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

14 February 2025

Whisper'd.

Carracci, Sleeping Venus, 1603


It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard;
It is the hour -- when lover's vows
Seem sweet in every whisper'd word;
And gentle winds and waters near,
Make music to the lonely ear.
Each flower the dews have lightly wet,
And in the sky the stars are met,
And on the wave is deeper blue,
And on the leaf a browner hue,
And in the Heaven that clear obscure
So softly dark, and darkly pure,
That follows the decline of day
As twilight melts beneath the moon away.

Lord Byron 

13 February 2025

Insist.


Katherine Rundell on the need for writing children's books (have you been to a book fair recently?) ...
There’s a willed optimism inherent in the act of writing for children. You’ll find it in murder mysteries by Sharna Jackson, in Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge, in dragon taming. To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

Best.


... Just fix it the best you can.

Curiosity.


I suspect that at its best your education’s main motive is to fuel your curiosity and teach you how to find out things for yourself. This is adequately simpleminded to cover the situation. Nothing much is remembered without the emotion of curiosity. Even your dogs and cats are full of it. You are unlikely to feel emotion for material unless your teacher has it. The educationists seem to think in terms of methodical steps but a teacher brimming with passion for the subject is what actually works.

Jim Harrison, from Off to the Side: A Memoir

Happy Birthday, Hook


Hooky was born on this day in 1956.

"Warsaw"

Napping.


Scientific American has Edison's napping technique ...
Thomas Edison was famously opposed to sleeping. In an 1889 interview published in Scientific American, the ever energetic inventor of the lightbulb claimed he never slept more than four hours a night. Sleep was, he thought, a waste of time.

Yet Edison might have relied on slumber to spur his creativity. The inventor is said to have napped while holding a ball in each hand, presuming that, as he fell asleep, the orbs would fall to the floor and wake him. This way he could remember the sorts of thoughts that come to us as we are nodding off, which we often do not recall.

Happy Birthday, Wood

Wood, Parson Weem's Fable, 1939


All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

Grant Wood, born on this day in 1891

12 February 2025

Released.


RUSH released Moving Pictures on this day in 1981.

"Vital Signs"
Courageous convictions
Will drag the dream into existence ...

Good morning.

11 February 2025

Me.


It's never possibility that's not present; only me.

Pico Iyer,

Thanks, Steve.

Happy Birthday, Edison


When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.  Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847

09 February 2025

Listen.


Thanks, Joe.

Hangwire, "This Fun Machine"

Talking Heads, "Heaven"

Abnormal.

Doisneau, L'écolier puni, 1956


“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Enable.


It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue -- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Half-Tone.



The origin of Windham Hill's great logo ...
The logo was designed by my friend Jay Durgan… he and I were on Skyline Blvd above Palo Alto and Stanford and slightly over onto the western side on Old La Honda Rd. and walking in an open field ringed with redwood trees… Jay looked to the west and saw the sun going down behind the redwood trees and said something like “there’s your logo.” It was inventive in that it was a line drawing that incorporated a “half-tone” in part of the shadow of the trees.”
Thanks, Kurt.  You're doing God's work.  Inspirational.
Erik Satie and folk fingerpicking ...

I'm looking for help on the name of the typeface they used.   

Oft.

Doisneau, Enfant Papillion, 1945


“Many are the strange chances of the world," said Mithrandir, "and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Silmarillion

Thanks, Noah.

Kids rule.

MacMillan, "The Gallant Weaver"

Durham University Chamber Choir, performs, under the direction of Benedict Munden ...

Open.


Steve has Gurri on free speech and ...
...[T]he resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian open society.
Hannah Arendt on soundbite discourse ...

To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk" -- except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Later ...

The lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Rosa Luxemburg: Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Simone Weil: Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Bertolt Brecht, from “O Germany, Pale Mother!”
O Germany— 
Hearing the speeches that ring from your house 
    one laughs. 
But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

08 February 2025

Stronger.


I'd tell Sonny Payne: "Let's get the back beat a little stronger, because Frank was only lifting his feet about a foot," says Jones, stomping his foot to a beat. "Let's get a foot and a half."

Quincy Jones

Excellent.

An excellent album ...


LONG NIGHT

Long night, it's a long night, my friend
The barrooms and the back street's dead end
Sometimes I thought I saw the sunrise and good times in the air
It was just, it was just another big town with midnight's neon glare

Long night, it's a long night, I know
The bus rides and the "nowhere to go"
I've seen what the street corners do to things like, love and dreams
Seen what the bottle can do to a man with his hopes and his schemes

A long night, what a long night it has been
The wheelers and the dealers, they win
I've tasted the 90-proof gin and chased it away with the blues
I rarely paid debts that I owed but I sure have paid my dues
No daylight, just a long night for me

Alec Wilder and Loonis Reeves McGlohon

Technique.


Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Johnny Marr, "Hideaway Girl"

Excellent.

An excellent book ...


Thanks, Steve.

Ockeghem, Missa cuiusvis toni

The Clarion Choir and Orchestra perform ...

Happy Birthday, Ruskin

Ruskin, Saint Mark's Basilica, Venice: Sketch after Rain, 27 May 1846, 1846

People are eternally divided into two classes: the believer, builder, and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer, and critic.

John Ruskin, born on this day in 1819

07 February 2025

More.


FACING NORTH

   Ninety billion galaxies in this one tiny universe –
   a billion seconds make thirty-two years.
   No matter how many ways we conceive it,
   this generous wedge called Ursa Major
   more than fills my sight.
   But now, as I turn to put out the lights
   and give my dog her bedtime cookie,
   my eyes become the handle of the great Milky Way,
   and carry it into the house.

Dan Gerber

At.


Enjoy the day!  Up and at 'em!

Gefilter.

Happy Birthday, Douglass


If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, born on this day in 1879

Act.

All.

Brady, Daniel Webster, 1849


There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

Daniel Webster

06 February 2025

Bob Marley, "Heathen/Ride Natty Ride"


Reminder.


Friend, this isn't meant to be grim.
Just a reminder that you are building something that 
        will one day be 
whole and complete,
So, build with purpose.

Jarod K. Anderson, from "End Point"

Thanks, Steve.

Happy Birthday, Reagan


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

Ronald Reagan, born on this day in 1911, from his speech, "A Time for Choosing"

Reverence.


If we read Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems as a query into a more conscious way of being, then we can begin to believe “'the solstice says ‘everything on earth is True.’” Harrison tells us insight begins in that place of standing on the precipice of darkness and light. Being human means being stretched between the known and the unknown: the longest day of summer is also a move toward winter, the longest night in winter is a turn toward brighter days. We bow to time and the cycles of change that are beyond our control. Light will come. Darkness will come. We are held in the numinous hours of grace before dawn and after dusk. 

To have reverence for life you must have reverence for death. 

Terry Tempest Williams, from "Everything on Earth is Ture", the preface to Jim Harrison's Complete Poems

Van Morrison, "Behind the Ritual"

Drinking that wine
Out of my mind 
In the days gone by ...

Study.


BRIDGE

Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
but the sea was too wide and it didn't
go anyplace. I'm proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air. Machado
came for a visit and we sat on the
end of the bridge which was his idea.
Now that I'm old the work goes slowly
but the material keeps coming as I hang
here in the air. Ever nearer death I like
it out here high above the sea bundled
up for the arctic storms of late fall,
the resounding crash and moan of the sea,
the hundred foot depth of the green troughs.
Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this the darkest music
which imitates the sky's thunder
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.
So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above
the abyss, the fatal plummet. Tonight the moon
will be in my lap. This is my job, to study
the universe from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea,
the faint green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.

Jim Harrison

Van Morrison, "In the Garden"

In the garden wet with rain
No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature
And the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost
In the garden ...

In.


Steve points to more wisdom ...
This separation cannot be bridged over, there is no ritual, no discipline, no sacrifice that can carry you across it; there is no savior, no Master, no guru who can lead you to the real or destroy the separation.  The division is not between the real and yourself; it is in yourself.

Happy Birthday, Marley.


Bob Marley was born on this day in 1945.

I had those shoes and those socks in high school.  I was no Rasta, just trying to be irie in a bumbo klaat world.

"Wake Up and Live"
Life is one big road with lots of signs
So when you riding through the ruts
Don't you complicate your mind
Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy!
Don't bury your thoughts
Put your vision to reality ...

Source.


[A] democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.


Thank you, Kurt.

02 February 2025

Excellent.

An excellent book ...


Our credentials are that we are out there, in nature, when others are not, and that we are out there because we want to be, not because we have to or are paid to be. Our eyes solicit the traceries of spoors on the earth and birds in the sky; our spirits are conscious of ravens and long for the restitution of wolves and bears to the land. We are the wildlife thermometers, poking about in rivers and swamps, in the shadows of forest canopies, under the ashes of desert suns, and the force that drives us is our soul.

 Guy de la Valdene

Promises.

Wyeth, February 2, 1942, 1942


The hedge-rows cast a shallow shade
      Upon the frozen grass,
      But skies at evening song are soft,
      And comes the Candlemas.
Each day a little later now
      Lingers the westering sun;
      Far out of sight the miracles
      Of April are begun.
O barren bough! O frozen field!
      Hopeless ye wait no more.
      Life keeps her dearest promises—
      The Spring is at the door!

Arthur Ketchum

Endless.

From the Firing Line episode that aired December 3, 1981, guests Paul Hollander and Ernest Van den Haag discuss why intellectuals are so dumb ...
WFB: Is it safe to say that once you've learned political truths you are not again easily deceived?
PH: No, I'm afraid that's not quite true, because many people who learned something from the case of the Soviet Union fell again on China and on Cuba, and are now falling for Nicaragua right after Cuba; so I think this quest for a good society outside your own is endless.

Happy Birthday, Tallyrand

Prud'hon, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord,1817


He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, from La Confession de Talleyrand

Happy Birthday, Heifitz

Jascha Heifitz, who was born on this day in 1901, and Erick Friedman perform the Largo ma non tanto from Bach's Double Violin Concerto, BWV 1043 ...

Unborrowed.


Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

Ayn Rand, born on this day in 1905, from The Fountainhead

Handel, Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, HWV 74

Marie-Sophie Pollak performs "Eternal Source of Light Divine" with members of Ensemble Concerto Munchen, featuring Matthew Sadler on the baroque trumpet ...

Up-Raise.


Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter's eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.

Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Robert Herrick

Happy Candlemas.

Thanks, Mum.

Out.


THE LAND of HEART'S DESIRE

God spreads the heavens above us like great wings
And gives a little round of deeds and days,
And then come the wrecked angels and set snares,
And bait them with light hopes and heavy dreams,
Until the heart is puffed with pride and goes
Half shuddering and half joyous from God's peace;
And it was some wrecked angel, blind with tears,
Who flattered Edane's heart with merry words.

Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house!
Let me have all the freedom I have lost;
Work when I will and idle when I will!
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.

I would take the world
And break it into pieces in my hands
To see you smile watching it crumble away.

Once a fly dancing in a beam of the sun,
Or the light wind blowing out of the dawn,
Could fill your heart with dreams none other knew,
But now the indissoluble sacrament
Has mixed your heart that was most proud and cold
With my warm heart for ever; the sun and moon
Must fade and heaven be rolled up like a scroll
But your white spirit still walk by my spirit.

When winter sleep is abroad my hair grows thin,
My feet unsteady. When the leaves awaken
My mother carries me in her golden arms;
I'll soon put on my womanhood and marry
The spirits of wood and water, but who can tell
When I was born for the first time?

The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away.

W.B. Yeats

Vision.


Some day we shall have a science of education comparable to the science of medicine; but even when that day arrives the art of education will still remain the inspiration and the guide of all wise teachers. The laws that regulate our physical and mental development will be reduced to order; but the impulses which lead each new generation to play its way into possession of all that is best in life will still have to be interpreted for us by the artists who, with the wisdom of years, have not lost the direct vision of children.

Earl Barnes, from the Preface to The Art of the Storyteller by Marie L. Shedlock

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Door.


How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Light.



Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

John 8:12

Perfect.


To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

Alexander Calder