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What’s on your mind?
- Thread starter Gutwrench
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Date, or day?
Not, er, the unmentionable "B-Day"? I thought that has been rescheduled to October 31.
You wandered onto the Happiness is a cool bum. Americans and Brits need to try (and buy) a bidet thread and your brain fixated on a homophone?
Well my understanding was that June the second was the planned day but due to weather it was delayed. So if the weather was good they’d (including my Grandad) have gone today and we would commemorate B day. Or if it was the 5th, C day!
Just where my mind was at.
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Yup.
Ah, fair enough.
An uncle by marriage was killed in November 1943; he was in the RAF and was the pilot (with the rank of acting Flt Lieutenant, actual rank FO) of a Lancaster with Coastal Command, and his entire crew perished with him.
His wife, my aunt, was my mum's eldest sister, and was herself an officer with the WAAFs, and she lived until January 2000. Her second husband worked in the bank when she met him, as did she, but he had worked in Bletchley Park during the war.
My Grandad was part of the expedition force that was evacuated at Dunkirk and then was also part of D-Day. He also went to Isreal after WW2. He never talked about it though. Shame.
I think It changed him. He never left the country other than his service. As a farmer by trade he volunteered rather than was conscripted.
My uncle (and aunt) volunteered, as well.
She had what they called "a good war", after his death, traveling with the Allied forces up through Italy and into Austria, immediately behind the front lines, with the task of requisitioning accommodation and such matters for the senior staff, after a city or town had been captured.
Her second husband died in the late seventies (they married in the late 60s - they were both widowed) but unfortunately he died long before people began to talk about, or write about, Bletchley Park; I would have loved to have been able to listen to him about that.
My aunt did say to me that there was a part of her that never got over the death of her first husband; he was nuts about her, and it was clear (form their photograph album, and the stuff he wrote on the back of some of the pictures) that they were very happy together.
Now, (preparing) dinner is on my mind.
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My SO’s first comment when she told me about the snake was that she was deciding whether or not to kill it. I convinced her not to, as I did with a smaller version of this species (Coluber constrictor) a couple of weeks ago - oddly enough, also hanging out in a tree.
They’re generally beneficial - unless you have chickens, which we don’t currently, but it explains my SO’s (a farmer’s daughter) propensity to move immediately to a shotgun-based solution. Well, they eat frogs too, which I don’t approve of, but what are you going to do? Snakes gotta make a living.
They don’t attack people unless provoked, or are shedding, which makes them cranky. They typically eat mice and rats, which is a good thing, IMHO. So they remain on the farm, unmolested, for the most part.
Venomous snakes, on the other hand, are definitely not welcome in our yard or outbuildings. I took out what I thought was a Cottonmouth a couple of years ago. Turned out it was a Northern Water Snake. A rookie mistake; as a biology undergrad, I should have known better. My .45 ACP 1911 did the job. Practice, I suppose. Ah well.
Read an interesting blog post by the ever interesting Cal Newport, based on an article appeared on The Atlantic which mentions an insightful, beautiful, deep quote by poet Mary Oliver from her last collection of poetry: "‘Attention is the beginning of devotion."
I think I'll ponder that quote for a while.
(@Scepticalscribe I think that you'll find the article published by The Atlantic quite interesting)
I think I'll ponder that quote for a while.
(@Scepticalscribe I think that you'll find the article published by The Atlantic quite interesting)
Around here, copperheads are the only snakes I have any urge to dispatch. Everything else is fine, and honestly beneficial(a few snakes hanging around the yard definitely cuts down on the number of mice and other rodents).
In any case, I tend to grab the 44 Mag Snake Shot.
Yep, seeing such a thing in the wild would probably make me soil myself and cry, not necessarily in that order. I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say I'd rather come across a bear than that while walking in the woods.
A beautiful, thought-provoking piece, with much food for thought therein; grateful thanks for drawing my attention to it.
My pleasure.
Another part of the article that struck a chord is this one:
"A century ago or so, poetry was a fixture of everyday life, enjoyed by everyday people. Then it slowly lost its audience. It turned out that the poem required sharper focus than a television audience could sustain and more patience than modernity would permit."
I think I might subscribe again to Poetry magazine... I enjoyed it for a couple of years.
Very fair and valid point.
While one of my grandparents (my maternal grandmother) was a primary school teacher, all four (born in the last two decades of the 19th century) of them, none of whom attended university, wrote with a beautiful copperplate hand (perfectly legible) and all loved - and effortlessly quoted - poetry, if they thought the occasion called for it.
It is a pity to see poetry increasingly corralled into what might loosely be termed "high culture", as has happened with opera and ballet in our world, when everyone should feel able to access, lose oneself in, and savour such cultural riches.
In the old Soviet world (and much of the post Soviet world), ballet and opera were for everyone, and were seen as cultural signifiers on the part of the state.
Actually, I lived in Georgia (Caucasus Georgia) for over two years a decade ago, and attended the opera and ballet regularly; invariably, they were packed out, all seats taken, with all ages - literally, from grannies of 90 down to entranced three year olds - and all social classes enthusiastically attending and eagerly following proceedings.
I will never forget a performance (an afternoon performance) of the Nutcracker Suite shortly before Christmas in 2009; the theatre was packed, and entranced and enthralled children comprised at least around a third of the audience. I also attended evening performances - with at least two breaks to allow the kids to stretch their legs - where you would see kids spilling out of the opera house when the performance ended, skipping and dancing along the pavement, full of excitement, trying to practice some of the steps and moves that they had seen on stage earlier that evening. It was a wholly wonderful sight, and helps explain why in some of the post Soviet world, this is not yet seen in terms of "high", or niche, culture.
But I do like the line "attention is the beginning of devotion", and taking the time to pay attention and think about what you have seen and heard, and think, yes, how true.
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What a beautiful post, thank you for sharing your memory of that performance.
I am sorry to see poetry becoming more and more a product of niche. I do remember when my elementary school teacher had us learn many poetry pieces. Ungaretti, Leopardi, Quasimodo, Carducci, D'Annunzio, and many more. We had to memorize even parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. Sadly I forgot many parts, but some bits and pieces remain with me. More than that, some of the feelings, and even the meanings are quite alive and more relevant by the day. I did hate the exercise of learning the poetry pieces, and I hated having to recite them in front of the whole class even more, but now I can appreciate what was happening and why.
It saddens me quite a lot to see that both of my kids are not being taught any poetry piece, and anything decent in literary terms... and they go to the school with one the highest ratings in TX. More concerning - and here I connect to your remark on copperplate - they are not even taught how to work well. Most of their assignments, and work is done on scrap paper or on photocopies that then is either lost, destroyed or simply handed out and never be seen again. I remember the painful job of having to copy on my binder or on my journal whatever was the "problem" or the "handout", usually written by the teacher on the blackboard. For the good of me I couldn't understand why I had to use a so inefficient method (I mean, just hand out the photocopies!) but now I realize that it not only taught me to analyze the question carefully (the question is as important as the answer) but also to take some form of pride in my work; if you will, the true teaching subject was not the question "if Johnny has 3 pies and gives half of them to Frank, how many pies remain to Johnny", but the concept of Quality (here I kinda connect to Pirsig's philosophy) and patience. There is no way that as I kid I could've understood it, but the teacher - I had her for all of my elementary school years, and I still remember her quite fondly; once we met randomly when I was 20yo, and to my surprise she still remembered me, the name of my family members, my grades, my "colleagues", and all the silly things I did - was able to plant a very important seed in my Being.
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Excellent post.
Schools matter, yes, hugely. And this is the sort of area where good European schools may have some sort of an advantage.
Nevertheless, if poetry is entirely excluded from the curriculum, this is severing the child from any possibility of having a sort of easy access to a totally different way of looking at the world, of using words differently, of playing with and toying with language, of stretching it - and, using certain rules of poetic composition - to see whether it can express thoughts and feelings more succinctly and powerfully than can sometimes be attempted by prose.
Because, at its best, poetry packs a real punch, and children - especially if introduced to exciting stuff, stuff that they can identify with (I still remember The Listeners by Walter de la Mare, which haunted me so much at the age of eleven that I committed it to memory), can really learn an appreciation and love of poetry if it is introduced to them in a sympathetic and natural manner.
Damn it, I even wrote poetry as a child (and some truly atrocious self-indulgent stuff as a teenager).
But, it also matters to have a home receptive to (and encouraging of) and supportive of, such interests, and activities.
On music, if you (that is, me) heard a piece of classical music you liked on radio, my parents were as prepared to support that by encouraging me to play their collections of music, if they had it, (or buying it for me, if they hadn't), as they were to buy us stuff by the Beatles, or other pieces of music that we liked.
Not only that, they encouraged us to paint, to draw, to write.
Wisely, they didn't distinguish between 'high" classy, or epic, poetry, (which was awe inspiring at its best, or with what spoke to you and when), and hilarious doggerel, (Hilaire Belloc, and so on, to which we used to roar with laughter when it was first read to us - I still remember some of these ludicrous, yet hysterically funny, and wildly irreverent, poems).
That meant that for us, growing up, it was as banal and 'normal' to read poetry, attend classical concerts and jazz and plays, as it was to draw, sketch, write stuff (one of my brothers is a published author as am I) as it was to watch a football match.
Give kids access to this world - as a normal activity - while they are children, and it will become an effortlessly included part of their lives as an adult.
Indeed, when my mum passed away, I found myself reaching for poetry, while my brother spent days listening to the music that he knew my mum would have loved while young.
However, I agree with you about the importance of writing out the question of an assignment or essay or exam, to serve as a sort of intellectual "tuning fork" or focus: It works.
And recent articles that I have read (anecdotally supported by friends still in the teaching profession) seems to suggest that children (and teenagers, and students) remember material far better if they write it down by hand - something to do with how we process information - than if they simply tap it into iPads or computers.
This is why, when attending meetings, even now, I always minute them by hand, (annotating and commenting in the margins), transferring my notes, later that day, to a more formal file on a computer.
But, yes, I am pretty much in agreement with you.
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