NPM: Goldengrove

Spring and Fall
To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Mary Poppins at the Hippodrome, a lovely evening - the play is good and the dancers were magnificent.

DVD: A couple more of The Last Detective

TV: Once Upon a Time - So we still don't know who the writer is, really, but I'm really starting to like Mr. Gold / Rumplestiltskin. Robert Carlyle is knocking that part out of the park. Modern Family - Cam's dad! He was Maurice! ha ha! The Mentalist - a lovely, bittersweet episode, really wonderful. A couple of my backlog in Grimm - nice to see Monroe's got a girlfriend, and I wonder if the Hexenbeast will turn on the captain the way Mystique did on Magneto.

Read: Finished The Song of the Dodo, which I highly recommend. A lot of Agatha Christie shorts, also an old mystery by Anna Katherine Green (one of the earliest writers of detective fiction in the US) called That Affair Next Door (1898).

Happy Birthday, Duke

Today, in Washington DC in 1899, Edward Kennedy Ellington - Duke Ellington - was born.

12 Grammys, 9 Grammy Hall of Fame Awards; a host of awards including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor, and a Pulitzer ... What a treasure.

Here's Mood Indigo



Take the A Train

Happy Birthday, Constantine

Today in 1863 Constantine Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis) was born, in Alexandria, Egypt, where (with a few short breaks in Liverpool and Constantinople) he spent most of his life.

Here, in the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, is arguably his most important poem, Waiting for the Barbarians. I'm showing you three translations (if you read Greek, the original, Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους, is here) - enjoy!

First, the Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard translation:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.


Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.


Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.


Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.


Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.


And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Now, as translated by Stratis Haviaras

What are we waiting for, gathered here in the agora?

The barbarians are supposed to show up today.


Why is there such indolence in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting around, making no laws?

Because the barbarians are supposed to show up today.
Why should the senators trouble themselves with laws?
When the barbarians arrive, they’ll do the legislating.


Why has our emperor risen so early this morning,
and why is he now enthroned at the city’s great gate,
sitting there in state and wearing his crown?

Because the barbarians are supposed to show up today.
And the emperor is waiting there to receive
their leader. He’s even had a parchment scroll
prepared as a tribute: it’s loaded with
all sorts of titles and high honors.


Why have our two consuls and praetors turned up
today, resplendent in their red brocaded togas;
why are they wearing bracelets encrusted with amethysts,
and rings studded with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they sporting those priceless canes,
the ones of finely-worked gold and silver?

Because the barbarians are supposed to show up today;
And such things really dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our illustrious speakers come out to speak
as they always do, to speak what’s on their minds?

Because the barbarians are supposed to show up today,
and they really can’t stand lofty oration and demagogy.


Why is everyone so suddenly ill at ease
and confused (just look how solemn their faces are)?
Why are the streets and the squares all at once empty,
as everyone heads for home, lost in their thoughts?

Because it’s night now, and the barbarians haven’t shown up.
And there are others, just back from the borderlands,
who claim that the barbarians no longer exist.


What in the world will we do without barbarians?
Those people would have been a solution, of sorts.

And finally, by John Cafavy, his brother, as Awaiting the Barbarians

— Why are we come together in the market place?

Barbarians are expected here to-day.

— Why in the Senate-house this inactivity —
why sit the Senators and do not legislate?

Because barbarians are to come to-day
What laws should they make now — the Senators?
Presently the barbarians will make laws.

— Why has our Emperor risen close upon the sun —
why is he waiting there, by the main city-gates,
seated upon the throne, — august, wearing the crown?

Because barbarians are to come to-day
And so the Emperor in person waits
to greet their leader. He has even prepared
a title-deed, on skin of Pergamus,
in favour of this leader. It confers
high rank on the barbarian, many names.

— Why do our consuls and the praetors go about
in scarlet togas fretted with embroidery;
why are they wearing bracelets rife with amethysts,
and rings magnificent with glowing emeralds;
why are they holding those invaluable staffs
inlaid so cunningly with silver and with gold?

Because barbarians are to come to-day;
and the barbarians marvel at such things.

— Why come not, as they use, our able orators
to hold forth in their rhetoric, to have their say?

Because barbarians are to come to-day;
and the barbarians have no taste for words.

— Why this confusion all at once, and nervousness:
(how serious of a sudden the faces have become):
why are the streets and meeting-places emptying,
and all the people lost in thought as they turn home?

Because the daylight fails, and the night comes,
but the barbarians come not. And there be
who from the frontier have arrived and said
that there are barbarians now at all.

And now what shall become of us without barbarians?
These people were in sooth some sort of settlement.

Many more of Cavafy's poems are here

The lines begin to blur

The New York Times has look at the Met's HD broadcasts, which includes an interesting take on the performance differences. Movies are very different from plays and operas. The director controls what you see, and the closeups make you relate differently to the actors than you do at the remove provided by the stage. At a play you're always aware you're watching something artificial - it's not worse, it's not better, but it is different.

I was thinking a bit of this last night at the Hippodrome, with every performer miked. Stage actors have to play to the last row in the balcony - I hope they don't forget that when they no longer have to project!

NPM: Red Bird

Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Of course I love the sparrows,
those dun-colored darlings
so hungry and so many.

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.

Still, for whatever reason —
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,

or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens —
I am glad

that red bird comes all winter,
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.

-- Mary Oliver

Happy Birthday, Lionel

Lionel Barrymore (of the famous acting family) was born today in 1878 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In later years his arthritis kept him in a wheelchair, but he kept on acting - Key Largo, for instance. Dr Gillespie in the Dr Kildare films (and their Kildare-less sequels), Mr Potter in It's A Wonderful Life, Grandpa in the wonderful You Can't Take It With You, Peggoty in David Copperfield, Billy Bones in Treasure Island, Disko Troop in Captains Courageous, and his Oscar-winning turn in A Free Soul: he left behind a wonderful body of work.

Happy Birthday, Terry

Today is Terry Pratchett's birthday! As WOSSNAME, the Newsletter of the Klatchian Foreign Legion, puts it:

WOSSNAME would like to raise a toast to Sir Pterry on the occasion of his birthday (28th April). Congratulations, and keep those books coming!

Indeed. He has a new book coming out this year; I can't wait to read it. Each new one is a precious gift, as is each day he remains with us.

Explore his world at Terry Pratchett books.com

NPM: Old Men

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

-- Ogden Nash

NPM: Dead Swell (Мертвая зыбь)

Буря промчалась, но грозно свинцовое море шумит.
Волны, как рать, уходящая с боя, не могут утихнуть
И в беспорядке бегут, обгоняя друг друга,
Хвастаясь друг перед другом трофеями битвы:
        Клочьями синего неба,
Золотом и серебром отступающих туч,
        Алой зари лоскутами.


The storm drives on through, but the leaden sea roars menacingly.
The waves, like a war host departing after battle, cannot calm down,
And run in disorder, chasing one after the other,
Boasting one before the other of their spoils from the battle:
        Shreds from the blue sky,
Gold and silver from the retreating clouds,
        Scarlet rags torn from the dawn.

--Apollon Nikolayevich Maykov (Аполлон Николаевич Майков)(tr me)

King Kong doesn't count

The clue asked which constitutional monarchy's citizens drove around with a car sticker of HKJ. Two of them guessed Hong Kong; the third guessed that, but changed it to Jamaica.

People. Have you ever heard of the king of Hong Kong? It's part of China, after all.

I'm not saying Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan should have leapt to your mind, but ... Hong Kong? Really?

(And yes I know, Final Jeopardy, they can't not answer - or at least not answering won't keep them from losing money, but still. I'd rather put a blank than an answer like Hong Kong is a constitutional monarchy)

Happy Birthday, John

Jean-Jacques Audubon was born in 1785, in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the illegitimate son of a sugar planter and one of his slaves. Audubon's father raised the boy in France and sent him to America to avoid his being conscripted into the army. And the rest, as they say, is history ... Audubon's drawings of American birds revolutionized not only ornithology but art. Here is one of his plates - the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

NPM: Your eyes (Твої очі)

I 7 from Зів'яле листя (Withered Leaves)

Твої очі, як те море,
Супокійне, світляне:
Серця мого давно горе,
Мов пилинка, в них тоне.

Твої очі, мов криниця,
Чиста на перловим дні,
А надія, мов зірниця,
З ніх проблискує мені.


Your eyes are like the sea
peaceful, shining:
the ancient grief of my heart
sinks in them, as into dust

Your eyes are like a spring
clean and pearl-bottomed;
and hope, like summer lightning
flashes at me from them

-- Ivan Fanko (tr by me)

Happy Birthday, Ella

Ella Fitzgerald was born today in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917. Recording more than 200 albums, many still available - or available again on cd - The First Lady of Song was one of the most influential jazz singers ever. Her voice spanned three octaves and she had a legendary purity of tone and phrasing, and a tremendous improvisational ability, especially in scat. I grew up listening to her (she's one of my father's favorite singers), and one of my favorite albums is the wonderful Complete Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Ella & Louis, Ella & Louis Again, and Porgy and Bess.

NPM: this cold night

this cold night
nothing moves
but stars

--Jason Sanford Brown

Austerity and us: what might happen

Interesting take on the trouble in the eurozone over in the Guardian today:

Yet politics, especially in America, is never so easy. As with his recent campaign stop in which he blamed Obama for a factory closing which actually occurred during the Bush administration, Romney will blame Obama for every problem – no matter how tortured or fraudulent the logic. It would be a great irony if Obama, who has been far more supportive of expansionary fiscal policy than any European leader, is hurt by the blowback from austerity in the eurozone. But this is what can happen when voters are in a foul mood and opponents are unencumbered by the truth.

There is, however, another outcome possible. In this alternative, continued economic troubles force Obama to sharpen his game and focus on principles, in which he gives a robust defense of fiscal stimulus, of the importance of the social safety net, explains how government spending can be a force for good. In fact, the events of the past few years have almost uniformly supported Obama's world-view and Democratic policies. But in order to win in November, he must fight for them now.

NPM: Love is not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power
I might be driven to sell your love for peace
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

There he is!

One of the great recurring legends in naming things is the old story about how the foreigner mistakes a "there" or "what?" for a name. "Kangaroo" is supposed to mean "I don't understand you" - although, sadly, it's really the Guugu Yimithirr word gangurru. I remember being told that the name Canada really means "over there", but it comes from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement".

But here's one that may (may) be true. (Wikipedia doubts it, but the guy they're quoting is wrong on a few other things.) This is the indri, a large, shy lemur. Its English name seems to be from a Malagasy word "indry" meaning "behold" (like French voila, or Russian vot) or the phrase "indry izy - there he is". The standard Malagasy word for the indri is babakoto.

NPM: Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare

Happy Birthday, Will

Today (most likely) in 1654 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon was born the Swan of Avon, the Bard, William Shakespeare.

Does anything need to be added to that? How does one choose which poem, which quote? I did choose one, for National Poetry Month, but here I'll just urge you to go here to find your own.

ps - I definitely, whole-heartedly recommend to you Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro. (Spoiler: It was Shakespeare.)

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Faust at the Lyric - brilliantly sung, especially by Bryan Hymel in the title role, but the staging was kind of weird. The present, okay, but really: if you don't already know that Mephistopheles is the bad guy when he shows up announcing that he's the devil, huge labels on the backdrop reading HATE Vice EVIL aren't going to help. Ditto Marguerite and Youth Love Virtue, or MAN Denies SIN when Faust is being convinced to woo her... All a bit anvilicious.

DVD: Some of Series 4 of The Last Detective, which I enjoy quite a lot.

Read: Halfway through The Song of the Dodo, which is engaging, infuriating, and fascinating. Seven or eight Christie shorts - Harley Quin, Parker Pyne, Tommy & Tuppence - for light relief.

Happy Earth Day

As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, it was founded in 1970. "The year after we walked on Moon, looked back home, & discovered Earth for first time"

(image from NOAA)

Duck duck duck duck duck...

I was walking to the Metro Thursday - left work an hour early to go to Prince George's Plaza for an errand - and spotted these guys in the creek between the parking lot and the station. If the geese have their hands full (metaphorically speaking) with five, pity Mrs Mallard: she's got sixteen!


Balls of mottled fluff nibbling at algae

Mom and some babies

Strangely, the drake was there, too. Generally - I'd have said "always" - the drakes have nothing to do with raising the ducklings, going off and hanging out with other drakes instead.

responsive ... or not

For the past week Blogger users (such as myself) have been unable to schedule a post to be published later. Or, rather, we have been able to schedule them - but they don't post.

Google's support list for Blogger is filled with hundreds of complaints. None of them have gotten an answer from a Google rep. To date, they don't even acknowledge the problem in their Known Issues blog.

I suppose they're all tied up fixing the myriad issues involving their "cool" new interface - the one they'll be forcing us all onto soon - but this particular issue is rather important to a lot of people. It's a nuisance to me, but people who depend on being first out of the gate are very unhappy. And Google is simply not even addressing it - not even one of those ubiquitous "we are working on the problem and hope to have it fixed soon" messages.

Blogger's free. So far it's been reliable and easy to use. If one of those things changes, it's problematic. If they both do ... well, I don't mind spending a little money to get them back.

NPM: Kilroy

Kilroy is gone,
the word is out,
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who wrote his name
in every can
from Poland to Japan
and places in between
like Sheboygan and Racine
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who kept the dice
and stole the ice
out of the BOQ
Kilroy
whose name was good
on every IOU
in World War II
and even in Korea
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
the unknown soldier
who was the first to land
the last to leave,
with his own hand
has taken his good name
from all the walls
and toilet stalls.
Kilroy
whose name around the world
was like the flag unfurled
has run it down
and left Saigon
and the Mekong
without a hero or a song
and gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

-- Gene McCarthy

Happy Birthday, John

Today in 1838, in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland, John Muir, "Father of the National Parks" and founder of The Sierra Club, was born.

"Innovate"

So, the Ryan budget, passed by those brave deficit hawks in the House, is going to take a huge bite out of Medicaid by

changing the program from an open-ended program for eligible individuals using matching funds from both the federal and state governments to a block grant of a fixed sum given to states, and the states decide how to allocate the money. The idea is that states can “innovate” at a local level to find ways to deliver needed benefits at reduced cost.

This will save $750 billion over the next decade. Yay!.. Um, wait, yay?

This notion that the states can always do it better than the federal government (as long as "it" isn't, say, medical marijuana or gay marriage or gun control) really comes unglued when it comes to anything that applies to huge numbers of people.

Specifically, here, that "find[ing] ways to deliver needed benefits at reduced cost". Pretty much all any state can do to reduce the cost while staying inside their (reduced) block grant is either cut payments to doctors and hospitals - a lot, drop people from the rolls, or cut benefit payments. The first option is problematic for two reasons: doctors and hospitals already think Medicaid doesn't pay enough; a lot of doctors won't even accept Medicaid patients. Secondly, Medicaid does cost less than private insurance; that's one way ACA was keeping costs down: expanding Medicaid eligibility. So there's less to cut.

The other two options involve cutting benefits - that is, giving people less help - or eligibility - that is, helping fewer people. Nice choice, there, House Republicans.

Because the fact is (as Aaron Carroll, MD, MS, points out over at the JAMA website) Medicaid doesn't cover your "able-bodied people", lulling them "to lives of dependency and complacency" as the architect of this plan so winningly puts it. Medicaid basically covers four groups of people: the blind and disabled, the elderly, children and pregnant women (they're the same thing per the GOP, right?), and poor parents of children. And I mean poor: in Texas, if you earn $5000 a year - a year - you earn too much to qualify.

So this "innovation" really means abandoning people who have no other means of survival.

By their God, Republicans love them some fetuses but don't much give a rat's ass for anyone already here, do they? Not unless that anyone is rich, anyway.

NPM: When spring comes again

When spring comes again
Maybe she won't find me in the world anymore.
Now, I like being able to think Spring is a person
So I can imagine she'll cry,
When she sees she's lost her only friend.
But the Spring isn't even a thing:
She's a manner of speaking.
Even the flowers don't come back, or the green leaves.
There are new flowers, new green leaves.
There are other beautiful days.
Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.

--Alberto Caiero

NPM: the cold night

people's voices--

in the grove the cold night

isn't

-- Issa

Happy Birthday, George

Today in 1937 - 75 years ago - George Takei was born.

Let me tell you, if you don't follow this guy on Facebook, you're missing out. And check out the official website.

Many happy returns, George!

So long, Pat

Pat Summitt is leaving the position of head coach at UT, turning the reins over officially to her long-time assistant Holly Warlick. We knew this day would come, and it's probably best that it come now, but still ... it's sad. So very sad.

Her career ends with a 1,098-208 record, 16 regular-season Southeastern Conference championships and 16 SEC tournament titles. During her time, Tennessee never failed to reach the NCAA tournament, never received a seed lower than No. 5 and reached 18 Final Fours. Every Lady Vol player who has completed her eligibility at Tennessee graduated under Summitt, and 74 former players, assistants, graduate assistants, team managers and directors of basketball operations are currently among the coaching ranks at every level of basketball.

In large part, she is responsible for the parity that kept the Lady Vols from the Final Four over the last five years (this year they lost to Baylor, who had an undefeated year), building women's basketball into a force that encouraged other schools to build programs to compete with her. Her legacy is secure.

And her time is not yet over, though this is Holly's team now. As coach emeritus, she will be helping with recruiting, watching practice, joining staff meetings, helping coaches analyze practice and games, and advising the Southeastern Conference on women’s basketball issues and mentoring players - and also working as a spokeswoman in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

People of 2012

My first thought on reading that Time had published its 100 Most Influential People list for 2012 was: it's only April, how can they have a list for 2012? My second came when I looked at the list, which was formatted just like this in the mobile news app - which is to say, not formatted at all - was that I wasn't even sure where some of those name began or ended (and if I didn't know a lot of them, the task would be even harder). Plus, what's that "and" doing? It makes it look like the last person on the list has a really looooooong name:

Jeremy Lin Christian Marclay Viola Davis Salman Khan Tim Tebow E.L. James Louis CK Rihanna Marco Rubio Ali Ferzat Rene Redzepi Kristen Wiig Anthony Kennedy Novak Djokovic Ben Rattray Jessica Chastain Yani Tseng Raphael Saadiq Elinor Ostrom Samira Ibrahim Jose Andres Ann Patchett Dulce Matuz Henrik Schrfe Freeman Hrabowski Maryam Durani Manal al-Sharif Anjali Gopalan Rached Ghannouchi Barbara Van Dahlen Ron Fouchier Donald Sadoway Hans Rosling Asghar Farhadi Sarah Burton Anonymous Pete Cashmore Cami Anderson Ali Babacan and Ahmet Davutoglu Ai-jen Poo Marc Andreessen Preet Bharara Robert Grant Andrew Lo Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Alexei Navalny Ray Dalio Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani Chelsea Handler Harvey Weinstein Chen Lihua Warren Buffett Alice Walton Harold Hamm Sheryl Sandberg Sara Blakely Eike Batista Tim Cook Daniel Ek Virginia Rometty Barack Obama Goodluck Jonathan Xi Jinping Fatou Bensouda Christine Lagarde Mario Draghi U Thein Sein Ayatullah Ali Khamenei Mitt Romney Juan Manuel Santos Timothy Dolan Portia Simpson Miller Mario Monti Wang Yang Maria das Gracas Silva Foster Andrew Cuomo Iftikhar Chaudhry Mamata Banerjee Walter Isaacson Ron Paul Benjamin Netanyahu Dilma Rousseff Erik Martin Cecile Richards Angela Merkel Lionel Messi Tilda Swinton Hillary Clinton Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Pippa Middleton Adele Matt Lauer Oscar Pistorius Claire Danes Stephen Colbert

NPM: Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
   The night above the dingle starry,
        Time let me hail and climb
   Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
        Trail with daisies and barley
   Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
   In the sun that is young once only,
        Time let me play and be
   Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
        And the sabbath rang slowly
   In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
   And playing, lovely and watery
        And fire green as grass.
   And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
   Flying with the ricks, and the horses
        Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
   Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
        The sky gathered again
   And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
   Out of the whinnying green stable
        On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
   In the sun born over and over,
        I ran my heedless ways,
   My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
   Before the children green and golden
        Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
   In the moon that is always rising,
        Nor that riding to sleep
   I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
        Time held me green and dying
   Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

--Dylan Thomas

There's no more beat

And nobody's dancing ...

So long, Dick.

Gatsby the preacher?

It's pretty obvious that the new champ on Jeopardy! never actually read The Great Gatsby. If he had, he still might not have guessed Elmer Gantry, but he'd have known that Jay Gatsby would never have said:

"Do you believe in my innocence, in the fiendishness of my accusers? Reassure me with a Hallelujah!"

NPM: A Song of the Weather

January brings the snow,
Makes your feet and fingers glow
February's ice and sleet
Freeze the toes right off your feet
Welcome March with wintry wind
Would thou wert not so unkind
April brings the sweet spring showers
On and on for hours and hours
Farmers fear unkindly May
Frost by night and hail by day
June just rains and never stops
Thirty days and spoils the crops
In July the sun is hot
Is it shining? No, it's not.
August cold and dank and wet
Brings more rain than any yet
Bleak September's mists and mud
Is enough to chill the blood
Then October adds a gale -
Wind and slush and rain and hail.
Dark November brings the fog
Should not do it to a dog.
Freezing wet December then
Bloody January again!

-- Flanders and Swann

Happy Birthday, Clarence

Clarence Darrow was born today in 1857. Darrow was the preeminent lawyer of his day: the defense attorney for Ossian Sweet & his family, in one of the most racially charged cases ever tried (a black doctor moving into a white neighborhood in Detroit finds his house under attack, and someone in the white mob is killed; the whole black family is charged with murder); for Leopold & Loeb (arguing not that they were innocent, but against the death penalty); for several union men in the Haywood trial and other Western Mining Union trials; and of course, in the Scopes Monkey Trial.

There will never be another Darrow. He was, like us all, a product of his times. For him, it was a time of class conflict so intense as to border on class warfare. It was a time during which the Radical Left-- anarchists, socialists, communists-- were at the peak of their influence. It was a time of Jim Crow, of lynchings, a time during which the Klu Klux Klan called the shots in parts of our country. It was a time of unprecedented xenophobia. It was a time of whirl and social change-- a time when the modernist notion of asking whether a behavior pleased one's own intellect began to challenge the Victorian way of asking whether the behavior was approved of by society. Mechanistic thinking was in the air: Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. Darrow was shaped, in both positive and negative ways, by these forces. Invariably, he saw his client's cases as inextricably linked to these large philosophical and social issues. He fought his battles not just for his clients, but also for the hearts and minds of the American people.

There will never be another Darrow. Power has shifted in the American courtroom since he ended his career. It's shifted away from attorneys and juries and to judges. There are more constraints operating on trial lawyers today; trials are more scripted. Few modern judges would let a defense attorney call a prosecutor as a witness; few judges today let attorneys depict their client's cause as bound up in the mechanistic workings of the ambivalent universe; the personal stories, the biting sarcasm, and the everpresent poetry that we find in Darrow's summations would likely be met today with judicial disapprobation.

There will never be another Darrow. In the pre-television, newspaper world of Darrow, words mattered more than images. Oratorical skills were valued; whole speeches were heard and were read-- not just sound bites. The ability to use words well could make one a hero in Darrow's time, a time that was the Age of Heroes (Ruth, Lindbergh). Clarence Darrow was at the same time one of the best loved and most hated men of his time-- it is hard to imagine a trial attorney achieving that status today.

There will never be another Darrow. In his time, there was a general belief that intellectual battles could be won, not just fought. That Science could beat Fundamentalism or that Fundamentalism could beat Science. That Trade Unionism would win, or Trade Unionism would be routed-- there seemed no middle way.

This is from an essay by Prof. Douglas Linder, to be found here

NPM: We Are Not Amused

Puck and the woodland elves shall weep with me
For that lost joke I made in Ledborough Lane,
The joke that Mrs. Baines declined to see
Although I made it very loud and plain.
I made the joke again and yet again,
I analysed it, parsed it and explained:
I did my very best to entertain,
But Mrs. Baines would not be entertained.

-- GK Chesterton

hopefully, again

There's some nice, straightforward usage advice at Oxford Dictionaries. One entry is on "hopefully", which says, in part:

Many people object to the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb. They compare it with other sentence adverbs such as ‘unfortunately’ or ‘clearly’, which can be paraphrased as ‘it is unfortunate that ...’ or 'it is clear that ...':

Unfortunately, he missed the train. [i.e. it is unfortunate that he missed the train.]
Clearly, they have made mistakes. [i.e. it is clear that they have made mistakes.]

It’s certainly true that you can’t paraphrase hopefully as ‘it is hopeful that’. But this is no reason to ban its use as a sentence adverb: there are no grammatical rules that say the meaning of a word mustn’t be allowed to develop in this sort of way.

(Sadly, they end with the standard "let the nuts win" argument:

Nevertheless, if you are making a formal speech or writing formally (e.g. preparing a report or drafting a job application), you should be aware that there are people who intensely dislike this usage. For some, it has become almost a test case of ‘correctness’ in the use of English, even if the arguments on which their view is based are not very strong. Consequently, in this type of formal situation, it would be better to choose a different adverb or reword your sentence altogether.

And sure, if you're writing a job application I guess you want to err on the side of caution. But again: do you really want to work for someone who'd base his hiring practices on "hopefully"? But I digress.)

My main point is that straw man there in the middle. Sure, "hopefully" doesn't mean "It is hopeful that...". But does "Thankfully, he was unhurt" mean "It is thankful that he was unhurt"? Does "Candidly, I don't like your sister" mean "It is candid that I don't like her"? Did Rhett Butler mean "It is frank that I don't give a damn"? Some sentence adverbs modify the sentence. Some, on the other hand, are extra-textual and modify the speaker. Why is "hopefully" the only sentence adverb like that to be banned?

NPM: Leaves

One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me;
But the stars above my head
Burn in white and delicate red,
And beneath my feet the earth
Brings the sturdy grass to birth.
I who was content to be
But a silken-singing tree,
But a rustle of delight
In the wistful heart of night—
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.
Blinded by a leafy crown
I looked neither up nor down—
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky;
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.

--Sara Teasdale

NPM: Dusk

dusk: bells quiet,
fragrance rings
night-struck from flowers

-- Bashô
(tr Jane Hirschfeld)

鐘消えて 花の香は撞く 夕哉
Kanekiete hana no ka wa tsuku yuube kana

Other translations:

the bell fades away
the blossom's fragrance ringing:
early evening.
--David Landis Barnhill

The sound fades,
the scent of the flowers arises, –
the bell struck in the evening.
--R.H.Blyth

The temple bell dies away.
The scent of flowers in the evening
is still tolling the bell.
--R.H.Blyth

Fading bells –
now musky blossoms
peal in dusk.
--Lucien Stryk

After the chimes fade
cherry fragrance continues:
evening dusk.
-- Makoto Ueda

Смолк вечерний звон –
лёгкий аромат цветов
угасает вслед.
-- Дмитрий Смирнов

Колокол смолк вдалеке,
но ароматом вечерних цветов
отзвук его плывёт.
--Вера Маркова

The Week in Entertainment

Live: City of Ladies, the Folger Consort's companion concert to Shakespeare's Sisters - 15th century Burgundian chansons, very beautiful.

DVD: Some Scarecrow & Mrs King, because I do like Kate Jackson. It's kind of amazing though, looking back at it now, how many times the plot hinged on finding a phone.

TV: The Mentalist - nice story, but the end shot - Jane saying Rigsby's baby was beautiful and the expression on his face as he walked away - that was something. The Middle was uneven but cute. Modern Family was funny - I love the stop sign, the 'dimpled Chad problem', and Gloria needing to be seen to convince people... Psych - season finale, waaaaah, but good. "Forget about it, Shawn; it's just Santa Barbara." But oh. my. god. They shot Henry!

Read: Nice little cozy called Die Buying that did not end with the female sleuth falling for the cop. (Well, not yet, anyway...) An extremely odd but enthralling novel called Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru. The key quote (as several reviewers have noted) is: “There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. … We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes.” The book is an echo chamber, bouncing from time to time yet always telling a cohesive (if not entirely coherent) narrative about the things you can't see if you stare at them.

The future is now?

From Paul Krugman's latest column:

The crucial point about both of these explanations is that they stand Mr. Christie’s narrative about himself on its head. The governor poses as a man willing to make hard choices for the future, but what he actually did was sacrifice the future for the sake of personal political advantage. He catered to national Republican prejudices that are completely at odds with New Jersey’s needs; he cared more about avoiding embarrassment over a misguided campaign pledge than about serving an urgent public need.

Unfortunately, Mr. Christie’s behavior is all too typical these days.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

Happy Birthday, Leonardo

Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

NPM: Timas

By Sappho, in Mary Barnard's brilliant translation

Timas

We put the urn aboard ship
with this inscription

This is the dust of little
Timas who unmarried was led
into Persephone's dark bedroom

and she being far from home, girls
her age took new-edged blades
to cut, in mourning for her,
these curls of their soft hair

Cyprian, in my dream

the folds of a purple
kerchief shadowed
your cheeks--the one

Timas one time sent,
a timid gift, all
the way from Phocaea

Moms Do Work

So, since the GOP is now loudly insisting that Moms Do Work, I presume the first thing any Republican president will do - heck, the first thing that GOP congressmen will buckle down to - is to make sure that welfare is reformed and TANF repealed, so that all those mothers on welfare can stay home with their kids.

Right?

Or is this poster more revealing of their actual attitude than they wanted it to be? White woman, one baby, well-off... Does Dad have to have a job for this to count?

April Birds

Some birds from the last couple of weeks.

First up, two winter birds still here, a dark-eyed junco


and a white-throated sparrow


A goldfinch, drab in winter garb

A male redwing, calling

And his mate (or at least a female - there are five males here this year)

A song sparrow

A chickadee

and a robin

The male flicker

and a adorable little male downy

A pair of cardinals hiding in the twigs

and the male with the sun lighting him up

A long way off, one of the red-shouldered hawks


At the water, a mallard duck,


and two drakes


A worried-looking killdeer

and an elegant blue heron

NPM: Yaroslavna

A poem inspired by the Igor epic, by N.L. Braun (НЛ Браун) (translation mine)

Yaroslavna

Sunset has burned out.
A wild cry sounds at midnight.
These nights Yaroslavna cannot sleep--
She longs to fly to the distant Kayal.

She wants to fly to the prince's camp,
Where she would creep under the edge of his tent.
"Where are you, my Igor, my longed-for prince,
"My thrice-bright beloved?

"If I could be turned into a cuckoo,
"I would call above you:
"I would watch over your sleep until dawn,
"And fly before your troops into battle.

"I would lift my wings, like hands,
"To the secret powers of the earth and sky,
"So that Veles' gentle grandsons
"Would protect you on the field of battle:

"So that your arrows would not break in your quiver,
"So that your spear would not become blunt in battle,
"So that no Polovtsian would pierce with his arrow
"The heart of Igor, my beloved!"

Thus, her tears burning hotly,
Possessed by a passionate grief,
Upon the city walls the princess
Cries and laments until dawn.

She wants to see, when morning silvers the grass,
Banners as bright as honor streaming homeward
Like roaming wolves; and to hear, like barking foxes,
Dark red shields ringing in the dawn.

"Where are you, my Igor, my warrior? Do you still live?"
But in the quiet before dawn the distances remain silent.
Above quiet Putivl, made of wood,
Cocks' wings thunder.

Ярославна

Догорела заря-заряниця,
Во полуночи див покричал.
Ярославне ночами не спится --
Улететь бы на дальний Каял!..

Долететь бы до княжьнего стана.
Приподнять бы палатки края:
"Где ты, Игор мой, князь мой желанный,
Трижды светлая лада моя?

Кабы, мне обернуться зегзицей,
Куковала бы я над тобой,
Стергла бы твой сон до денницы,
Перед войском летела бы в бой.

Я простерла бы крылья, как руки,
К тайным силам небес и земли,
Чтобы Велеса добрые внуки
В поле ратном тебя берегли.

Чтобы стрелы не сохли в колчане,
Чтобы копье не тупилось в бою,
Чтоб стрелой не пробил поучанин
Сердце Игоря, ладу мою!"

И, слезы обжигаясь горячей,
Одержима горючей тоской,
Причитает княгиня и плачет
До зари на стене городской.

Будто видит: ковыль серебрится,
Реют стяги, как слава чисты,
Рыщут волки и брешут лисицы,
На червленые брешут щиты.

"Где ты, Игорь мой, воин мой? Жив ли?"
Предрассветные дали молчат.
Над бревенчатым тихим Путивлем
Петушинные крылья стучат.

Why did he say that?

After the challengers correctly answered the Final Jeopardy question, they had $10,001 and $11,601. The champion had $13,200. She answered correctly. Alex said: Did she risk enough?

Alex - she couldn't lose if she got it right. There was no "enough". She was ahead with a ZERO wager. (Actually she wagered $8,000, of which Alex said, "That's enough!")

Weird.

Maybe he was overcome by habit?

Goslings!

The goslings hatched today! Five of them are meeting the world:

The whole family



Three of them staggering and falling



Mom and three of the goslings



Dad's already honking and hissing to try and keep them together.



They're so new they're still wet!

Others in the park

Mostly I take pictures of birds in the park (I'll some geese in a minute, and more up tomorrow) but here are some other residents:

Trees are residents, right? I don't know what kind this is (crabapple?), but it's gorgeous. The other is dogwood, of course.





Here's an Eastern painted turtle:


And here's one of the groundhogs/woodchucks coming out of a pipe with his mouth full of stuff. I guess they're incorporating this into their burrow system?

Neutral language

An utterly brilliant observation was made over at the Log during a discussion of an attempt being made in Sweden to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun (hen) beside he and she (han and hon).

As an aside, for a moment, I'll add that I doubt it will work, because languages generally resist very much any attempt to add a pronoun. I'll also add that English has one - it's "they" - and anyone who happily uses plural verbs with singular "you" shouldn't have a problem doing it with "they", ahem. And I'll also observe the cliché truism that 3/4 of the world's languages don't have gender at all let alone gendered pronouns, yet you'd be reality-challenged to think all those cultures were egalitarian.

Back to the brilliant observation:

languages differ not in what they can say, but in what they must say. In English it's hard to tell a story without incidentally declaring your protagonist's sex, but perfectly easy to tell a story without offering a grammatical clue to anyone's race. The grammar is fully race-neutral.

As the kids say, oh, snap

Dali Patriarch

In case you haven't heard (and you probably haven't), head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill was caught lying last week.

First, Kirill told television host Vladimir Solovyov that despite what Ukrainian journalists wrote in 2009, he never wore a Breguet watch that is estimated to cost more than $30,000. Then, without much effort, journalist Andrei Malgin found an official photograph on the site of the patriarchate that had the watch neatly photoshopped out. The only problem is that they forgot to airbrush the reflection of the watch on the table.

The patriarchate quickly explained that the photograph had been doctored by an inexperienced 24-year-old employee — a "lay woman," the statement emphasized — without permission. [one does wonder: would a nun have not done it - or done a better job? (me)] (English article at The Moscow Times)

Now you can enjoy the picture a Russian friend sent me: