My parents were both profoundly affected by the Great Depression. My father, graduating from high school, saw his hopes for college and a medical career disappear. My mother, whose family had been relatively well-to-do, was a child, her family reduced to a father hunting for food, her mother scrubbing floors in movie theaters, and days when there was nothing to eat in the house. You don’t “get over” an experience like that; you can come to terms with it, deal with it, and overcome it, but it leaves a deep impression. At the Coolidge Review, Alexander Field writes that the Great Depression did have a hidden economic miracle that almost no one realized at the time.
Most of us watched or read about the testimony of Dr. Anthony Facui before a Senate committee on Wednesday. Or the non-testimony. My own Missouri senator asked if Dr. Fauci could tell them the color of his tie or of the rug in the room. Both questions were met with Fauci pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The fact is, he was caught. Even with the pardon he received from former President Joe Biden, answering any question truthfully about the COVID-19 issue would be setting off multiple grenades, including for his own reputation. The general news media, almost on cue, circled the wagons; they’re as culpable as Dr. Fauci is, and the insistence that he “did the right thing” is almost beyond belief. Reporters who dared to question the received wisdom paid the price. By the way, Racket News has unlocked all its articles on Dr. Fauci; it’s providing the coverage that our mainstream media should be.
The mayor of New York City released the names of all the properties the city was defining as “second homes” which would result in an additional annual property tax. Except the list was never quality-checked or, apparently, reality-checked. It turns out that a lot of the listings are not what the city thought they were, as a reporter for The Free Press discovered when his 81-year-old mother was socked with an additional $55,000 assessment on her house. It’s not a second home. She owns no second home. But someone in the city decided her property qualified. But never fear; there’s an appeal process – dense, opaque, and all online, almost especially designed to mystify elderly people. She navigated it, or actually, her son did it for her (article unlocked).
When I think about Paul Revere, I think of two things. First, he made a famous ride. And second, he was a silversmith. He was also an engraver, and the Library of Congress Blogs has a post containing several of them.
Tim Challies has a thoughtful post about marriage. When you get married, you marry the whole person. If you see your spouse as a project, thinking in terms of improvement plans, you may have the wrong focus.
My wife and oldest son love the music of Rich Mullins. I will admit to a certain partiality myself. At Mere Orthodoxy, Songwriter and writer Andrew Peterson is interviewed about the singer who died almost 30 years ago.
One item on a page of new books caught my eye – a new work by Novel Prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro entitled The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain. The last work I’d read by him was The Buried Giant, something of a early medieval story set not long after the age of King Arthur’s reign. I loved the story, so I went looking to find out more about this new work.
Ishiguro was born in Japan but raised and educated in Britain. He’s likely best known for two works that out-British the British – Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day (which won the Booker Prize in 1989). But among many other books, he’s written stories set in Japan, delved into crime fiction (When We Were Orphans), and most recently written Klara and the Sun, which might be defined as literary science fiction.
And now he’s written song lyrics, many of which look suspiciously like poetry.
In 1837, a large group gathered to commemorate the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Revolution. And Ralph Waldo Emerson read a poem that contained one of the most famous lines in American history and poetry.
By the way, not everyone living in America liked the Declaration of Independence. Tories and Loyalists objected, and two of them actually penned and published a response. Back in England, in the nave of Westminster Abbey, you can find a memorial to Major John Andre, ordered by General Washington to be executed for spying; the memorial commends his zeal for his country. We forget that for those who signed the Declaration of Independence, they were risking everything, including execution for treason. (I discovered, courtesy of Family Search, that I am related to one of the signers, Robert Treat Paine; he’s a second cousin seven times removed.)
A couple of contrarian views about poetry surfaced this week. Steve Knepper at New Verse Review explained why he’s against publishing the “selected poems” of poets, at least somewhat against. And former English teacher Susan Spear took issue with how poetry is taught in schools, focusing on “meaning” rather than “versecraft.”
It was 1993 or 1994, and I was attending a men’s weekend conference in downtown Indianapolis. At lunchtime, there was a break, and people wandered all over downtown, or were checking out the conference sales booths. I was wandering inside the convention arena, and I heard some music. I strolled over to what turned out to be a 45-minute impromptu concert by Steven Curtis Chapman. This past week, Chapman reflected on his career and what’s next.
Mark Zuckerberg wrote an extraordinary letter to Congress this week. Whether it was getting out in front of bad news, damage control, an apology, or all of the above, it still made headlines. Yes, Facebook was pressured to censor news on COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, and other topics. And, yes, it did occasionally cave. And now we see that our Federal Bureau of Investigation interfered in the 2020 presidential election. See “Zuckerberg Defies the Borg.”
In the 1970s, few religious topics gathered more interest that the Shroud of Turin, purported to be the burial cloth of Jesus. It was supposedly definitively debunked as a medieval creation, but the legend lives on. A new form of X-ray dating says the cloth dates to at least 73 A.D., and an artificial intelligence image generator has recreated the face of the figure in the shroud. And “A Face in the Shroud“ is indeed haunting.
I’m not a music critic. I read and review a lot of poetry, but most days I don’t consider myself a poetry critic, either. But I love listening to music. Lately, when I go on long walks three to four times a week, I’m listening to Eremo by Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen.
In their new album (After), the Aaron Irwin Trio has combined music and poetry to create something decidedly different. Each of the nine compositions orchestrate a poem; three include a recitation of the poem. “Orchestrate” may be the wrong word here; the musicians describe each selection an interaction “between sound and verse.”
And what the listener experiences is a wide array of emotions and responses – joy, chaos, beauty, anxiety, and more.
For a project I’ve been working on, I spent a fair chunk of Wednesday and Thursday reading poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One poem is one of his best-known works, although not under its official title of “The Landlord’s Tale” from Tales of a Wayside Inn. Better known as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” it is still a soul-stirring poem. At the Society of Classical Poets, Andrew Benson Brown asks the question, whatever happened to great poetry? He sees Longfellow as one of the last of the great American poets.
Speaking of great poetry, it may not be a popular thing to say these days, but the father of Western civilization has long been recognized to be the Greek poet Homer. Joshua Katz at New Criterion writes about the importance of Homer and the poetic tradition.
I had a comment exchange with a friend this week; we represent opposite sides of the political spectrum, but we still manage to keep it civil and mutually beneficial. The great American political divide didn’t happen overnight, nor has it been a development only since the 1960s. As Shaun Rieley at The Imaginative Conservative writes, the divide can be traced back to the late 18th century, and the conflict of competing ideas (and ideologies) began with Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.
British poetRowan Evansis a musician. And a poet. And a musician-poet. And likely a poet-musician. He’s composed music for guitar, keyboard, cello, strings, synthesizer, and electronics. His music has been used in theater, art installations, short films, animation, and performances. He’s a sound designer, so it’s no surprise that his music sounds designed for poetry and his poems for music.
Listen to his web site’s playlist. Choose any of the eight selections listed; I was particularly taken with “Dunes” and “Ocean.” Poems began to play through my mind as I listened. I’m not sure how Evans does it, but it’s a marvel.
A Method, A Path is his first full collection; he previously published a chapbook.
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