Happy Birthday, Rimbaud

If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. 

That’s obvious to me: 

I witness the unfolding of my own thought: 

I watch it, I hear it: 

I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854

Eddie Money, "Trinidad"

'Tis the season ...

Jethro Tull, "Songs from the Wood"

Blue.

The world was introduced to The Specials on this day in 1979.

"Concrete Jungle"...

Happy Birthday, Tosh

Winston Hubert McIntosh,  Peter Tosh, was born on this day in 1944.

"Pick Myself Up" ...

Released.

Styx released Cornerstone on this day in 1979.

"Borrowed Time" ...

Released.

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers released Damn the Torpedoes on this day in 1979.

"Shadow of a Doubt (Complex Kid) ...

Marvellous.

Kelley, The Sequestered Situation of This Church Seems Always to Have Made It a Favorite Haunt of Troubled Spirits, 1991

When the dance was at an end, Ichabod was attracted to a knot of the sager folks, who, with Old Van Tassel, sat smoking at one end of the piazza, gossiping over former times, and drawing out long stories about the war.

This neighborhood, at the time of which I am speaking, was one of those highly favored places which abound with chronicle and great men. The British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding and infested with refugees, cowboys, and all kinds of border chivalry. Just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and, in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit.

There was the story of Doffue Martling, a large blue-bearded Dutchman, who had nearly taken a British frigate with an old iron nine-pounder from a mud breastwork, only that his gun burst at the sixth discharge. And there was an old gentleman who shall be nameless, being too rich a mynheer to be lightly mentioned, who, in the battle of White Plains, being an excellent master of defence, parried a musket-ball with a small sword, insomuch that he absolutely felt it whiz round the blade, and glance off at the hilt; in proof of which he was ready at any time to show the sword, with the hilt a little bent. There were several more that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand in bringing the war to a happy termination.

But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long-settled retreats; but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long-established Dutch communities.

The immediate cause, however, of the prevalence of supernatural stories in these parts, was doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land. Several of the Sleepy Hollow people were present at Van Tassel’s, and, as usual, were doling out their wild and wonderful legends. Many dismal tales were told about funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major André was taken, and which stood in the neighborhood. Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow. The chief part of the stories, however, turned upon the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.

The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits. It stands on a knoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent, whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime; but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. Such was one of the favorite haunts of the Headless Horseman, and the place where he was most frequently encountered. The tale was told of old Brouwer, a most heretical disbeliever in ghosts, how he met the Horseman returning from his foray into Sleepy Hollow, and was obliged to get up behind him; how they galloped over bush and brake, over hill and swamp, until they reached the bridge; when the Horseman suddenly turned into a skeleton, threw old Brouwer into the brook, and sprang away over the tree-tops with a clap of thunder.

This story was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous adventure of Brom Bones, who made light of the Galloping Hessian as an arrant jockey. He affirmed that on returning one night from the neighboring village of Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow, but just as they came to the church bridge, the Hessian bolted, and vanished in a flash of fire.

All these tales, told in that drowsy undertone with which men talk in the dark, the countenances of the listeners only now and then receiving a casual gleam from the glare of a pipe, sank deep in the mind of Ichabod. He repaid them in kind with large extracts from his invaluable author, Cotton Mather, and added many marvellous events that had taken place in his native State of Connecticut, and fearful sights which he had seen in his nightly walks about Sleepy Hollow.

Washington Irving, from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Resentment.

Resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage. That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

Excellent.

An (nearly) excellent album ...

Relativism.

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

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

Indeed.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Haydn, Keyboard Sonata in D-Major, Hob.XVI:37

Olivia Steimel performs ...

Wins.

High.

SONNET to a STILTON CHEESE

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour

And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;

England has need of thee, and so have I–

She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,

League after grassy league from Lincoln tower

To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.

Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,

Like a tall green volcano rose in power.

Plain living and long drinking are no more,

And pure religion reading “Household Words”,

And sturdy manhood sitting still all day

Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;

While my digestion, like the House of Lords,

The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

G. K Chesterton

Tradition.

I am not so arrogant as to think that just because I’ve seen someone make Peking duck in Beijing that I’ll have something to add to the process after only a brief encounter. Most of the time, the dishes I see made or eat are the end result of a lifetime of trial and error–and hundreds if not thousands of years of tradition. 

Anthony Bourdain

Liberating.

AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL

O beautiful for spacious skies,

   For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

   Above the fruited plain!

      America!  America!

   God shed His grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

   From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,

   Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

   Across the wilderness!

      America! America!

   God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

   Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved

   In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved,

   And mercy more than life!

      America!  America!

   May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness,

   And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream

   That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

   Undimmed by human tears!

      America!  America!

   God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

   From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Bates

David Francey, "The Breath Between"

Another year that's had us see

The passing into memory

Souls and hearts, and voices stilled

Before that sun could climb the hill

We hold them close, and we carry on

In the breath between the here and gone ...

Hailed.

OXFORD CHEESE ODE

The ancient poets ne'er did dream

That Canada was land of cream,

They ne'er imagined it could flow

In this cold land of ice and snow,

Where everything did solid freeze,

They ne'er hoped or looked for cheese.

A few years since our Oxford farms

Were nearly robbed of all their charms,

O'er cropped the weary land grew poor

And nearly barren as a moor,

But now their owners live at ease

Rejoicing in their crop of cheese.

And since they justly treat the soil,

Are well rewarded for their toil,

The land enriched by goodly cows

Yields plenty now to fill their mows,

Both wheat and barley, oats and peas,

But still their greatest boast is cheese.

And you must careful fill your mows

With good provender for your cows,

And in the winter keep them warm,

Protect them safe all time from harm,

For cows do dearly love their ease,

Which doth insure best grade of cheese.

To us it is a glorious theme

To sing of milk and curds and cream,

Were it collected it could float

On its bosom, small steam boat,

Cows numerous as swarm of bees

Are milked in Oxford to make cheese.

To prove the wealth that here abounds,

One cheese weighed eight thousand pounds,

Had it been hung in air at noon

Folks would have thought it was the moon,

It sailed with triumph o'er the seas,

'Twas hailed with welcome, queen of cheese.

James McIntyre

Quietly.

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

                      But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Happy Birthday, Corradini

Corradini, Veiled Truth, 1752

Antonio Corradini was born on this day in 1688.

Thank you, Dr, Richardson.

Meditate.

Trumbull, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, 1788

On this day in 1781, British troops commanded by Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, signalling the end of the American Revolution.

The Architect of the Capitol explains John Trumbull's painting ...

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis in the Capitol Rotunda is one of two paintings that artist John Trumbull completed on this subject. He painted this version between 1819 and 1820, basing it upon a small painting (approximately 20 inches by 30 inches) that he had first envisioned in 1785, when he began to “meditate seriously the subjects of national history, of events of the Revolution.”

Sublime.

Biéler, La Raclette, 1903

Fingers warm against my abdomen

a Raclette, burning and dripping sweat,

and I need to melt yet, against

the hardest parts of Greco-Roman.

Bodies release like Swiss cheese

scraped off you into my roundest bits,

permanently pressed cheese sandwiches;

the pungent smell of release.

Oh, how sublime, the ancient rind,

curving splendor, a fountain sip

of perfectly paired white wine lips,

roasting flames with your gooey hips;

I love you best when unrefined.

Katie Frances Hartless

Complicit.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense. Nonsense of this kind is a bid to be accepted. 

Sir Roger Scruton, from "The Great Swindle"

Excellent.

An(other) excellent album ...

Jethro Tull, "Heavy Horses/Moths"

Enter.

Munnings, The Old Oak, 1959

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? 

E.M. Forster, from Howards End

Sense.

No matter how old we get there should always be that sense of living on the margin of impossibility.  Some people are frightened by it, some are elated, but I believe the sense of the impossible can be used to sharpen our senses to what we are doing and where, if anywhere, we are going.

Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

Cleverness.

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

 

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Happy Birthday, Giordano

Giordano, The Triumph of Bacchus with Ariadne, 162

Lucca Giordano was born on this day in 1632.

Jethro Tull, "Velvet Green"

Walking on Velvet Green

Scotch pine growing

Isn't it rare to be taking the air?

Happy Birthday, Canaletto

Canaletto, The City Seen Through an Arch of Westminster Bridge, 1747

Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, was born on this day in 1697.

Now.

'Tis Autumn.  The weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon." 

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to these ...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Happy Birthday, Great-Grandpa Firchau

My namesake, Carl Robert Firchau, was born on this day in 1884.

The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts. 

Blaise Pascal

Undergo.

As the folktale sees I see.

As the folktale lives I live.

And the path to my door, that too is a folktale.

Coming here you either undergo what people undergo in a folktale, or you will never lift my latch.

Little wonder I so rarely hear my latch being lifted.

John Moriarty

Sharps.

Buchholz, Untitled, 1957

Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again.  The fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October.

Thomas Wolfe, from Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

But.

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: "This tower is most interesting." But they also said (after pushing it over): "What a muddle it is in!" And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: "He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did he not restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion." But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics

Happy Birthday, Wilde

The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

Oscar Wilde, born on this day in 1854

Beautiful.

Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms -- you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.

Seneca

It's beautiful, it's like a bird humming.

Now.

...[T]o think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.

Frederick Buechner

Thank you, Kurt.

Done.

Done and done.

Nobody-But-Yourself.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e.e. cummings, born on this day in 1894

Listen.

Entire.

The entire sixty-five episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater.

Then.

Monteverdi, Beatus vir, SV 268

Perrine Devillers sings with some other people ...