Bobby & Ricky

And Dylan is interviewing Gervais. Should be interesting.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow...

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow;
there is no humor in Heaven.”
— Mark Twain

Today is the birthday of the man who wrote under the name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910). Go listen to Garrison Keillor at The Writer’s Almanac. (Is there anyone with a more mellifluous voice?)

Double word space between sentences a quaint Victorian habit?

So says Robert Bringhurst, in The Elements of Typographic Style:

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victoria habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, a colon or any other mark of punctuation. Large spaces (e.g., en spaces) are themselves punctuation.

Whose woods these are

Just back from my regular Wednesday morning run with my friend Tom. We almost didn’t go because of the cold (-10º C) but I’m glad we did: the early morning light in a forest hung with snow is a thing to behold. The snowfall of a few days ago brought down a few large branches so that our route was quite the obstacle course (though enjoyable in its way). It also made our normal half hour significantly longer and, because Tom had to be somewhere, he took the shortcut back to his car. This gave me the chance to enjoy the almost complete quiet (damn the din of traffic) of the woods to myself. I was enjoying the Frostian moment of solitude when it occurred to me that a Frostian moment would necessarily include thoughts of mortality. But that felt right, too. I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Irish Cream

Years ago, I got this recipe from my Tante Truusje. Baileys it’s not but who can argue with the price? It is delicious, easy, and perfect for the Christmas season. (Which reminds me, I should post my hot buttered rum recipe too. . . .)

Can of worms

“The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, ‘What am I doing?!’”

— Jack Handey, Deepest Thoughts.

My Love Is Like to Ice

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congealed with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)

Snow

nuannaarpoq

The Inuktitut word which means “the taking of extravagant pleasure in being alive.”

Friendship

Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it's gentleness

And understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It's preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I'm feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends.
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.

Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2006)

“Zero”

The November 20 issue of the New Yorker has another scary environment essay by the brilliant Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Darkening Sea: What Carbon Emissions Are Doing to the Ocean.” A few pages in, she quotes climate scientist Ken Caldiera:

Caldeira siad that he had recently gone to Washington to brief some members of Congress. “I was asked, ‘What is the appropriate stabilization target for atmospheric CO2?’ he recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, I think it's inappropriate to think in terms of stabilization targets. I think we should think in terms of emissions targets.’ And they said, ‘O.K., what's the appropriate emissions target?’ And I said, ‘Zero.’

“If you’re talking about mugging little old ladies, you don’t say, “What’s our target for the rate of mugging little old ladies?’ You say, ‘Mugging little old ladies is bad, and we’re going to try to eliminate it.’ You recognize you might not be a hundred per cent successful, but your goal is to eliminate the mugging of little old ladies. And I think we need to eventually come around to looking at carbon-dioxide emissions the same way.”

New releases

A couple of new upcoming CDs look interesting. Brad Wheeler of The Globe and Mail writes snappy little reviews:

Snake Road
Bob Lanois
Cordova Bay
Rating: ***
He's heavy, and he's my brother. Bob Lanois, who describes himself as a fledgling harmonica player, hails his uber-producer bro Daniel to make an instrumental album of cinematic scope and rural charm, with slight urban affectations. The musical landscapes are French-Canadian and vaguely Romanian, with a melodic mouth harp that shimmers, quivers and sometimes makes like a squeeze box. Last track “Up Set” has a lazy roller-rink organ and the slow lope of Roy Rogers's horse. Happy trails, indeed.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
Tom Waits
Anti-
Rating: ****
Tom Waits — surprise — has the most peculiar scrap heaps you'll ever wish to hear. The three CDs of Orphans collect batches of abandoned songs, cover tunes and songs that are written new, all grouped by style and theme. First disc “Brawlers” finds Waits bark-voiced and heavy-footed on rough-house blues and gutter-level rockabilly. “Bawlers” are sepia-toned laments, lullabies and rural ballads; on “Bastards,” things just get weird. In all, more than three hours of Waits, at turns shaking and soothing with songs that “survived the flood” and were wiped of muck — but not completely.

Thanksgiving epiphany

Dylan as a pilgrim?

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it."

So says Mark Twain. The lower mainland has been experiencing record rainfall. Fine. Ditto for the wind. Even the power loss was tolerable. But no Starbucks? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Oh the humanity!

(Well, TG that's over. Never mind.)

Yes, its a mess. But its my mess

You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs

Found an interesting book in the remainder pile at my local Chapters (and it was only 4 bucks!): The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus. It’s a great idea: a collection of essays on mostly ancient songs that are still part of our cultural vocabulary (nice jacket design too by Rubina Yeh). Haven’t gotten too far into it yet but I’m really enjoying Ann Powers’ piece on “The Water Is Wide”. She offers a compelling insight into why so much pop music is focused on things romantic:

"'Lovers are always waiting,' writes Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet, her inquiry into the structures of passion. ‘They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.'

"When a lover falls in love, she tends to make time, carving out minutes on end to manufacture conversations, reflect upon encounters, and ponder whether what she’s sensing is real or not. Her love is definitely real in those stolen moments, when no one — most of all, the beloved — is around to dispute it. One reason why so much popular music revolves around romance is that music has the same power to set time aside, making a little private space within the day where the singer or the listener can build on inner ground. Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away … give me a boat that can carry two. Music works like that longed-for vessel, carrying its lover to a place where reality isn’t crowding her out."

A blustery day

Wow. What a day of wind and rain yesterday. 19+ hours without power. I'm glad to be back.

I don't wanna be hers, I wanna be yers

Reading a blog item recently on “pushing the rhyme envelope” in song reminded me of an audio clip (not great quality I'm afraid) I have of literary critic Christopher Ricks at the New Yorker Festival in 2001. All about Bob Dylan and his inventive use of rhyme, it's twelve minutes of pleasure and you can listen to it here. Especially fun is his discussion of Dylan's I Wanna Be Your Lover (which is a song worth tracking down by the way!).

Collage for John

This is the collage I did for my friend in celebration of his 60th birthday.

Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver

it is at moments after i have dreamed

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

—turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

E. E. Cummings

Borat

From the CBC website, a review of the movie:

“Borat is a film about how foreigners see westerners — promiscuous, greedy, materialist hypocrites — and how the West sees foreigners: horny, incomprehensible, primitive curiosities. And so it is a film about how everybody is wrong, but also how much there is to laugh at in the cutting shards of truth that create those stereotypes. All of which accounts for just how hard it is to watch.”

A rain chain is a beautiful thing

typo_dylan

This has been around for a while but it's still a lot of fun to watch, esp. if you're a Dylan and/or typography fan.

Forty Years

Life is your privelege, not your belonging.
It is the loss of it, now, that you will be singing.

Wendell Berry

Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

Robert Frost