferably spaghetti
- 4 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 tsp. freshly cracked black pepper, plus more to taste
- 1 cup finely grated Pecorino Romano
- 3⁄4 cup finely grated Cacio de Roma
Instructions
- Bring a 6-qt. pot of salted water to a boil. Add pasta; cook until al dente, 8–10 minutes; reserve 1 cup pasta water and drain pasta.
- Meanwhile, heat oil in a 12″ skillet over medium heat until shimmering.
- Add pepper; cook until fragrant, 1–2 minutes.
- Ladle 3⁄4 cup pasta water into skillet; bring to a boil.
- Using tongs, transfer pasta to skillet; spread it evenly.
- Sprinkle 3⁄4 cup each Pecorino Romano and Cacio de Roma over pasta; toss vigorously to combine until sauce is creamy and clings to the pasta without clumping, about 2 minutes, adding some pasta water if necessary. (Leave the pasta on the heat until the cheesy funk just starts to crisp in places. Toss some chili flakes in there, too. Oh yeah ... skip the glasses and drink the wine straight from the bottle with this one. --Ed.)
- Transfer to 4 plates and sprinkle with remaining Pecorino and more pepper.
- Repeat as needed.
There.
Homer, Blown Away, 1888
POEM from THE IRON HEEL
“Joy upon joy and gain upon gain
Are the destined rights of my birth,
And I shout the praise of my endless days
To the echoing edge of the earth.
Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die
To the uttermost end of time,
I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss,
In every age and clime—
“The froth of Pride, the tang of Power,
The sweet of Womanhood!
I drain the lees upon my knees,
For oh, the draught is good;
I drink to Life, I drink to Death,
And smack my lips with song,
For when I die, another ‘I’ shall pass the cup along.
“The man you drove from Eden’s grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dearest woes,
From the first faint cry of the newborn
To the rack of the woman’s throes.
“Packed with the pulse of an unborn race,
Torn with a world’s desire,
The surging flood of my wild young blood
Would quench the judgment fire.
I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh
To the dust of my earthly goal,
From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb
To the sheen of my naked soul.
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh
The whole world leaps to my will,
And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed
Shall harrow the earth for its fill.
Almighty God, when I drain life’s glass
Of all its rainbow gleams,
The hapless plight of eternal night
Shall be none too long for my dreams.
“The man you drove from Eden’s grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dear delight,
From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream
To the dusk of my own love-night.”
Jack London
Hustle.
You
In your Lark
You're a mark
You're a screamer
You know
How to hustle
Daddy
Is a rare
Millionaire
I don't care
Yeah you
Got the muscle
I got the news
Mozart, Clarinet Quintet in A-Major, K. 581
The Armida Quartet and clarinetist, Sabine Meyer, perform ...
Gourmand.
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
W. H. Auden
Happy Birthday, Potter
Potter, Lepiota Friesii, 1896
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.
Beatrix Potter, born on this day in 1866
27 July 2022
Imagination.
It's later on a Wednesday, the sun is going down
I'm standing naked by a swimming pool, there's no one around
My imagination wanders back, red dust is always there
We lay together in the jungle, and love was in the air
As I dive into the water, both time and motion freeze
I'm hanging there suspended like a feather in the breeze
Below is your reflection, like an image from the past
But I can't be sure if it's really you, because you're wearing a tribal mask ...
Roger Glover, from "The Mask"
Stop.
Stop it. Stop "meeting" things.
He who perpetrates an outrage may well be quick to forget what he has done. But they who have suffered at his hands are justified at least in remembering the wrongs he has done them.
Marquis de Sade
Stop it.
Thanks for the recon, Jess.
Marked.
A marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debate is ridiculous. Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.
William F. Buckley Jr., from Up from Liberalism (1959)
Adjustment.
From John Dos Passos' essay, "A Question of Elbow Room," from the January 25, 1958 edition of National Review ...
When all the discussions of the position of man in the framework of government that had obsessed so many of the best minds of the century came to a focus in 1776, the chief preoccupation of the state-builders in America was to establish institutions in their new country which would allow each citizen enough elbow room to grow into individuality. They differed greatly on how best to bring about that state of affairs but there was no disagreement on fundamental aims. Protection of the individual’s happiness — the assurance of the elbow room he needed to reach his full stature — was the reason for the state’s existence.Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris held very differing views on the problems of government. Jefferson was an agrarian democrat who believed that every man was capable of taking some part in the government of the community; Morris was a city-bred aristocrat who believed that only men to whom wealth and position had given the advantage of a special education were capable of dealing with public affairs; but when Morris wrote George Washington his definition of statesmanship — “I mean politics in the great Sense, or that sublime Science which embraces for its Object the Happiness of Mankind” — he meant the same thing by the word happiness as Jefferson did when he wrote it into the Declaration of Independence. To both men it meant elbow room. Elbow room is positive freedom.Consult any sociologist today as to the meaning of happiness in the social context and he’ll be pretty sure to tell you it means adjustment. Adjustment, if it is freedom at all, is freedom of a very negative sort. It certainly is the opposite of elbow room.The outstanding fact you learn from reading the letters of the men of 1776 was that none of them had any illusions about how men behaved in the political scheme. A radical idealist like Jefferson allowed for the self-interest (real or imagined) of the average voter, or for the vanity and ambition and greed of the officeholder, as much as a cynical conservative like Gouverneur Morris.Both parties understood the common man as well as any of the more desperate demagogues we have with us today. They allowed for his self-seeking, for his shortsightedness, his timidity, his abominable apathy, his only intermittent public spirit. The difference was that the statesmen of the early republic used that “sublime Science” in the service of their great statebuilding aims. Using men as they found them, they managed to set up the system of balanced self-government which made possible the exuberant growth of the United States.In Jefferson’s day the average citizen had a fair understanding of most of the workings of the society he lived in. The years that stretch between us and the day of his death have seen the shape of industry transformed in rapid succession by steam power, electric power, the internal combustion engine, and now, by jet propulsion and the incredibly proliferating possibilities of power derived from nuclear fission and fusion. Any social system of necessity molds itself into shapes laid down by the daily occupations of the individual men who form its component parts. The mass-production methods of assembly-line industry have caused a society made up of individuals grouped in families to give way to a society made up of individuals grouped in factories and office buildings, for whom family life has been relegated to the leisure hours.
Sport.
Constable, Cloud Study, 1821
An great analogy to learning, with experience being water, the learner being wind, and understanding becoming "the sport of wind," clouds ...
Since the increased attention which has been given to Meteorology, the study of the various appearances of water suspended in the Atmosphere is become an interesting and even necessary branch of that pursuit. If Clouds were the mere result of the condensation of Vapour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy, if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone, then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows, an attempt to describe forms which, being the sport of winds, must be ever varying, and therefore not to be defined. But however the erroneous admission of this opinion may have operated to prevent attention to them, the case is not so with Clouds.Luke Howard, from "Essay on the Classification of Clouds"
Released.
AC⚡DC released Highway to Hell on this day in 1979.
"If You Want Blood (You've Got It)" ...
