More on the Mundane

"Nirvana" by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom Waits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVVzCURucaA

http://talesfromshangri-la.blogspot.com/2014/09/pleading-case-for-mundane.html

Kipling on Character

This is one of the most famous of Kipling's works -- and one of my most favorite poems. It explains what character looks like in daily life.

In the concrete, he describes such character traits as humility, cool-headedness, trustworthiness, perseverance, courage and risk, resignation and fortitude.

Poetry Foundation link

If—

    

If you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, 

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, 

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken 

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 

And lose, and start again at your beginnings 

    And never breathe a word about your loss; 

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you 

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, 

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, 

    If all men count with you, but none too much; 

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Country Romance

Love these two pretty songs about real, grown up romance.

Remember When -- Alan Jackson

Something That We Do -- Clint Black

Mrs. Pardiggle, Mr. Bumble, and the rest

Nothing subtle about Dickens.

Charles Dickens and the linguistic art of the minor character. 

O Captain! My Captain!

This poem was written by Walt Whitman for Abraham Lincoln at his death. I read it at the funeral of my grandfather, a retired Navy Captain and pilot in WWII and the Korean War.

I found this poem a fitting tribute for my grandfather -- a Harvard-educated renaissance man, lover of poetry, graceful ballroom dancer, a veteran -- dashing and courageous. He introduced me to the poems of Robert W. Service and the stories of Bret Harte.

My father is a veteran, also, and my uncle flew combat air missions in VietNam. David's grandfather and at least one of his great uncles were veterans, as well. The USS Loeser (pronounced LOH-zer) was named after David's "Uncle Art," who was killed in WWII.

On Memorial Day we remember those who died in war. And by extension, it seems right to remember those who are and were willing to die in war.

Soldiers and farmers are frequently given as examples for believers in Scripture. I am blessed to have both in my family.

(This copy from Poetry Foundation website):

O Captain! My Captain!

Related Poem Content Details

BY WALT WHITMAN

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; 

                         But O heart! heart! heart! 

                            O the bleeding drops of red, 

                               Where on the deck my Captain lies, 

                                  Fallen cold and dead. 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; 

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, 

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, 

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 

                         Here Captain! dear father! 

                            This arm beneath your head! 

                               It is some dream that on the deck, 

                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; 

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells! 

                            But I with mournful tread, 

                               Walk the deck my Captain lies, 

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

Source: Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891)

Stopping by Woods

...written and read by Robert Frost -- read when he was an older man.

Whose woods these are I think I know

Mark Twain

The only footage of Mark Twain known to be in existence

"Thomas Edison once said, 'An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.'"

Stories Make You Smarter and More Empathetic

Reading fiction is good for you.

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=090915&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-reading-fiction-improves-intelligence&origin=

Who Cares about Homer and Shakespeare?

David sent this along to me today -- sensible reasons and practical ways for all students to read and study the classics -- even business majors. But I posted this mainly for the stories about Catholic school (which I attended in high school).


The Suicide of the Liberal Arts

"The Two Uses"

Even the workaday and practical arm
Becomes all love for love's sake to the lover.

If this is nature's thrift, love thrives on it.

*The Two Uses

The eye is not more exquisitely designed
For seeing than it is for being loved.
The same lips curved to speak are curved to kiss.
Even the workaday and practical arm
Becomes all love for love's sake to the lover.

If this is nature's thrift, love thrives on it.
Love never asks the body different
Or ever wants it less ambiguous,
The eye being lovelier for what it sees,
The arm for all it does, the lips for speaking

-Robert Francis (American, born 1901)

Fine China, Fat Televisions, and Ordinary Coffee

My sister-in-law sent me this poem, and I love it.

My Grandparents’ Generation

by Faith Shearin

They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

“My Grandparents’ Generation” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

"Centireading"

"After a hundred reads, familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow. Centireading belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading. Christmas is devoted to reading books we all know perfectly well. The children want to hear the one story they have heard so many times they don’t need to hear it again."

On reading a book 100 times -- a good writer writes about reading Hamlet and Wodehouse,

Centireading Force:why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

As a Navy kid who attended 10 schools, I found reading and re-reading and re-reading certain books formed a groove in my mind of friendly kinship and "place" that eluded me in my constantly-changing school social circles. These books helped me translate my experiences from the vantage point of a wanderer in good company.

I saw myself as the adventuring outsider, watching mountains and plains and woods and cities roll by the car window on 80 or 95 or the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Though a skinny American girl living in the 1970s and 80s, I felt I related directly with the Pevensies and the Ingalls of Narnia, Cambridge, and the woods and prairies of 19th century America -- not the Middletons of Charleston or the Donovans of Maine or the Smiths of Virginia. I can quote the Narnia books and the Little House books like I can quote the Bible, yea, in time of need.

Later, as an adult living in Shanghai, when the strangeness of that glittering and odd city felt heavy and chemical, and like walking in a backwards world upside down, I turned frequently to Wodehouse to recall something warmly organic, a comfortable friendship, the mollifying lightness of old jokes shared again. And also therein recalled a world that presumes we are all, occidental and oriental, at least a little bit nuts.

In this except from the article, the author reflects on Jeeves and Hamlet (and why not?) as an expat Canadian boy in England: 

"Every Sunday, my family would load ourselves into a car – my father, my mother, my kid brother and I – and drive out more or less randomly to see what England had to offer. In western Canada where I grew up, it had been perfectly standard to cross three or four hours of prairie to visit a relative for lunch. From Cambridge, an hour in any direction would land us in a church from the reign of Queen Anne, unspeakably ancient to our new world eyes, or some grand estate, the luxury of the residence always offset by the cheapness of its gift shops, always reeking of scones and plastic guidebooks, or the ruin of some abbey, the stuff of mossy legends. During these trips, in the tiny English car, we would listen to cassettes of The Inimitable Jeeves, read by Jonathan Cecil.

The psychology of my love for The Inimitable Jeeves isn’t exactly hard to understand. As we rolled through that strange country, laughing at the English with the English, the family was both inside and outside. My associations with The Inimitable Jeeves are as powerful as they could possibly be, a fused sense of family unity and childhood adventure. The book is so much more than just a happy childhood memory. In such ways, books pick us, rather than the other way around.

The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of cliche. 'To be or not to be' is the Stairway to Heaven of theatre; it settles over the crowd like a slightly funky blanket knitted by a favorite aunt. Eventually, if you read Hamlet often enough, every soliloquy takes on that same familiarity. And so 'To be or not to be' resumes its natural place in the play, as just another speech. Which renders its power and its beauty of a piece with the rest of the work."

Christian in the Arts

Here's a link to a kickstarter campaign for a young friend of ours, Allison Mattox. She is a believer and an actress in Los Angeles.

She is working hard, paying her own way -- "earning her chops" as they say -- in a tough industry in an expensive town. I'll be frank, as as mom -- aside from the fact that she comes from a creative family -- the things that recommend her to me are that she is earnest, hard working, and basically figuring this out without acting entitled. We all know that in the Mom World these things are a deal maker.

Mattox is producing a small film called Three in June based on a family account of a Southern girl on her wedding day. If you are interested in supporting Christians in the arts, please check it out and consider donating or sharing the word.

It's tempting to moan about Hollywood, millennials, the culture. But instead let's help hard-working Christian millennials get in the game, get experience, and make a difference.

Three in June

Thanks,
Anne

Pleading the Case for the Mundane

A letter to a gifted prep school friend

Dear Friend,

You are caught up in a hundred little deaths of your soul these days. You are forced to sit through classes which are beneath you.

You know more about these books, these histories; you understand them better than your peers. You are better read than some of your teachers. This is really true, at least in an academic sense.

In other classes you are made to study material you know you will never use. Odds are good you won't need that quadratic formula in graduate school or in cooking your dinner.

And this is an indignity. You, O Suburban Minion, must abide the endless chores of polite conversation, lunchroom shufflings, leading questions, obvious observations, endless chores, polite conversation....

You have better taste.

Every day you are forced to eat food lacking in subtlety, speak to people lacking in insight and nuance, and grind through homework assignments lacking in imagination and spark, taught by adults who punch the card when you include "setting," "characters," and an ample amount of ham-handed adverbial verbiage. Similes that sit like a knuckle sandwich in your mouth.

What's the use? Where are Sartre and Camus and Kerouc and Woolf in all of this mundane flotsam and jetsam? Where is the Green Knight?

Where is Keats in this tedious homework assignment to analyze Fanny Brawne -- 'til the Bright Star herself becomes thick-limbed, ugly, and graceless with dead eyes? Nothing like the sun.

Oh to be one of those noted intellectuals! Those brilliant sparks, caught up in thought and conversation, and not hampered by The Daily Bourgeois of suburban high school and carpool line and vacuuming the stairs.

Oh to feed that bright fire of the mind, all day, with people who understand and appreciate the heat!

Yet, you are well-read. What about those characters you know so well?

What about Saruman in his tall tower hanging in the thin air far above the plains and the little men and the beasts.

What about Uncle Andrew and Queen Jadis, and their "high and lonely destiny"?

What about that invisible man, and his lone scientific pursuit of autonomy, fed by a withered heart lacking in human connection?

What if Dr. Frankenstein was a monster and the Monster had a soul?

What about Virginia's Lighthouse? Did it help her see the rocks?

And you have read The Intellectual Greats. What if:

What if many of those ivory tower intellectuals were tiresome bores in the pub or the parlor?

What if it would be insufferable to share just one drink with them? What if they were the ones everyone avoided at the cocktail party or on the street?

What if they were people that made other people look at the clock to mutter about appointments and traffic and "needing to go, so nice to touch base with you...."

What if -- in their rejection of humility, humanity, and the simplicity of duty -- they lost touch with glory, divinity, and the deeply complex?

What if, in their single-minded pursuit of truth and beauty in isolation -- in the rarefied company of themselves and their toadying salons -- they lost both. (Truth and beauty, that is.)

What if we all felt sorry for their wives and children and dogs and next door neighbors?

And more.

What if Mother Teresa was a genius and Sartre was a fool (himself telling tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing)?

What if Einstein practiced piano scales daily as a kid?

What if the capitalist down the street is a philanthropist, the humanist down the street is a misanthropist, the scholar is a bigot, and the small town sheriff is a sage?

What if theology is the queen of the sciences?

It's complicated, isn't it?

Think:

What if we maintain our connection to the divine, in part, by maintaining our relationship with the human?

What if we love God in part by loving others and performing daily duties?

What if even the Word Himself became flesh. And dwelt among us.

And what if to love and know and learn, we have to go where the unwashed they are, and live where the un-nuanced they live, and eat their casseroles, boiled vegetables, and drink their iced tea, and do their homework assignments?

And in meeting with daily life and daily people, what if we find not just truth and beauty, but also ourselves right there?

What if we find that we, in fact, are just another one of them: merely a co-regent of all creation. (Nothing big.)

My friend, what if we find our best selves in the mundane performance of daily duties that bring order and abundance, done with love, joy, and humility?

Here is your next homework assignment for "Life 101"

* Read the Gospel of John to yourself aloud and slowly
* Read "The Practice of the Presence of God" by Brother Andrew
* Read "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson
* Discuss with your fellow co-regents. (Ie, your middle class parents, teachers, and friends. You might be surprised at how much they know.)

Sincerely,
An old friend who once hated homework, wore black turtlenecks, and choked on both gnats and Camels

Little birthday poem

for Sarah

She of the soft brown hair
Bright brown eyes
Math problem sighs
Puppy dog highs
Pink lip gloss

She of the cartwheels,
Handsprings
Trampoline tumbling
Shy-brave smiling
Flip-flop flipping
Flowered shorts

She of the tie-dye
Shirts,
Daddy flirts
Besties texting
Cookie baking
"Iced-chai-latte" thirst
Queen of Latin First
(and Second) Declensions
Our third
Is 12 today

Small Cool One

Liquid fur
Flows, crossing concrete and curb
Streaming through green grass

Silky, threading disaster
Needling cars, boys, and falling leaves
Skirting tires and mailboxes
Dashing at trees

To mix with light and shadow
Of brown leaf and log
To ripple in hiding on a branch
And wink at barking dog

Robert McCloskey

McCloskey is the writer of Caldecott-winning children's books from decades ago. I loved them as a child and my children loved them, too. Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, Make Way for Ducklings, and others

All are available on amazon. Don't buy the story tapes. Enjoy the illustrations and chuckle over the story together.

Sarah used to try to put her little foot on the page and step into Sal's mom's kitchen. I wanted to go there, too.

-Anne

Spring Poems: Emily Dickinson, "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"

A narrow fellow in the grass 

BY EMILY DICKINSON

A narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him—did you not

His notice sudden is,

The grass divides as with a comb,

A spotted shaft is seen,

And then it closes at your feet,

And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,  

A floor too cool for corn,

But when a boy and barefoot,

I more than once at noon

Have passed, I thought, a whip lash,

Unbraiding in the sun,

When stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled and was gone.

Several of nature’s people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality.

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

Spring Poems: Robert Frost, "The Pasture"

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

Spring poems: AE Housman, "Loveliest of Trees"

"Loveliest of Trees"

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,	5
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,	10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.