Welcome.

Wyeth, N.C., Chadds Ford Hills, 1931

The AUTUMN WIND

1

The Autumn wind on suthering wings

Plays round the oak-tree strong

And through the hawthorn hedges sings

The years departing song

There's every leaf upon the whirl

Ten thousand times an hour

The grassy meadows crisp and curl

With here and there a flower

There's nothing in the world I find

That pleases like the Autumn wind.

2

The chaffinch flies from out the bushes

The bluecap " tee hees" on the tree

The wind sues on in merry gushes

His murmuring autumns minstrelsy

The robin sings his autumn song

Upon the crabtree overhead

The clouds like smoak slow sail along

Leaves rustle like the human tread

There's nothing suits my musing mind

So pleasant as the Autumn wind.

3

How many miles it suthers on

And stays to dally with the leaves

And when the first broad blast is gone

A stronger gust the foliage heaves

The poplar tree it turns to gray

As leaves lift up their underside

The birch it dances all the day

To rippling billows petrified

There's nothing calms the quiet mind

So welcome as the Autumn wind.

4

Sweet twittering o'er the meadow grass

Soft sueing o'er the fallow ground

The lark starts up as on they pass

With many a gush and moaning sound

It fans the feathers of the bird

And ruffs the robins ruddy breast

As round the hovel end it whirled

Then sobs and gallops o'er the west

In solitude the musing mind

Must ever love the Autumn wind.

John Clare

'Tis Autumn.

Magic.

Again.

Beaton, Gertrude Lawrence by a Mirror, 1930

My Shagri-La beneath the Summer moon,

I will return again

Now, on to the Oyster Months ...

Arresting.

Today. In 1979 ...

Best.

Released.

Poco released Ghost Town on this day in 1982.

Unleashes.

Thanks, Kurt.

Happy Birthday, Lanois

"That's the Way It Is" ...

Released.

Triumph released Allied Forces on this day in 1981.

"Fight the Good Fight" ...

Happy Birthday, Golding

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.

William Golding, born on this day in 1911

History.

Huffman, American Horse being Interviewed by O. D. Wheeler on the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1898

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell

Antilibrary.

Spitweg, The Bookworm, 1851

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Wisdom.

Wise.

Delight.

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

Joseph Campbell

Telemann, Fantasia for Violin without Bass, TWV 40:14

Arranged for lute and performed by Xavier Díaz-Latorre ...

Hiawatha.

Happy Birthday, Johnson

Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1756 

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove. 

 Dr. Samuel Johnson, born on this day in 1709

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Waybill

Fee Waybill was born on this day in 1950.

"Tip of My Tongue" ...

Powerful.

Buck.

It's the last Saturday of the summer, so the Happy Hour specials tonight are margaritas, buy-one-get-one, and chicken nachos, half price.  Drink up, Jim.

As always, it's five plays for a buck on the jukebox ...

Pablo Cruise, "A Place in the Sun"

America, "Ventura Highway"

Firefall, "Strange Way"

Bread, "Guitar Man"

Ambrosia, "Holdin' on to Yesterday"

Cheap Trick, "Mandocello"

Meet.

Hunters.

Wyeth, Frog Hunters, 1941

Excellent.

Became.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

Alberto Manguel

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

My love of life is tentative so I write to ensure my survival. I try to write well so I won’t be caught shitting out of my mouth like a politician. To the old banality “Eat or die,” I add “Eat and write or die.” After writing I often read Brillat-Savarin, also cookbooks, on the toilet. Then I try to cook as well as I hope I write. After a nap, I write again, in the manner of an earthdiver swimming in the soil to understand the roots and tendrils of trees. I anchor myself to these circular life processes so as not to piss away my life on nonsense. I hunt and fish because it helps my writing. Novels and poems are the creeks and rivers coming out of my brain. I continue writing in bleak times to support my wife and daughters, my dogs and cats, to buy wine, whiskey, food. I write as an act of worship to creatures, landscapes, ideas that I admire, to commemorate the dead, to create new women to love. Just now while listening to the blizzard outside I poured a huge glass of Bordeaux. This is what I call fun! Rimbaud said, “Everything we are taught is false.” I believed him when I was eighteen and still do. Writers are mere goats who must see the world we live in but have never discovered. I write to continue becoming an unmapped river. It suits me like my skin.

Jim Harrison, from “Why I Write”

Castello, Sonata Decima

Quicksilver Baroque performs ...

Happy Birthday, von Steuben

Peale, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus, Baron von Steuben, 1780

Friedrich von Steuben was born on this day in 1730.

A letter to George Washington ...

From Steuben
Portsmouth, N.H., 6 December 1777
Honorable Sir,

The inclosed Copy of a Letter whose Original I Shall have the honor to present to your Excellency, will instruct you of the motives that brought me over to this Land. I shall add only to it that the Object of my greatest Ambition is to render your Country all the Services in my Power, and to deserve the title of a Citizen of America by fighting for the Cause of your Liberty.1

If the distinguished Ranks I have Served in in Europe Should be an Obstacle, I had rather Serve under Your Excellency as a Volunteer, than to be a Subject of Discontent to Such deserving Officers as have already distinguished themselves amongst you.

Such being the Sentiments I always profest, I dare hope that the respectable Congress of the United States of America, will accept my Services. I could Say moreover (Were it not for the fear of offending your Modesty) that your Excellency is the only Person under whom (after having Served under the King of Prussia) I could wish to pursue an Art to which I have Wholly given up my Self.

I intend to go to Boston in a few Days where I shall present my Letters to the Honble John Hancock Esqr. Member of Congress, and there I shall wait for your Excellency’s Orders, according to which I shall take convenient Measures. I have the honor to be with respect Honorable Sir Your Excellency’s most obedient and most humble servant

Steuben

Mayflower.

On this day in 1620, the Mayflower set sail for Virginia from Plymouth, England with 102 passengers onboard.

Respighi, Six Pieces for Piano

Roberto Plano performs the Notturno ...

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 ... The Tubes Group, "Turn Me On"

Love me like you mean it

Make a mess and clean it

Don't you stop 'til I tell you when ...

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

Deadly.

It's Theodore Thursday, boys and girls ...

Haunts.

Peretti-Griva, Italian Girl, 1920

Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious, because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.

Louise Glück

Happy Birthday, Cooper

Jarvis, James Fenimore Cooper, 1830

The woods are but the ears of the Almighty, the air is his breath, and the light of the sun is little more than a glance of his eye.

James Fenimore Cooper, born on this day in 1789, from The Deerslayer

Released.

Jethro Tull released Stormwatch on this day in 1979.

"Dun Ringill" 

We'll wait in stone circles

'Til the force comes through ---

Lines joint in faint discord

And the stormwatch brews 

A concert of kings

As the white sea snaps

At the heels of a soft prayer

Whispered

In the wee hours I'll meet you

Down by Dun Ringill ---

JAMF.

Talented.

Solitude.

Rapacki, In the Library, 1928

All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Released.

Ronnie Wood released I've Got My Own Album to Do on this day in 1974.

I can hear you calling me

Prettiest girl that I've ever seen

Ronald David Wood, from "I Can Feel the Fire"

Wash.

Before listening to the way, do not fail to wash your ears.

Otherwise it will be impossible to listen clearly.

What is washing your ears?

Do not hold on to your view.

If you cling to it even a little bit,

you will lose your way.

What is similar to you but wrong, you regard as right.

What is different from you but right, you regard as wrong.

You begin with ideas of right and wrong.

But the way is not so.

Seeking answers with closed ears is

like trying to touch the ocean bottom with a pole.

 

Ryokan

Happy Birthday, Owens

Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.

Jesse Owens, born on this day in 1913

Happy Birthday, Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken, born on this day in 1880.

Flows.

We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. 

We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. 

We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. 

We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. 

 

We spend our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears.

We are endlessly seeking security. 

 

Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted.

Henepola Gunaratana

Promotional.

Peak.

Strikes.

Addictive.

Fairs.