Happy Birthday, Anderson

Ian Anderson was born on this day in 1947.

"The Secret Language of Birds" with Jethro Tull ...

Happy Birthday, Dryden

Kneller, John Dryden, 1697

Calm was the even, and clear was the sky,

      And the new budding flowers did spring,

When all alone went Amyntas and I

      To hear the sweet nightingale sing;

I sate, and he laid him down by me;

      But scarcely his breath he could draw;

For when with a fear, he began to draw near,

      He was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha!

He blush'd to himself, and lay still for a while,

      And his modesty curb'd his desire;

But straight I convinc'd all his fear with a smile,

      Which added new flames to his fire.

O Silvia, said he, you are cruel,

      To keep your poor lover in awe;

Then once more he press'd with his hand to my breast,

      But was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha!

I knew 'twas his passion that caus'd all his fear;

      And therefore I pitied his case:

I whisper'd him softly, there's nobody near,

      And laid my cheek close to his face:

But as he grew bolder and bolder,

      A shepherd came by us and saw;

And just as our bliss we began with a kiss,

      He laugh'd out with A ha ha ha ha!

John Dryden, born on this day in 1631

Big.

Hillers, Big Navajo, 1879

Rollins Band, "Shine"

No such thing as spare time

No such thing as free time

No such thing as down time

All you got is life time

Go ...

Happy Birthday, Piaget

Jean Piaget was born on this day in 1896.

Pssst!  Public education!  Are you listening?

Happy Birthday, Shaw

My favorite actor, Robert Shaw, was born on this day in 1927.

Quint's tale of the USS Indianapolis ...

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail.

What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that shark he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes ...

Anyway ... we delivered the bomb.

Happy Birthday, Walton

Huysmans, Portrait of Walton, 1672

Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration. 

Izaak Walton

Rossini, The Barber of Seville

Catherine Trottmann performs "Una voce poco fa" with L’Olympia Symphonique, conducted Yvan Cassard ...

Morrissey, "How Soon is Now"

Gin, rocks, anchovy olives.

Siouxsie & The Banshees, "Spellbound"

You hear laughter

Cracking through the walls

It sends you spinning

You have no choice ...

"Shoplifters of the World Unite"

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Smiths, 1986 ...

Morrissey, 2005 ...

Happy Birthday, Renbourn

John Renbourn was born on this day in 1944.

"Rosslyn" ...

Will.

SELECTING a READER

First, I would have her be beautiful,

and walking carefully up on my poetry

at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,

her hair still damp at the neck

from washing it. She should be wearing

a raincoat, an old one, dirty

from not having money enough for the cleaners.

She will take out her glasses, and there

in the bookstore, she will thumb

over my poems, then put the book back

up on its shelf. She will say to herself,

“For that kind of money, I can get

my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

Ted Kooser

Stories.

Over the past few months I spent many hours in the library of my childhood.  

A librarian told me a few stories ...

Observations.

Back in Ohio ...

Bach, Sonata in E minor, BWV 1034

Kristine West, recorder, Stina Petersson, cello, and Marcus Mohlin, clanger, perform the Andante and Allegro...

Happy Birthday, Bulfinch

Bulfinch, Tontine Crescent, 1794

Charles Bulfinch was born on this day in 1763.

"Building Boston: The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch," a lecture presented by Joseph Cornish, architectural historian and director of Design Review of the Boston Landmarks Commission ...

INXS, "Spy of Love"

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

Vivaldi: Dixit Dominus, R. 807

Sara Mingardo performs the "De torrente in via bibet" with the Dresden Instrumental-Concert, directed by Peter Kopp ...

Matters.

Happy Birthday, Tennyson

Cameron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1866

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born on this date in 1809.

CROSSING the BAR

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Glimmer.

Ssssssssstones, "Waiting on a Friend"

McEnroe/Borg: Fire & Ice

Endsleigh.

Wyatville, Endsleigh Cottage, Dairy, and Grotto, c. 1815

Jeffry Wyatville was born this week in 1766.

Thank you, Dr. Kitchen.

Mozart, Così Fan Tutte, K. 588

Catherine Trottmann performs "Una Donna a Quindici Anni" ...

Work.

Keith, "Eileen"

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 ... Eddie Money, "Gamblin' Man" ...

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

Aretha Franklin, "Don't Play that Song"

Highest.

Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1810

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Walter Pater

Lifts.

Severn, Posthumous Portrait of Shelley, 1845

[Poetry] awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "A Defence of Poetry"

Marini, Passacaglia

Performed by the Laussane Bach Ensemble ...

Happy Birthday, Pater

The charm ... of what is classical, in art or literature, is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us. “Romanticism,” says Stendhal, “is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.” But then, beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion—of music—which what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tranquilize us. The “classic” comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty, which they possess indeed in a pre-eminent degree, and which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper. Curiosity, and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as in all true criticism. When one’s curiosity is deficient, when one is not eager enough for new impressions and new pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical properties too highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture which passed so long for true Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere irritation. 

Walter Pater, from "The Classic and Romantic in Literature", born on this day in 1839

Yes, "Magnification"

Quest.

I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits.

Harold Bloom, from The Western Canon

Happy Birthday, Shelley

THE CLOUD

From the seas and the streams; 

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid 

In their noonday dreams. 

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 

The sweet buds every one, 

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, 

As she dances about the sun. 

I wield the flail of the lashing hail, 

And whiten the green plains under, 

And then again I dissolve it in rain, 

And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below, 

And their great pines groan aghast; 

And all the night 'tis my pillow white, 

While I sleep in the arms of the blast. 

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, 

Lightning my pilot sits; 

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, 

It struggles and howls at fits; 

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, 

This pilot is guiding me, 

Lured by the love of the genii that move 

In the depths of the purple sea; 

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, 

Over the lakes and the plains, 

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, 

The Spirit he loves remains; 

And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile, 

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, 

And his burning plumes outspread, 

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, 

When the morning star shines dead; 

As on the jag of a mountain crag, 

Which an earthquake rocks and swings, 

An eagle alit one moment may sit 

In the light of its golden wings. 

And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, 

Its ardours of rest and of love, 

And the crimson pall of eve may fall 

From the depth of Heaven above, 

With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest, 

As still as a brooding dove.

That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, 

Whom mortals call the Moon, 

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, 

By the midnight breezes strewn; 

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, 

Which only the angels hear, 

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, 

The stars peep behind her and peer; 

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, 

Like a swarm of golden bees, 

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, 

Till calm the rivers, lakes, and seas, 

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, 

Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, 

And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; 

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, 

When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. 

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, 

Over a torrent sea, 

Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, 

The mountains its columns be. 

The triumphal arch through which I march 

With hurricane, fire, and snow, 

When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, 

Is the million-coloured bow; 

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, 

While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, 

And the nursling of the Sky; 

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; 

I change, but I cannot die. 

For after the rain when with never a stain 

The pavilion of Heaven is bare, 

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams 

Build up the blue dome of air, 

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 

And out of the caverns of rain, 

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, 

I arise and unbuild it again. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, born on this day in 1792

The Cars, "Touch and Go"

Oh-oh-oh ...

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"

CONNECT

Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, "Four"

Marcus King, "Hard Working Man"

Thanks, Jess.

Time.

Martini-time, time to draw the curtains and

Choose a composer we should like to hear from

W.H. Auden

Morrissey, "Panic"

Burn down the disco

Hang the blessed DJ

Because the music that they constantly play

It says nothing to me about my life ...

Stop.

Stop it.  Stop beginning sentences by saying, "I mean ..."

Stop it.

Individual.

Professor Bloom on preposterous "-isms" (from 2015) ...

Our burden as teachers now, even someone as old as I am, is in a sense something beyond our ability to teach.  There is a vast change in the cultural climate, which has devalued the very difficult act of solitary deep reading. 

Whether you call it feminism, which is not really feminism, has nothing to do with equal rights for women, or whether you call it transgenderism, or ethnicity, or Marxism, or any of these French manifestations, be it deconstruction or one mode of differential linguistics or another, or whether you call it -- what I think is mislabeled -- the new historicism, because it's neither new nor historicism, but simply a dilution of Foucault, a man whom I knew and liked personally, but whose influence I think has been pernicious, just as Derida's, with whom I also shared a friendship until eventually we broke with each other. All these "isms" are preposterous of course; they have nothing to do with the study of literature or with its originality. As I've said before, the aesthetic is an individual and not a social concern.

Released.

Talking Heads released Fear of Music on this day in 1979.

"Cities" ...

Back.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.

"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So."

Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."

Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick or, the Whale, chapter 119, "The Candles"

Yes, "The Messenger"

Appleton.

Firchau, Appleton, August 3, 2013, 2013