II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

“Son at Seventeen”

My son, an expert by overexposure,
recognizes the song before I do,
the best one of the year
about how sex is good for everybody.

This large man who was a boy a year ago
cranks up the radio till the car
is a bulging capsule of sound,
heavy on the bass.

As he drives, he sings every word loudly,
with cellular belief.
He will have it all, give it all
in his time, probably soon.

My heart begins to vibrate dangerously
at the lowest frequencies.
Tonight I feel old enough to be mother to a man.

I mime my fear to him,
My hand on my chest, my eyes wide.
I can feel it in my chest, I scream.

He stops singing long enough to nod,
Delighted that I have noticed.
It gets better, he yells.

— Francette Cerulli from The Spirits Need to Eat
© Nine-Patch Press. Reprinted with permission.

A “thin place”

We’ve bought our tickets for a two week trip to Scotland and a week at Iona (a “thin place”) in late May. Impetuous? Yes, definitely. Is this a sufficient excuse to buy that digital SLR? I think maybe yes.

Rockabye Baby

I wasn’t aware of these until my kid sister pointed them out to me: lullaby renditions of some of rock music’s bigger acts: Radiohead, The Cure, Coldplay, Led Zeppelin, U2, etc. It’s mildly intriguing to see what the musician Michael Armstrong does with the songs. But once your curiosity is satisfied, it seems kind of pointless. The worst of it is the clichéd notion that music for the very young has to be made with vibraphone and glockenspiel.

RND#04:'Economic Growth' by Cathode (vid by Richard Fenwick)

Howard Fishman does the “Basement Tapes”

Check this out. And a sample mp3 of ‘Down in the Flood’ here.

The Dawkins Confusion

Alvin Plantinga handily makes mincemeat of Dawkin’s The God Delusion. While I’m not always a fan of Books & Culture (it’s often rather conservative for my taste) I have nothing but respect for Plantinga (it doesn’t hurt that he taught at my alma mater for 20 years). He seems to be having fun while he’s at it — a very enjoyable read. H. Allen Orr does a similar dissection over at The New York Review of Books. I’m not one to get my back up by arguments for atheism, but for God’s sake make your arguments cogent!