Paul Weller, "Andromeda"

Happy Father's Day, Pop

Happy Father's Day to my Pop and blessings to all dads and their families on this very special day.

As a kid, I remember this poem tacked above my Dad's workbench ...

The Little Chap Who Follows Me

A careful man I want to be;

A little fellow follows me.

I do not dare to go astray

For fear he'll go the self same way.

I cannot once escape his eyes,

Whate'er he sees me do, he tries.

Like me he says he's going to be;

The little chap who follows me.

He thinks that I'm so very fine,

Believes in every word of mine.

The base in me he must not see;

The little chap who follows me.

I must remember as I go

Through summer's sun and winter's snow,

I'm building for the years to be;

The little chap who follows me.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Umberto Eco

Overnight.

I'm in ...

Night owls and stargazers, this is for you: The S.S. Badger is offering overnight sailings across Lake Michigan.

Summer.

As Summer is beginning right about ... now, here's the introduction to Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury ...

JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM: an introduction

This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.

I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.

First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.

Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.

What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.

So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.

It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

An then I wanted to call back what the ravine was like, especially on those nights when walking home late across town, after seeing Lon Chaney’s delicious fright The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and leap out and grab me, shrieking, so I ran, fell, and ran again, gibbering all the way home. That was great stuff.

Along the way I came upon and collided, through word-association, with old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.

Along the way I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved. For I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother “ditched” him.

Along the way, I found myself in the basement working the wine-press for my father, or on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion load and fire his home-made brass cannon.

Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to surprise myself, I might add. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blunwas somehow true.

So I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.

I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic work of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town.

But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.

And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty streaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.

As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Perhaps a new poem of mine will explain more than this introduction about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.

Here’s the start of the poem:

Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my birthplace:
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small Midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:
So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods’ bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh…
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supercede
While Grandmama in rockingchair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantuim.

Waukegan/ Green Town/ Byzantium.
Green Town did exist, then?
Yes, and again, yes.

Was there a real boy named John Huff? There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn’t go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love.

Was there a Lonely One? There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured.

Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have answered that.

Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera.

So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first “novel.”

A final memory.

Fire balloons.

You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.

But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer night air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.

I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn’t they? And that one is me.

The wine still waits in the cellars below.

My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.

The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

Why and how?

Because I say it is so.

Ray Bradbury
Summer, 1974

Your hymnal is here.

Fire balloons afloft in Thailand ...



Basic fire balloon how-to is here.

Genius.

Searching.

If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going, come what may.

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother, Theo, July, 1880

Simple.

August 10, 1930, Obi Tyler, a Massachusetts hermit explained his philosophy on health, longevity, and simple living ...

Harmony.

If we understood the world, we would realise that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

Jean Sibelius

Seal.

Thomson, The Great Seal of the United States, 1782

On this day in 1782, Congress approved the Great Seal of the United States and the eagle as its symbol.

Happy Birthday, Jacques Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach was born on this day in 1819.

Elīna Garanča and Anna Netrebko perform the "Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour" from The Tales from Hoffmann.  Emmanuel Villaume conducts the Prague Philharmonia ...

Furs, "Highwire Days"

Happy Birthday, Ann Wilson

Ann Wilson was born on this day in 1950.

"Kick It Out"...

Sea Power, "Machineries of Joy"

Happy Birthday, Blaise Pascal

Quesnel, Pascal, 1691

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal, born on this day in 1623

Beauty.

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plow;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Opened.

Collier, John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 1901

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey 104no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children — to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil knows a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learnt; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learnt little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew. Children are by nature eager for information. This ought to be encouraged. In fact, we may to a great extent trust to their instincts, and in that case they will do much to educate themselves. Too often, however, the acquirement of knowledge is placed before them in a form so irksome and fatiguing that all desire for information is choked, or even crushed out; so that our schools, in fact, become places for the discouragement of learning, and thus produce the very opposite effect from that at which we aim. In short, children should be trained to observe and to think, for in that way there would be opened out to them a source of the purest enjoyment for leisure hours, and the wisest judgment in the work of life.

John Lubbock, from "Education," found in his book The Pleasures of Life

Happy Birthday, Thomas Sully

Sully, Thomas Jefferson, 1824

Thomas Sully was born on this date in 1783.

 American Philosophical Society's presentation of A Final Image: The Thomas Sully Portrait of Thomas Jefferson

Telemann, Overture-Suite for Two Oboes, Two Horns, Strings and Continuo in D-Major, TWV 55:D21

Bremer Barockorchester performing ...

Purify.

Ray Bradbury on life and love ...

We keep cleansing the stream just as any impurity running downhill in a river by the time it travels nine miles is purified.   So the life of a man traveling to the sea, which is our inevitable death someday, purifies itself.  It must, because if you do not purify, these tensions remain in and turn in on yourself and destroy you.  The man who cannot laugh freely is a sick man.  The man who cannot cry and release tears in that direction, there's a sick man.  The man who cannot be violent through exercise, through sports, through acting out his violence in paper or painting or acting on a stage, is a sick man.

Lasts.

What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

Susan Sontag, from her interview with Rolling Stone in 1979

Paul Weller, "Above the Clouds"

The Major Oak, Rest in Peace

The BBC is reporting the death of The Major Oak.

Lingers.

Manet, The Bench in the Garden of Versailles, 1881

TO ANY READER

As from the house your mother sees

You playing round the garden trees,

So you may see, if you will look

Through the windows of this book,

Another child, far, far away,

And in another garden, play.

But do not think you can at all,

By knocking on the window, call

That child to hear you. He intent

Is all on his play-business bent.

He does not hear; he will not look,

Nor yet be lured out of this book.

For, long ago, the truth to say,

He has grown up and gone away,

And it is but a child of air

That lingers in the garden there.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Study.

Copley, Mercy Otis Warren, 1763

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of man, that pants for distinction. This principle operates in every bosom, and when kept under the control of reason, and the influence of humanity, it produces the most benevolent effects. But when the checks of conscious are thrown aside, or the moral sense weakened by the sudden acquisition of wealth or power, humanity is obscured, and if a favorable coincidence of circumstances permits, this love of distinction often exhibits the most mortifying instances of profligacy, tyranny, and the wanton exercise of arbitrary sway. Thus when we look over the theatre of human action, scrutinize the windings of the heart, and survey the transactions of man from the earliest to the present period, it must be acknowledged that ambition and avarice are the leading springs which generally actuate the restless mind. From these primary sources of corruption have arisen all the rapine and confusion, the depredation, and ruin, that have spread distress over the face of the earth from the days of Nimrod to Cesar, and from Cesar to an arbitrary prince of the house of Brunswick.

Mercy Otis Warren, from History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, Volume 1 and Volume 2

C.P.E. Bach, Sonata in D Major, Wq.137, H. 559

Stéphanie Houillon and Guido Balestracci play the violas while Paolo Corsi accompanies ...

Excellent.

An excellent movie.

You might think it's funny.  You might think he gets what's coming to him.  You might be wrong.

Sure.

Wyeth, N.C., Backcountry Militia on the Move, 1928

The Congress has likewise resolved that fifteen thousand men shall be supported at the expense of the continent; ten thousand at Massachusetts, and five thousand at New York; and that ten companies of riflemen be sent immediately; six from Pennsylvania, two from Maryland, and two from Virginia, consisting of sixty-eight privates in each company, to join our army at Boston. These are said to be all exquisite marksmen, and by means of the excellence of their firelocks, as well as their skill in the use of them, to send sure destruction to great distances.

John Adams, from a letter to Elbridge Gerry, 18 June 1775

Benefits.

Harold Bloom on reading's therapeutic benefits ...

Time is limited, you know, there is only so much time and there is so much to read that would really enhance your life.  It is, as I argue in this book, not only one of the most intense of all pleasures, but I think it is the most healing of all pleasures.  I think it is more profoundly therapeutic, and most of what is urged upon us as therapy, one does not of course argue with the antidepressant drugs or anti-schizophrenic drugs, they are essential, but when it comes to the various modes of talking therapy, even a spiritual therapy, I would urge a deep course of solitary reading of the books that most matter instead.

Brian Lamb interviewed Professor Bloom on the occasion of the publishing of his book, How to Read and Why ... HERE.  The best arguments for The Reading Life are presented there.

Happy Birthday, Gregg Rolie

Gregg Rolie was born on this day in 1947.

"Feelin' That Way" with Journey, including Ainsley Dunbar, before Jonathan Caine took over and musically neutered the band (just like he did with The Babys) .  

Yes, I'm still bitter.

Soothing.

Rackham, The River, 1940

Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long waking dreams. The Water Rat, like the good little fellow he was, sculled steadily on and forbore to disturb him.

"I like your clothes awfully, old chap," he remarked after some half an hour or so had passed. "I'm going to get a black velvet smoking-suit myself some day, as soon as I can afford it."

"I beg your pardon," said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. "You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!"

"The River," corrected the Rat.

"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"

"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it's always got its fun and its excitements. When the floods are on in February, and my cellars and basement are brimming with drink that's no good to me, and the brown water runs by my best bedroom window; or again when it all drops away and shows patches of mud that smells like plum-cake, and the rushes and weed clog the channels, and I can potter about dry shod over most of the bed of it and find fresh food to eat, and things careless people have dropped out of boats!"

"But isn't it a bit dull at times?" the Mole ventured to ask. "Just you and the river, and no one else to pass a word with?"

"No one else to—well, I mustn't be hard on you," said the Rat with forbearance. "You're new to it, and of course you don't know. The bank is so crowded nowadays that many people are moving away altogether. O no, it isn't what it used to be, at all. Otters, king-fishers, dabchicks, moorhens, all of them about all day long and always wanting you to do something—as if a fellow had no business of his own to attend to!"

"What lies over there?" asked the Mole, waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water-meadows on one side of the river.

"That? O, that's just the Wild Wood," said the Rat shortly. "We don't go there very much, we river-bankers."

"Aren't they—aren't they very nice people in there?" said the Mole a trifle nervously.

"W-e-ll," replied the Rat, "let me see. The squirrels are all right. And the rabbits—some of 'em, but rabbits are a mixed lot. And then there's Badger, of course. He lives right in the heart of it; wouldn't live anywhere else, either, if you paid him to do it. Dear old Badger! Nobody interferes with him. They'd better not," he added significantly.

"Why, who should interfere with him?" asked the Mole.

"Well, of course—there—are others," explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way. "Weasels—and stoats—and foxes—and so on. They're all right in a way—I'm very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then—well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact."

The Mole knew well that it is quite against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it; so he dropped the subject.

"And beyond the Wild Wood again?" he asked; "where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?"

"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where we're going to lunch."

Leaving the main stream, they now passed into what seemed at first sight like a little landlocked lake. Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill-wheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both fore-paws and gasp: "O my! O my! O my!"

Kenneth Grahame, from The Wind in the Willows

Released.

David Gilmour released his first solo album on this day in 1978.

"So Far Away"...

Exuberance.

van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods, 1640

Complete and total exuberance.

No phones.

Weather.

In June 1944, the success of the greatest military invasion the world had ever seen depended on weather readings taken by one woman, Maureen Sweeney ...

Most.

van Gogh, Shoes, 1886

The PHILOSOPHER

I saw him sitting in his door,

—Trembling as old men do;

His house was old; his barn was old,

—And yet his eyes seemed new.

His eyes had seen three times my years

—And kept a twinkle still,

Though they had looked at birth and death

—And three graves on a hill.

“I will sit down with you,” I said,

—“And you will make me wise;

Tell me how you have kept the joy

—Still burning in your eyes.”

Then like an old-time orator

—Impressively he rose;

“I make the most of all that comes,

—The least of all that goes.”

The jingling rhythm of his words

—Echoes as old songs do,

Yet this had kept his eyes alight

—Till he was ninety-two.

Sara Teasdale

Speaking.

There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept.

Peter Ackroyd, from Chatterton

Haydn, Quartet in F-Major for Strings, Op. 50, No. 5, “The Dream”

Orion String Quartet performs ...

Wide-Eyed.

Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.  You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.  

Sir Philip Pullman, from The Golden Compass

The Bodelian Library provides a peak at Sir Philip's desk ...

Corelli, Concerto grosso Op. 6, No. 1 in D major

Enrico Onofri guides and performs with Camerata Bern ...

Happy Birthday, Sir George Frampton

Frampton, Peter Pan, 1912

Sir George Frampton was born on this day in 1860.

Cheap Trick, "I Can't Take It"

You'll want to order an extra side of ranch for the nachos ...

Glory.

Shepherd, George Washington, Esq., General and Commander in Chief of the Continental Army in America, 1775

The General does not mean to discourage the practice of bathing, whilst the weather is warm enough to continue it; but he expressly forbids, any persons doing it, at or near the Bridge in Cambridge, where it has been observed and complained of, that many Men, lost to all sense of decency and common modesty, are running about naked upon the Bridge, whilst Passengers, and even Ladies of the first fashion in the neighbourhood, are passing over it, as if they meant to glory in their shame: The Guards and Centries at the Bridge, are to put a stop to this practice for the future.

George Washington, from his General Orders, 22 August 1775

Happy Birthday, David Hinds

David Hinds was born on this day in 1956.

"Roller Skates" with Steel Pulse ...

Introduced.

With the release of Unknown Pleasures, the world was introduced to Joy Division on this day in 1979.

"Shadowplay"...

Refuge.

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

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

Miracle.

“What are we?” he asked. 

“Why, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers; ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and material that know not themselves, that sleep moving and move but finally to make an eye and waken on themselves. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind force that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth. So the Universe, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to feel its own flesh and know it to be ours.”

Ray Bradbury, from The Halloween Tree

Appointed.

Sharp, George Washington, Commander in Chief of Ye Armies of Ye United States of America, 1780

George Washington was appointed head of the Continental Army on this day in 1775 ...

I shall hope that my undertaking of it, is designd to answer some good purpose—You might, and I suppose did perceive, from the Tenor of my letters, that I was apprehensive I could not avoid this appointment, as I did not even pretend ⟨t⟩o intimate when I should return—that was the case—it was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment without exposing my Character to such censures as would have reflected dishonour upon myself, and given pain to my friends—this I am sure could not, and ought not to be pleasing to you, & must have lessend me considerably in my own esteem. I shall rely therefore, confidently, on that Providence which has heretofore preservd, & been bountiful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall—I shall feel no pain from the Toil, or the danger of the Campaign—My unhappiness will flow, from the uneasiness I know you will feel at being left alone—I therefore beg of you to summon your whole fortitude & Resolution, and pass your time as agreeably as possible—nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hear it from your own Pen.

George Washington, from a letter to Martha Washington, 18 June 1775

Happy Birthday, Edvard Greig

Edvard Greig was born on this day in 1843.

To the Spring, Op. 43, No. 6 ...

Happy Birthday, Vernor's

Vernor's first hit the shelves on this day in 1866.

Happy Birthday, Alan White

Alan White was born on this day in 1949.

"Hold On"...

Make-Up.

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Yap.

They say it's International Blogging Day ...

Keith & The Winos, "Yap Yap"

Great.

On this day in 1777, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.

With a great flag comes great responsibility, so here's a reminder of how to respectfully display and handle The Flag.

The Waterboys, "Mad as the Mist and Snow"

Waterboys Mike Scott and Steve Wickham blow through Yeats' "Mad as the Mist and Snow"...

Our minds are at their best this night

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Wanders.

Possibility.

Opgenhaffen, Untitled, 2010

A VISION

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows. The river will run

clear, as we never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground. They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting. Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

Wendell Berry

Thank you, Veerle.

Jorma Kaukonen, "There's a Bright Side Somewhere"

Vaster.

THINGS to THINK

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Robert Bly

Fascinating.

Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...

Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.

Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.

Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.

Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.

My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977.  On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”

Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.

Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today.  I knew he believed in me and all his students.  He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man.  His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down.  That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.

I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.

Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats

Coburn, W. B. Yeats, 1913

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

W.B. Yeats, born on this day in 1865, from The Celtic Twilight

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

David Hockney, Rest in Peace

Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967

David Hockney has passed.

Jerry Jeff Walker, "Quiet Faith of Man"

It's sandwich time.

State.

We may build many imitation Greek temples and we may buy them full of pictures, but there is something more—in fact the one thing more which really counts before we can be an art nation—we must get rid of this outside feeling of looking in on art. We must get on the inside and press out.

Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don’t believe any real artist cares whether what he does is “art” or not. Who, after all, knows what is art? 

Robert Henri, from The Art Spirit