Thanks for looking.
Seattle Photo-I Hear You
Tuesday Quotation-Mark Twain
‘A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way’
Some Twain on cats quotes.
Some from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats.‘
Seattle Photo-The Letter B
Friday Poem-W.H. Auden
On The Circuit
Among pelagian travelers,
Lost on their lewd conceited way
To Massachusetts, Michigan,
Miami or L.A.,
An airborne instrument I sit,
Predestined nightly to fulfill
Columbia-Giesen-Management’s
Unfathomable will,
By whose election justified,
I bring my gospel of the Muse
To fundamentalists, to nuns,
to Gentiles and to Jews,
And daily, seven days a week,
Before a local sense has jelled,
From talking-site to talking-site
Am jet-or-prop-propelled.
Though warm my welcome everywhere,
I shift so frequently, so fast,
I cannot now say where I was
The evening before last,
Unless some singular event
Should intervene to save the place,
A truly asinine remark,
A soul-bewitching face,
Or blessed encounter, full of joy,
Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan,
With, here, an addict of Tolkien,
There, a Charles Williams fan.
Since Merit but a dunghill is,
I mount the rostrum unafraid:
Indeed, ‘twere damnable to ask
If I am overpaid.
Spirit is willing to repeat
Without a qualm the same old talk,
But Flesh is homesick for our snug
Apartment in New York.
A sulky fifty-six, he finds
A change of mealtime utter hell,
Grown far too crotchety to like
A luxury hotel.
The Bible is a goodly book
I always can peruse with zest,
But really cannot say the same
For Hilton’s Be My Guest.
Nor bear with equanimity
The radio in students’ cars,
Muzak at breakfast, or–dear God!–
Girl-organists in bars.
Then, worst of all, the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?
Is this a milieu where I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic swig?
Another morning comes: I see,
Dwindling below me on the plane,
The roofs of one more audience
I shall not see again.
God bless the lot of them, although
I don’t remember which was which:
God bless the U.S.A., so large,
So friendly, and so rich.
Seattle Photo-Red Light, Green Light
I like the colors. Something to work towards…thanks for looking
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Seattle Photo-X Marks The Spot
Seattle Photos-A Gull, Considered
—
This was Harry at his most presentable: A shrewd cunning in stillness. Perhaps, he’d even brought me a question.
He was half-again as large as the other gulls near the Market. Not respected, maybe, but feared.
My mind would wander to thoughts of freedom, watching his wings dip and scissor, cutting the air. Sometimes I would watch his eyes, too, scouring the ground for food and the sky for other birds.
The constant shrieking and territorial displays were better than silence, Dear Reader, especially if thoughts of death crept in (how much I missed L).
—
Harry had other behaviors: Gobbling fish guts and slurping coffee directly from the street. One day, he’d snatched a french-fry mid-air from a child’s fingers. After the shock and a brief consolation, we smiled in mutual surprise.
Clever, I suppose.
In short, Harry didn’t give a shit.
In fact, the bird shit wherever he pleased.
This is where our story begins…
Seattle Photo-Craftsman Blue
Friday Poem-W.S. Merwin
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color
This poem commemorates a deep loss in my life. After the shock of sudden death, we each found ourselves a deep pool to wade through. Don’t worry, Dear Reader. Time gives memories back; the thoughtless remarks, the bad jokes, and conversations seemingly gone forever.
Keep moving. If you find your heart hardened in the wake of death or loss, find yourself in light.
Two Photos Around An Aesthetic-Ye Olde Shopping Mall
Just had a quick visit to family in the D.C. area, and Georgetown has a lot of high-end shops. A vague notion of London flashed through my mind. This is an area with appeal; where attractive women go to shop, see the sights, and be seen.
How does one capture the aesthetic (brick facades, colonial style, gothic script, ye ‘Olde English Shoppe’ vibe)?
The light was winter-light, mid-latitude, coming from over the left-shoulder/south/southwest. There were a lot of subjects, and lots of visual interest.
In photo number one, the reflection seems balanced, but the focus should probably be on one subject, preferably the guy (tough to manage if he’s only reflected). In number two, the umbrella on the right should probably in focus.
Neither are ‘winners’, really, but both have solid elements. They demonstrate that, over time, while taking photographs, you can continue to add judgment upon judgment, experience upon experience, into a ‘tool belt.’ You must make decisions, quick decisions on the street, regarding focus (what’s in focus?), light (shutter, how much to let in?), subject (what’s the story you want to tell?), and composition (what’s in frame, and what did you leave out?).
Each variable is crucial, and in this case, there are some focus and subject (static/boring) issues, to be sure.
Thanks for looking and reading.
—
Thursday Poem-Joseph Brodsky
1 January 1965
The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.
What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.
You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It’s clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it’s too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven’s light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.
Seattle Photo-Bridge & Mountain
—-
Dear Nestle, my father taught me the importance of chocolate. I’m submitting this entry to your Nestle Alpine White ‘Sweet Dreams’ campaign.
Better late than never.
Repost-Two Quotations
“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
‘It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.’
Seattle Photo-Tired Of Walking
Seattle Photo-Don’t Buy That Condo!
The photo’s all real. Just playing around with some text.
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Kojak’ll chase a perp down a garbage-strewn alley on the lower East Side. Right around minute fifty, just before the last ads for life insurance and Polident.
Someone’s gotta let the mother of another dead hooker taste a little justice.
Maybe a sharply-spoken word unloosens memory; a lost soul’s dreams, floating to some place in the sky.
Maybe amidst the stench of dopeheads and their dealers, greed and thoughtless action..a splash of Old Spice reminds us all of a little thing called hope.
—
This is my favorite:
Friday Poem-A.E. Stallings
The Mistake
The mistake was light and easy in my hand,
A seed meant to be borne upon the wind.
I did not have to bury it or throw,
Just open up my hand and let it go.
The mistake was dry and small and without weight,
A breeze quickly snatched it from my sight,
And even had I wanted to prevent,
Nobody could tell me where it went.
I did not think on the mistake again,
Until the spring came, soft, and full of rain,
And in the yard such dandelions grew
That bloomed and closed, and opened up, and blew
Seattle Photo-Winter Rain
Thanks for looking.
Seattle Photo-Under The Bridge
Tuesday Poem-Philip Larkin
The Old Fools
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?
At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
Seattle Photo-Husky Sunday
That’s a good-looking dog
Seattle Photo-Light
Friday Poem-Wallace Stevens
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Seattle Photo-Silhouette Spot-Fog, Clear Skies & Fire-Smoke
Different conditions from the same ol’ spot. Thanks for looking. If you have a favorite, let me know.
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Seattle Photos-Santa Waits To Take Us All ‘Across The Lake’ If You Know What I Mean
Merry Christmas! Thanks for looking.
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Seattle Photo-Kirkland Night Shot
Sunday Photo-Red Chains
The incomparable Fiorina Bellagamba makes an appearance in Seattle…
Merry Christmas 2023
As posted: (it’s a long one): ‘Postmodern Religion And The Faith Of Social Justice‘
Let’s say you use mathematics and/or engineer systems, in pursuit of new knowledge and truth.
Come worship at the Human Pagoda!
Are you an artist, captivated by the beauty of this world?
We have an ecopodment for you.
At the cutting-edge Institute of Global Citizens (IGC), we draft rules for tomorrow’s leaders.
As a thought-leader, your contributions will feed into a Council of Purely Democratic Representation, uniting our fractured world and restoring Nature’s purity.
Swim in the warm bath of the (S)elf. Float in the bowl of Romantic Nature.
Freedom is next at Peace Pavilion West.
As posted, someone called me a Postmodern Conservative a while back, and I’d just like to say that there are many identities juxtaposed at the intersectionality of bodies in space. Dominant narratives, meta-narratives, and counter-narratives serve to liber…
Merry Christmas!
R.I.P.
Very Near The Darkest Evening Of The Year-Robert Frost
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Seattle Photo-Shipping Sunrise
Thursday Photo-Color Practice
Saturday Poem-Robert Frost
The Wood-Pile
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day
I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther – and we shall see’.
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
Seattle Photo-Same Old Sunset Spot
It’s what I got when I get the time. Thanks for looking.
Tuesday Poem-Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Seattle Photo-Looking South
A Philip Larkin Poem And A Memory From An Irish Vacation
Dublinesque
Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.
The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.
There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),
And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
Of some interest?:
One evening, my family found ourselves around a communal table (for lack of space) in a small-town Irish pub. With two red-faced British couples, also on vacation, in their fifties or so, we made conversation. Surrounded by locals, one of the Brits began to wax philosophic: ‘What do we think of the Irish?’ ‘Well…let’s say the Irish are really just British who’ve wandered off a bit’, gesturing to everyone around.
I remember…being quite shocked. I looked towards the face of the older tweed-coated gentleman, elbow to elbow next to me.
No reaction?
His eyes were blank, slightly downcast.
I then remember thinking: ‘Them’s fightin’ words, yessiree bob, or enough to get yourself into a real pickle back home.’ (my inner narrator is an old hobo/prospector).
Welcome to (H)istory.
Seattle Photo-Fog Race
Thanks for looking.
Seattle Photo-Wind Practice
Happy Thanksgiving 2023
Thanks for stopping by and to everyone that has.
I hope yours is a feast with good drink, loved ones and family.
All the best!
Tuesday Poem-Robert Hayden
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering,breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Seattle Photo-Strange City
Seattle Photo-Crosswalk
Happy Veterans Day 2023
Thank you for your service.
Seattle Photo-Public Art
Thanks for looking.
Seattle Photo & A Poem By Richard Wilbur
Today, rousing from sleep, if your first sight was that of a young couple consumed by one another, silent within the silences of conversation, would it be as dark as the following?
I hope not!
Thanks to a reader.
From Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’
…“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
Tuesday Poem-Wendell Berry
The Peace Of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Seattle Photo-Sunday Morning Fog
Thanks for looking. Updated.
Seattle Photo-Morning Light
‘I walked all night. I walked until the puddles dried and pockets of steam drifted slowly over the Sound.‘
‘Why were there only four employees on a night shift floor where there should be forty?‘
‘Why was a fifty year-old packing floor shining like new?‘
—
Sunday Photo-October Sunset
Hope you’re having a good Sunday.
Thanks for stopping by, and to everyone that has.
Seattle Photo-Hill & Cloud
If this were an ad, what would the product be? Asking for a friend.
Seattle Photo-More Fog Practice
Thanks for looking.
Monday Poem-James Merrill
A Renewal
Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break.
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on.
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.
Seattle Photo-Commerce In Fog
It used to be coal underground, down to the lake and out to the Sound.
Seattle Photo-Fog Day
Seattle Photo-Focus
Allow The Glow-Some Random Neon And Non-Neon Links On Place & The American West
Via Mick Hartley, Steve Fitch Photography has neon motel signs glowing into the Western night.
He also has a book simply titled ‘Motel Signs:’
“To me, neon really figured in the migration movement on Route 66. The farther you go out West, the more neon you’d see, especially as a presence on motels. You can see towns like Tucumcari, New Mexico, coming from 20 miles away.”
I may harbor skepticism regarding a more anthropological, back-to-Earth Romantic primitivism found in certain quarters (Berkeley, especially), but I certainly appreciate good composition. Click through for more photos and less pre-judgment.
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As posted, what’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?
Nabokov in America: On The Road To Lolita.
Michael Dirda review of the review here.
“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’
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Well, there’s Donald Judd and Marfa, Texas, which looks interesting:
As previously posted, The Critic Laughs, by Hamilton:
Do you long for the days of unabashed American consumerism? Are you nostalgic for nights lit only by a soft, neon glow on the underbellies of clouds? Return to a time when America broadcast its brash, unironic call to the heavens.
But it can be empty, and lonely, and full of hard work and suffering:
Montana Pastoral
I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,
Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
And thistle, mustard and the wild oat stay.
There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.
So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove
To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove,
And found no images of pastoral will,
But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.
And because this blog likes to keep things a bit mysterious, I think ‘New Slang’ by the Shins (James Mercer) captures three strands I can identify: Western U.S. cowboy folk (Home On The Range), English (England) folk, and Pacific NW hipsterdom, which is interesting to me, and because in the arts, I like to like a song, and think about what’s going on afterwards:
That hipsterdom part likely connects with a lot of powerful modern and postmodern strands which could be affecting all of our institutions sooner or later, but, you know…it’s also just a song.
Click here.
Is that a real tower against a painted sky?
Go West.
Seattle Photo-Fence & City
Friday Poem-William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans At Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Rowing Practice
Bank Lunch Blue
Some people like this kind of thing. Thanks for looking.
Wednesday Poem-Wallace Stevens
Postcard From The Volcano
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
A little authoritative and paternal, but a Romantic poet. A modernist, brilliant with language but precise in meaning, abstract, somewhat philosophical. They say he had a deathbed conversion. Here’s another line of his:
“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.“
And then just to frustrate matters more:
Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
See Also: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…and while I may not agree with his conclusions, Denis Dutton knows aesthetics pretty well and philosophy too: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘John Passmore on Hume: Section 1′
Seattle Photo-Last Days Of Summer
Sunday Quotation-Mark Twain
‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.’
The Figure 5-A Weekend Poem By William Carlos Williams & A Photo
The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
I like Charles Demuth’s fidelity to the original, and use of imagist-imagination. The figure 5 comprises such an important part of the poem.
‘Imagism was a sub-genre of Modernism concerned with creating clear imagery with sharp language. The essential idea was to re-create the physical experience of an object through words. As with all of Modernism, Imagism implicitly rejected Victorian poetry, which tended toward narrative.‘
And:
‘The most exemplified phase of Modernism, referred to as “High Modernism,” occurred during the inter-war years (1918-1939). This was the time when writers synonymous with Modernism, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, thrived. While Victorians typically concerned themselves with rendering reality as they understood it into fiction, Modernists recognized that reality was subjective, and instead strove to represent human psychology in fiction.‘
During the post-war years, the confessionals, with a fair amount of free and blank verse became dominant, with a kind of feelings-first, psychological exploration of the (S)elf.
Dear Reader, this photograph represents the closest I’ve gotten to elements of the modernist imagination so far. I hope you enjoy. The Straussian movement pushes back to a kind of classicist revival, an embrace of tradition, and rejection of much modernity.
***On second-thought, the photo of these parts of very real thing is abstracted into a kind of modernesque design.
Fire Truck Mirrors & A Bit Of Sky
Out-Of-Focus Photo-Caption This
‘Can I talk to you real quick about supplements?’
Monday Photo-Crate For Sitting
Saturday Poem-Robert Frost
After Apple-Picking
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Repost-Via a Reader via Scientific American: ‘An Update On C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures:”
Essay here (PDF).
‘Earlier this summer marked the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” essay, in which he lamented the great cultural divide that separates two great areas of human intellectual activity, “science” and “the arts.” Snow argued that practitioners in both areas should build bridges, to further the progress of human knowledge and to benefit society.’
My two cents: This blog tends to worry about modern ‘one culture’ visions, too.
On the one hand, you’ve got your ‘scientific socialism;’ the clear dead-end, totalizing Marxist theories of history and various neo-Marxist movements having since colonized many faculty-lounges, HR departments, and media pulpits across America.
Deep, bad ideas tend to live on once plugged into many deep, human desires and dreams. The radical pose will be with us for a while.
Of course, it’s rather sad to witness the sheepish, suburban apologetics of identity amongst the chattering classes; the moment of surprise and fear when a previously insulated writer (leaning upon traditions) realizes today just is their day in the barrel.
Sooner or later you’re going to have to stand up for your principles.
—
You’ve also got many modern ‘-Ist’ movements, which, whatever truth and knowledge claims they may contain (some quite important ones, I think), are often quick to conflate the means of science with the ends of politics. ‘Join us,’ they say, and become a part of the modern world. The mission of ‘Education’ is easily mistaken for knowledge, learning with wisdom, collective group action with individual achievement.
There is a kind of a high middlebrow drift towards….I’m not sure where, exactly.
Alas, if you’re still with me, here are some links:
“...in the days when, to get a Ph.D., you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hard-core scientific basis for literary study.”
and of the New Criticism he says:
“I’ve been skeptical from the beginning of attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have missed the real point,”
Did literature professors at one point have something more substantive to teach?
In a broader context, hasn’t the Western mind has shifted to “science,” instead of God as a deepest idea, and so too isn’t literature a part of this shift?
As Richard Rorty sees it, no standard objective for truth exists but for the interpretation of a few philosophers interpreting whatever of philosophy they’ve read. It’s all just an author’s “stuff.” Here’s an excerpt discussing the debate between him and Hilary Putnam:
Addition: Western mind shifted to “science?”…well as for poetry T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens had some fairly profound religious influences.
See Also: Should You Bother To Get A Liberal Arts Education? From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’
Repost-Heather McDonald At The WSJ: ‘ The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’
***Whom do you trust for discussions of the arts and culture, and would you just rather publications be up front about their ideological bents and loyalties?
Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
Photo-Jet Lag
Sometimes when it happens fast, it passes like a dream.
Photo-Beach Breakdown
Friday Poem-Seamus Heaney
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.