why we shouldn’t just go ahead and have a tropical storm, can you?
I’ll be getting things in order throughout the day. May even venture out to the the old Dollar General to see why sort of trouble I can find. JK. I don’t go looking for trouble.
I was scrounging the Apartment the other day looking for things Mom would be interested in. I came across a CD– left by Daughter C & The J-Man– titled “Dinner Music.” I went to the storeroom, found a mini-boombox, plugged it in and previewed “Dinner Music.” It was not. But it did remind me that we had a delightful CD of Itzhak Perlman doing Scott Joplin. So we listened.
Dinner was Tuesday Southern Vegetarian Night. Delicious. No bones. Just a pound of bacon. Southern Vegetarian.
Listening to Joplin reminded us of The Sting. So we pulled it up and watched the whole thing while relaxing on a 3.5′ x 6′ space back here in the Den on 60 acres.
What a great movie!
SueK was 100% correct and I was– well, I got drove in the correct spot on my first attempt before SueK corrected me.
We’re diagramming this sentence:
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
Today in 1816, J.G. Saxe was born.
Today in 1840, Thomas Hardy was born.
My goodness! That infallible source really comes through for us today and that is not snark.
John Godfrey Saxe I (June 2, 1816 – March 31, 1887) was an American poet known for his re-telling of the Indian parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant“,[1] which introduced the story to a Western audience. He also said “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe
Which is exactly the reason Mr. Big Food and I make sausage!
Ah man. A sort of sad life’s tale. His satirical works made him famous in his day– he enjoyed popularity as a speaker– but his brother, his wife, and five of his six children died– the kids from tuberculosis.
Funny isn’t it? Never heard of the guy, yet four of today’s five reading are Saxe’s. The name, Thomas Hardy, is known by all today. One selection.
Daily Reading June 2
I’m calling BS on this:
*NWTE Not Worth the Effort.
May you enjoy all the things today– health, safety, and reading.
This is sort of a re-post from a few years ago. Here’s what I said at the time:
It was delicious. It’s from Healthy Home Cooking: Fresh Ways with Poultry, The Editors of Time-Life Books (1986). Look how involved the instructions are. If I’m remembering correctly, in 1986 we women were wearing suit jackets with shoulder pads to give us “upper body presence.” And Time-Life was instructing us to make Curried Chicken with Chutney and Raisins.
(Sorry about the screen shots. Original post had formatting new WP doesn’t like.)
CURRIED CHICKEN WITH CHUTNEY AND RAISINS
The military has intervened to maintain public order since the Whiskey Rebellion.
This is not a political blog so I’ll be brief. The author of that tweet admonished folks to “read a book.” Well, sir, I have read that book; I’ve read about the Whiskey Rebellion in many books. The whole entire episode comes down on the head of that bastard son of a Jamaican whore. So don’t you go thinking you can get off telling me to go “read a book” without me telling you to … .
Well. This is not a political blog.
Given the complexity of the situation, both the track and intensity
forecasts are currently low confidence.
Paragraph four of four, or as the kids note, 4/4, from the NWS Hurricane Center.
Maybe it’s just me and my relative lack of coffee but when one is making predictions and communicating such to the public, wouldn’t one give enough of a rat’s ass about the public to say, hey, maybe I ought to disclose the fact that we’re still in the just winging it stage *before* one spends three paragraphs winging it?
Maybe it’s just me.
Trying to convince Kat that it’s low level coding. I mean. If you can code, and if, in Tony’s case you can do logic & beyond, you can diagram.
On this day in 1882, John Drinkwater was born.
On this day in the year 1793, Henry Francis Lyte was born.
On this day in 1598, Christopher Marlowe was killed in a street brawl.
I told you last week there were big things coming up and here you go. Killed in a street brawl. That infallible source alerts us to the “fact” that this may or may not be true, but that’s not going to stop us from investigating Marlowe ourselves, now is it?
In case you have, as I had, forgotten Christopher Marlowe, he was a contemporary of, but predecessor to, Shakespeare. My researches led me to three crappy old books which speak incredibly highly of his work. He’s regarded by them all as the founder of English Drama.
Following the bent of his own fiery genius and striking out boldly on his own, Marlowe freed himself and English drama from the rigid bondage of classical rules.
John Metcalf, English Literature (1912, 1930)
Everything that Marlowe wrote is stamped with a love of beauty and of the impossible.
Halleck’s New English Literature (1913)
He is never to be ranked among the minor poets of his time.
William Simonds, A Student’s History of English Literature (1902)
Of his death, Simons tells us
Marlowe, twenty-nine years old, died a tragic and disgraceful death. Such was the end of not a few of the brilliant characters who wasted genius and life thus in the prodigal age of the great queen.
A Student’s History of English Literature (1902)
Halleck, that he “was fatally stabbed in a tavern quarrel.”
In a footnote to the 1930 edition of English Literature, Metcalf provides detail.
Halleck comments further that Marlowe “unwittingly wrote his own epitaph in that of Dr. Faustus:”
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo’s laurel-bough.
The Tragicall History of the life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Daily Reading June 1
Forget those. Read Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”*
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Stay well. Stay safe. Keep reading.
* The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (1932) is 900 pages.
Just what I was looking for. You do the thinking and the placement. You can save the image.
I really do have things to do.
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
First sentence of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Yes. It is Drudgework Monday and yes, I do have homemaking tasks to accomplish. But I wanted to get this out there for SueK who wondered if I had ever tried diagramming one of De Quincey’s or Thackeray’s sentences. I thought this one was a good place to start!
There drove a coach.
That seems to be the guts of it, right?
Let’s go see if there’s anything resembling sentence diagramming software.
That’s encouraging. But I don’t want something that does it for us. Ehh.
How about this– we’ll do it the crappy old fashioned way with a pencil (pen if you dare!) and a piece of paper. Take a picture. Email it to me at– and I’m getting really cryptic here– booksbygone at GEE EMM EXX with appropriate punctuation and ending– and I’ll post ’em.
Miss M’s in on it. We’ll see if Daughter C & The J-Man, and Kat & Tony will chime in.
For what it’s worth, I am finding it very difficult to be in a good mood this morning. Pardon my French, but the F-ing rabbits ate my beans and that really ticks me off. Mr. Big Food tells me there’s no way I can kill them all.
Argh.
Here’s a question for SueK, JoeBeth, and anyone else who at some point made the transition from City Mouse to Country Mouse. I am hearing some rumbling that current events are prompting some City Mice to reflect on their ways of life. Some may even consider a change.
I remember our first few years here. We were never hard core City Mice but there was a time when I did not know what a bush-hog was, or that one measured fuel efficiency in tractors not by miles per gallon but by hours per gallon. There was a time when I did not know the difference between an axe and a maul. There was a time when we did not own a generator, or tillers, or toilet snakes, sub-pumps, a full set of socket wrenches, or weather radios much less our own personal weather station.
The know-it-all City Mice who move to the Country will have a lot to learn. They’ll have to learn that glyphosate is not the enemy, it is your friend; and Round-up costs way too much keep a fence line clean. They’ll have to learn that it costs less to use non-ethanol gas in your zero-turn riding mower than it does to buy a trailer, and a hitch, so you can take the mower to the shop to have the carburetor flushed. They’ll have to learn that hearing gunshots on a cold winter Saturday afternoon is no cause for alarm– your neighbor got a new 9mm for Christmas!
So Country Mice, if you had the opportunity to advise a City Mouse who is considering changing his ways, what would you say?
Poetry and criticism being by no means the universal concern of the world, but of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there.
“the Author’s Preface” to An Essay On Criticism, Alexander Pope
I was traveling around the shelves this afternoon and I came upon Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books 70: The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray and An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope (1894). I thought that would make a nice little pull-quote. Cracked me up.
More importantly, I wish you could read the biographical notice by the editor. It is a delight! But I cannot find it digitally anywhere, and my copy is far too delicate to scan.
I shall try.
The “Rape of the Lock” is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work even invented. It is admirable in proportion as it is made of nothing. It is all gauze and silver spangles: the most glittering appearance is given to everything,– to paste, pomatum, billets-douz and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affection. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an alter raised to the goddess of vanity; and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetics diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep.
Don’t you wish editors for that infallible source could write like that?
Now. Where was I? Right. Tennyson. SueK wants us to diagram a Tennyson sentence.
Have a nice, relaxing evening.
On this day in 1819, Walt Whitman was born.
Regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman joins the ranks of Dante, Shakespeare, Virgil and Homer in terms of artistry and exceptional skill in the written words.
https://waltwhitman.com
It seems a bit… early to be making the second claim, don’t you think?
Daily Reading May 31
Here’s a bit–
Once Paumanok, When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing, Up this seashore in some briers, Two feather’d guests from Alabama, two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown, And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask, we two together. Two together! Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all time, minding no time, While we two keep together. Till of a sudden, May-be kill’d, unknown to her mate, One forenoon the she-bird crouch’d not on the nest, Nor return’d that afternoon, nor the next, Nor ever appear’d again. And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea, And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather, Over the hoarse surging of the sea, Or flitting from brier to brier by day, I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird, The solitary guest from Alabama. Blow! blow! blow! Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok’s shore; I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.
That infallible source has a brief blurb on the poem. Cliff notes here if you’re interested.
Stay well and keep reading.
Photos taken from June through August several years ago.
Happy gardening!
IT IS A SELF-FIXING SITUATION. IT JUST TAKES TIME WHICH WE MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE.
That should be MAY, right?
The calendar in the Pocket University Guide to Daily Reading is based on is 1922’s. In 1922, Memorial Day fell on May 30th. You’ll recall we read Hale’s The Man Without a Country last Monday. Today’s Daily Readings are from May 25th.
Born on May 25 in the year 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Daily Readings for May 25 or 30th depending on what year you happen to be living
The two Lincoln selections are from one of the autobiographical volumes in the Pocket U. Library. My Gawd the fawning over him is sickeningly sweet. The first is itself an extract of a longer speech he gave to the US House of Representatives in January 1948. (Link is to the entire speech.) We are to compare and contrast the style of the young Lincoln with the elder (later in the volume) and be amazed at his literary maturity or something. Regarding the second reading, it shows, “Lincoln’s power of straightforward statement and his good sense.”
I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful. The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day. Never let your correspondence fall behind. Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done.…
Extemporaneous speaking should be practised and cultivated. It is the lawyer’s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.
Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket? A moral tone ought to be infused into the profession which should drive such men out of it.
Despite not being a huge fan of Abe (it’s complicated), a lot of that sounds like good advise.
Stay well and keep reading.
That’s all I got. Via Powerline’s The Week in Pictures.
Good luck with whatever it is you need luck for today.
