Arrian and Alexander...more to come, at a limited level

Due to a loss in the family, posting will be sporadic this week. I wanted to go into detail about Books 4 and 5 of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander but I may only have time to post on thematic and stylistic points in this section before the book discussion call on September 12.

I constantly mention this and will do so again--I encourage anyone interested in exploring more about Arrian or Alexander to participate in the Reading Odyssey's book discussion calls.

Down where the drunkards roll

While reading Joseph Roth's The Legend of the Holy Drinker I had this song stuck in my head and it won't go away even after I finished the novella. So I'll share it in hopes that it will eventually go away. Richard Thompson, Suzanne Vega, and Loudon Wainwright III perform the old Richard & Linda Thompson song:

For a celebration that continues...

Some flowers for my wife, even if they are from nine years ago. Happy anniversary!

I aspire to be something less

Green:
A song for someone aspiring to be an ordinary god may still strike a chord with those of us aspiring to something less. Then again, it may simply be a reminder of having to mow around a grandparent's fig tree in the heat of an Alabama summer. And wishing I had sampled more of the fruit and listened to more of the stories available at the time...

OK, where was I?

Back home and back to work today after a week away. I avoided internet access while away so I have a lot piled up. I hope to get back to a semi-normal posting schedule next week (depending on work).

The only book I read while I was away was Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order. On top of all my other reading projects (wait, the library notified me some of my special orders are in!) I can add a new one. Chapter Three of the book addresses aspects of and around the Thirty Years War and the following books were mentioned. I’m not promising myself I’ll get to all of them (and probably not even touch any of these until next year), but at least it provides a starting point:
Grimmelshausen, Adventures of Simplicissimus
Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier
Grotius, The Law of War and Peace
Stacton, People of the Book
Huxley, Grey Eminence
Schiller, The Wallenstein Trilogy
Grass, The Meeting at Telgte

If anyone knows of any additional books (or have comments on these) regarding the Thirty Years War, fiction (another good reason for me to revisit The Betrothed) or nonfiction (Wedgwood?), I welcome the comments.

W.C. Rice Cross Garden

The Cross Garden of Prattville, AL from Jamison B on Vimeo.

I've got nothing today so I thought I would pass on a video of the late W.C. Rice's Cross Garden in Prattville, Alabama. I haven't been by the cross garden in over 20 years but I've been following developments through its Facebook page. The video is well done, but there's no substitute for actually being there and letting the atmosphere wash over you (twilight was always my favorite time to visit). Thanks to Jamison B. for taking the time to put together the video.

For more information on the cross garden, there are several articles online, including this one from RoadsideAmerica.com.

If you give a kid a camera...

...you get a picture like this.

Richard Burton reads The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo

A reading of the poem that Elizabeth Taylor asked Colin Farrell to read at her funeral...but read by Richard Burton, appropriately enough.




The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)


THE LEADEN ECHO

How to keep--is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--
Yonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Trapped

Source
(click for larger view)

A friend emailed me the link to this cartoon...thought someone out there might like it. (Be sure to move the mouse over the panels, too.)

Blogging (and connectivity) to resume in a few days

Every time I take a book with me on a family trip I never get more than a page or two read and this trip is no exception. Not that I'm complaining, given the surroundings.

Who Lost Super Bowl III?

For anyone wanting to hang onto the football season for another day, here’s an old piece by Geoffrey Colvin on the cultural implications of Super Bowl III. While overstating the impact/symbolism of the game, he may not be that far off. I remember watching part of the game while playing at a friend’s house. I also remember the adult males being stunned by the Colts’ loss.

While recently helping out on a project for my son’s class I scanned my first-grade class picture. I couldn’t help but laugh…there I was with a #12 jersey. The picture is back-and-white but I clearly remember the green color of that shirt. My dad was old school—Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas were the quarterbacks to admire, not the loud-mouth upstart whose jersey I wore. To his credit, I don’t remember him ever saying a word about my Namath jersey. But I still received flattop haircuts each month for quite a while...

If the millions of Americans who rose blinking from their seats sensed they had seen the beginnings of a new world, later events would confirm the feeling—though few could have seen what was coming. The triumph of the New Culture, the ascendance of self-gratification, the demise of the old sports ethic that Bubba Smith so eloquently expressed all were part of the cultural unraveling that has shaped the past three decades and that continues to be reflected in sports. With the ideal of an athlete no longer defined by an elevated character, or by much of anything other than the size of one's contract, sports began to lose the place of authority they had held in the culture.

Coming to a download near you

Library of Congress gets first big gift of major label music

The largest music company in the world has just given the largest audio-visual gift ever to one of the largest libraries in the world, the US Library of Congress. Universal will donate more than 200,000 master recordings from the 1920s-1940s to the Library, which will make this rare music available to the public over the Web.

The recordings come from Universal's in-house collection and feature the best existing master copies of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" in 1947 and Les Paul doing the "Guitar Boogie." The master recordings currently reside on metal and lacquer discs, with some on mono tape, and they feature plenty of material that was never released from such artists as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.

...doing the Snoopy dance...

What do you want me to read to you tonight?

"Are you sure?"

(Apparently not...we ended up with a Hank the Cowdog book)

So long old friend

Speaking of pretexts, I was about to throw out (long overdue) my lone Shakespeare Santa Cruz shirt and wanted to test out my new phone's camera. So here we go.

Not pictured is the shoulder and sleeve discolored from falling down a hill during a hike on Kauai. The red-lava dirt permanently stained it, but I viewed it as adding character.

Ten conversions into bookstores

I'm not sure what links I followed to get to this article on Apt Adaptation: 10 Cool Converted Bookstores (otherwise I would be sure to credit them), but I'll pass the link on regardless for your perusal.

My favorite is the Selexyz Dominicanen Church in the Netherlands--stunning (the first in the article and the picture at the top of the post).

I remember going to the Bookstop in Houston (the second in the article and the picture below) when I lived there in the mid-90s. I enjoyed going but the uniqueness was muted after a few visits. Still, I visited it on many a night out instead of other entertainment.

Dust to dust

Picture source

I want to make sure I give proper credit for these amazing pictures so I highly recommend checking out the other pictures and write-up from Martino - NL on his visit to an abandoned castle in Spain. The bookcase above looks nice from a distance, but upon closer inspection (below) the books have fused together in decay.

Picture source

This and that. Mostly that.

Reading has taken a back seat lately so it follows that writing about reading has as well. But since I can’t write about what I’ve read, I’ll write about what I’m planning to read.

While reading Petersburg I kept thinking that it reminded me of something I had already read and it finally dawned on me I was thinking of The Truth about the Savolta Case by Eduardo Mendoza. I read this about ten years ago and found it was still on our shelves so I plucked it to read (and enjoy) again. Set in Barcelona near the end of World War I, it mirrors the turbulence in post-Franco Spain. I believe the English version is out of print but I see it pop up in used bookstores every now and then for $10 or less.

Rebecca at Rebecca Reads has organized a tour of Anthony Trollope for the next Classics Circuit. Never having read anything by Trollope, I decided to take the plunge with The Way We Live Now. Three other bloggers are scheduled for the same book so I look forward to reading their comments as well as the ones about other works during what I dubbed Trollopolooza (I don't think the name will catch on...it sounds like it could be for a sex-workers’ convention).

I’m listening to Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life during my commute and enjoy it every bit as much as his biography on Alexander Hamilton. I recommend it, even if you’ve read other biographies on Washington. I commented on Joseph Ellis’ His Excellency last summer. Having read it recently I find it helps during this bio--knowing the framework the additional details "stick" better. One thing (of many) that I like about Chernow’s book involves his fleshing out of other characters involved with Washington, goading me to see if there are good biographies on Nathanael Greene and Anthony Wayne among others.

(Speaking of which, I remember a series of books that was in my elementary school when I was in the fourth grade. They were biographies, all with orange covers and didn’t have much more than the person's name as the title. Does anyone else recall this series? I recall reading dozens of these about people like Francis Marion, Jim Thorpe, Helen Keller, and many others. If I recall correctly, at least half the book would cover events in the person's youth to make it relevant to a 10-year-old.)

I seem to have gathered several books that are at least partially about Austria in the early 20th-century:

The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler
The World Of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

(I still need to get to the earlier The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth which I picked up in an airport bookstore several years ago.)

Somewhere along the way I want to rejoin my ancient Greek reading by tackling Thucydides, Xenophon, and plays. And I rather doubt I’ll have a chance to read The Tempest before the upcoming movie is released but I’d like to try. I’m not even going to mention all the other books I want to read or revisit. Oh well…

A final thought: In reading D. G. Myers’ post on Cancer Etiquette, his comment about “Even so, hope is a dicey thing” took me off on a mental tangent about the myth of Pandora’s jar. When putting the lid back on after releasing all the evils into the world, Pandora is able to trap hope before it can escape. Of course this raises the question of why hope was in a jar of evils in the first place. I’ve always interpreted it to mean that since hope was unable to escape with the other evils, it is not inherently good or evil but dependent on how it is used. However it can be interpreted, I continue to be increasingly appreciative of how the “ancients” framed and described things.

Whispers of the Wolf

I've read maybe 10 pages this week and got nothin', so in the spirit of Halloween I present a few clips of Monster Chiller Horror Theatre with Count Floyd. I haven't seen these clips in years (and only vaguely remember seeing them the first time) but I'm hooked again and look foward to seeing more of these shows this weekend. Verrry scarrry. In more ways than one.

A Murder in Salem

From an article by E. J. Wagner in November's Smithsonian:

On the evening of April 6, 1830, the light of a full moon stole through the windows of 128 Essex Street, one of the grandest houses in Salem, Massachusetts. Graced with a beautifully balanced red brick facade, a portico with white Corinthian columns and a roof balustrade carved of wood, the three-story edifice, built in 1804, was a symbol of prosperous and proper New England domesticity. It was owned by Capt. Joseph White, who had made his fortune as a shipmaster and trader.

A childless widower, White, then 82, lived with his niece, Mary Beckford (“a fine looking woman of forty or forty-five,” according to a contemporary account), who served as his housekeeper; Lydia Kimball, a domestic servant; and Benjamin White, a distant relative who worked as the house handyman. Beckford’s daughter, also named Mary, had once been part of the household, but three years earlier she had married young Joseph Jenkins Knapp Jr., known as Joe, and now lived with him on a farm seven miles away in Wenham. Knapp was previously the master of a sailing vessel White owned.

That night, Captain White retired a little later than was his habit, at about 9:40.

At 6 o’clock the following morning, Benjamin White arose to begin his chores. He noticed that a back window on the ground floor was open and a plank was leaning against it. Knowing that Captain White kept gold doubloons in an iron chest in his room, and that there were many other valuables in the house, he feared that burglars had gained access to it. Benjamin at once alerted Lydia Kimball and then climbed the elegant winding stairs to the second floor, where the door to the old man’s bedchamber stood open.

Captain White lay on his right side, diagonally across the bed. His left temple bore the mark of a crushing blow, although the skin was not broken. Blood had oozed onto the bedclothes from a number of wounds near his heart. The body was already growing cold. The iron chest and its contents were intact. No other valuables had been disturbed.

I first read of the Salem murder many years ago in a Greenwich Village secondhand bookshop. I’d ducked inside to escape a sudden downpour, and as I scanned the dusty shelves, I discovered a battered, coverless anthology of famous crimes, compiled in 1910 by San Francisco police captain Thomas Duke.

The chapter on Captain White’s savage killing, evocative of the golden age mystery tales of the late 19th century, riveted me at once. The famed lawyer and congressman Daniel Webster was the prosecutor at the ensuing trial. His summation for the jury—its inexorable cadence, the slow gathering of dreadful atmospheric details—tugged at my memory, reminding me of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of terror. In fact, after talking with Poe scholars, I learned that many of them agreed the famous speech had likely been the inspiration for Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” wherein the narrator boasts of his murder of an elderly man. Moreover, I discovered, the murder case had even found its way into some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works, with its themes of tainted family fortunes, torrential guilt and ensuing retribution.

Those facts alone proved an irresistible magnet to a crime historian like me. But the setting—gloomy, staid Salem, where in the 1690s nineteen men and women were convicted of witchcraft and hanged—endowed the murder case with another layer of gothic intrigue. It almost certainly fed the widespread (and admittedly lurid) fascination with the sea captain’s death among the American public at the time. The town, according to an 1830 editorial in the Rhode Island American, was “forever...stained with blood, blood, blood.”

The twists and turns of this case are fascinating as is the impact it had on Hawthorne and Poe. You can even visit the scene of the crime:

Today, the Salem witch trials drive the town’s tourist trade. But, every October, you can go on historian Jim McAllister’s candlelight “Terror Trail” tour, which includes a stop at the scene of the crime, now known as the Gardner-Pingree House. You can also tour the inside of the house—a national historic landmark owned by the Peabody Essex Museum—which has been restored to its 1814 condition. The museum possesses—but doesn’t exhibit—the custom-made club that served as the murder weapon.

I was allowed to inspect it, standing in a cavernous storage room wearing a pair of bright blue examination gloves. The club is gracefully designed and fits easily in the hand. I couldn’t help but admire Richard Crowninshield’s workmanship.

Autumn revisited

Picture source

My introduction to the use of contrasting plants to send an evil message involved a neighbor’s yard sprouting winter grass in their dormant bermuda grass reading “31 – 7”—that year’s Alabama/Auburn football score. Every day, until the neighbor seeded the rest of his yard with winter grass, I would look out my bathroom window and be reminded of that game.

I have mentioned Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog in a previous post and the first post of his I read dealt with totalitarian trees. In particular, the forest with trees in the shape of a swastika interested me. The larches (try to say that in something other than a Monty Python voice) stand out once their leaves change with the season and contrast with the surrounding forest, a stark reminder of what lengths people will go to in order to deliver a symbol of their belief. Or to kiss up to someone. Who took the pains to plant such a symbol? Who was intended to see it? The proposed explanations don’t feel satisfying to me, but then banal reasons may provide the most accurate explanation.

For more on “the outlandish, the anomalous and the curious from the last five thousand years”, be sure and check out Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog.