Month: April 2012

Posted on by — Leave a comment

On This Day: April 21

Updated April 20, 2012, 2:28 pm

NYT Front Page

On April 21, 1910, author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, died in Redding, Conn.
Go to article »

On April 21, 1838, John Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist considered the father of the environmental movement, was born. Following his death on Dec. 24, 1914, his obituary appeared in The Times.

Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »

 

On This Date

By The Associated Press

1649 The Maryland Toleration Act, which provided for freedom of worship for all Christians, was passed by the Maryland assembly.
1789 John Adams was sworn in as the first vice president of the United States.
1816 Charlotte Bronte, author of “Jane Eyre,” was born in Thornton, England.
1836 Texans led by Sam Houston defeated the Mexicans at San Jacinto, assuring Texas’ independence.
1910 Author Mark Twain died at age 74.
1960 Brazil inaugurated its new capital, Brasilia, transferring the seat of national government from Rio de Janeiro.
1977 The musical “Annie,” based on the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie,” opened on Broadway.
1980 Rosie Ruiz, the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon, was disqualified when officials discovered she had jumped into the race about a mile from the finish.
1992 Robert Alton Harris became the first person executed by the state of California in 25 years as he was put to death in the gas chamber for the 1978 murder of two teenage boys.
2004 Five suicide attackers detonated car bombs against police buildings in Basra, Iraq, killing at least 74 people.
2011 Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., announced he would step down amid a developing ethics probe while insisting he’d done nothing wrong.

Current Birthdays

By The Associated Press

Queen Elizabeth II, Head of state of the United Kingdom

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II turns 86 years old today

AP Photo/Sang Tan

James McAvoy, Actor

Actor James McAvoy turns 33 years old today

AP Photo/Dan Steinberg

1932 Elaine May, Actress, writer, turns 80
1935 Charles Grodin, Actor, turns 77
1941 David Boren, Former U.S. senator, D-Okla., turns 71
1947 Iggy Pop, Rock musician, turns 65
1949 Patti LuPone, Actress, singer, turns 63
1951 Tony Danza, Actor (“Taxi,” “Who’s the Boss?”), turns 61
1958 Andie MacDowell, Actress, turns 54
1959 Robert Smith, Rock musician (The Cure), turns 53
1963 John Cameron Mitchell, Actor, director (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”), turns 49
1970 Nicole Sullivan, Actress, comedian (“MadTV,” “King of Queens”), turns 42
1980 Tony Romo, Football player, turns 32
1982 Cadillac Williams, Football player, turns 30

 

Historic Birthdays

John Muir 4/21/1838 – 12/24/1914 Scottish-born American naturalist and conservationist.Go to obituary »
64 Lodovico Carracci 4/21/1555 – 11/13/1619
Italian painter and printmaker
70 Friedrich Froebel 4/21/1782 – 6/21/1852
German educator and founder of the kindergarten
39 Charlotte Bronte 4/21/1816 – 3/31/1855
English novelist; wrote “Jane Eyre”
67 Josh Billings 4/21/1818 – 10/14/1885
American humorist and writer; popular after the Civil War
56 Max Weber 4/21/1864 – 6/14/1920
German sociologist and economist
70 Billy Bitzer 4/21/1874 – 4/29/1944
American motion-picture cameraman
67 G. Donald Harrison 4/21/1889 – 6/14/1956
English-born American organ designer and builder
85 Randall Thompson 4/21/1899 – 7/9/1984
American composer of choral music
49 Leonard Warren 4/21/1911 – 3/4/1960
American operatic baritone
70 Marcel Camus 4/21/1912 – 1/13/1982
French film director

 

via learning.blogs.nytimes.com

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

April 21

MORNING

“Him hath God exalted.”
Acts 5:31

Jesus, our Lord, once crucified, dead and buried, now sits upon the throne of glory. The highest place that heaven affords is his by undisputed right. It is sweet to remember that the exaltation of Christ in heaven is a representative exaltation. He is exalted at the Father’s right hand, and though as Jehovah he had eminent glories, in which finite creatures cannot share, yet as the Mediator, the honours which Jesus wears in heaven are the heritage of all the saints. It is delightful to reflect how close is Christ’s union with his people. We are actually one with him; we are members of his body; and his exaltation is our exaltation. He will give us to sit upon his throne, even as he has overcome, and is set down with his Father on his throne; he has a crown, and he gives us crowns too; he has a throne, but he is not content with having a throne to himself, on his right hand there must be his queen, arrayed in “gold of Ophir.” He cannot be glorified without his bride. Look up, believer, to Jesus now; let the eye of your faith behold him with many crowns upon his head; and remember that you will one day be like him, when you shall see him as he is; you shall not be so great as he is, you shall not be so divine, but still you shall, in a measure, share the same honours, and enjoy the same happiness and the same dignity which he possesses. Be content to live unknown for a little while, and to walk your weary way through the fields of poverty, or up the hills of affliction; for by-and-by you shall reign with Christ, for he has “made us kings and priests unto God, and we shall reign forever and ever.” Oh!, wonderful thought for the children of God! We have Christ for our glorious representative in heaven’s courts now, and soon he will come and receive us to himself, to be with him there, to behold his glory, and to share his joy.

EVENING

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.”
Psalm 91:5

What is this terror? It may be the cry of fire, or the noise of thieves, or fancied appearances, or the shriek of sudden sickness or death. We live in the world of death and sorrow, we may therefore look for ills as well in the night-watches as beneath the glare of the broiling sun. Nor should this alarm us, for be the terror what it may, the promise is that the believer shall not be afraid. Why should he? Let us put it more closely, why should we? God our Father is here, and will be here all through the lonely hours; he is an almighty Watcher, a sleepless Guardian, a faithful Friend. Nothing can happen without his direction, for even hell itself is under his control. Darkness is not dark to him. He has promised to be a wall of fire around his people–and who can break through such a barrier? Worldlings may well be afraid, for they have an angry God above them, a guilty conscience within them, and a yawning hell beneath them; but we who rest in Jesus are saved from all these through rich mercy. If we give way to foolish fear we shall dishonour our profession, and lead others to doubt the reality of godliness. We ought to be afraid of being afraid, lest we should vex the Holy Spirit by foolish distrust. Down, then, ye dismal forebodings and groundless apprehensions, God has not forgotten to be gracious, nor shut up his tender mercies; it may be night in the soul, but there need be no terror, for the God of love changes not. Children of light may walk in darkness, but they are not therefore cast away, nay, they are now enabled to prove their adoption by trusting in their heavenly Father as hypocrites cannot do.

“Though the night be dark and dreary,

Darkness cannot hide from thee;

Thou art he, who, never weary,

Watchest where thy people be.”

via view.lists.biblegateway.com

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Bowling, Beer, Chips & Salsa: Fun Friday at the Lanes

P1550
P1553
P1552
P1551

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Grief In Greenness: Two Melancholy Poems Of Spring by Philip Larkin via NPR

Spring flower with dead bloom

Eldad Carin/iStockphoto.com

April 20, 2012

Springtime is the season of renewal, but it can also be a season of ambivalence. After all, for something to be made new and fresh, it first has to have gotten old and worn. Perhaps this is why some of the best poets of spring are masters of minor-key feelings like doubt, sadness and regret — every rebirth, as they know, contains a little death.

The English poet Philip Larkin (whose Complete Poems were recently published) is a famously melancholy writer, so it’s no surprise that he also wrote two of the finest spring poems of the last century. Larkin’s poetry usually involves a wry, sensible, self-mocking persona that serves as a barrier against an oceanic emotional current — reading his best work is like being served tea on the edge of a steadily eroding cliff.

Often, this unstable arrangement emerges as a shift in diction and tone. He’ll begin a poem in an aggressively conversational idiom (“Announcements, splutteringly loud. // Clash with the quack of a man with pound notes round his hat”), and then end in a very different register (“Let it stay hidden there like strength … something they share / That breaks ancestrally each year into / Regenerate union. Let it always be there.”). Other times, the tension between Larkin’s persona and his actual feelings resolves into a classical balance that is as poignant as it is precarious.

That balancing act is evident in both of Larkin’s spring poems. The first is from 1950, and is called “Coming.”

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Spring, Larkin tells us, speaks to emotion, not reason. Just as a child can’t understand adult conflict, yet is instinctively pleased by its resolution in laughter (which Larkin carefully notes is “unusual”), we can neither comprehend nor control our response to seasonal renewal. We just like it. And we like it even though the reality of the state to which it reduces us — childhood — isn’t necessarily desirable (“I, whose childhood / Is a forgotten boredom”).

“Coming” therefore gives us a kind of circular thought process: Spring makes us happy, but it is irrational happiness — but it is still happiness … and so on. Those competing conclusions churn beneath the smooth surface of the poem and give it a rotating force that is practically seasonal.

Larkin revisits this idea more explicitly about 20 years later in his second great spring poem, “The Trees.”

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

“The Trees” sets up a contrast between what trees “seem to say” and what we can actually learn from their springtime revival. First, Larkin tells us that “their greenness is a kind of grief,” and asks whether this sadness comes from our knowledge that “they are born again / And we grow old.” But he rejects this notion: “No, they die too.”

Indeed, despite what the trees’ new leaves “seem to say” and what is “almost being said,” the truth is “written down” in the growth rings inside their trunks (and of course, in the poem itself). Trees grow older. At some point, there will be no more rings, and they will die. The rings — usually a symbol of eternity — here convey the opposite: the trees’ mortality. The poem’s penultimate line is therefore delicately ironic: “Last year is dead, they seem to say” — but this, as we know from the previous stanza, is a “trick.” The only thing that doesn’t actually end is time.

And yet, as in “Coming,” the tone of the poem argues against its bleaker conclusions. “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”: The words are attributed falsely to the trees (which can’t speak), and they aren’t even true, in the sense that birth is the only truly “fresh” beginning. But they feel true. Again, we’re in the grip of a circular debate between what we know to be the case and what we want the case to be.

The desire that Larkin frames is the same one Emerson writes about in his essay “Circles.” “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire,” Emerson says, “is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.” Or, one might say, to see another spring arrive, in all its ambiguous glory.

David Orr writes about poetry for NPR Books and other publications. His most recent book is Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

“The Trees” and “Coming” are excerpted from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited and with an introduction and commentary by Archie Burnett. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. All rights reserved.

via npr.org
Spring

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

On This Day: April 20

Updated April 19, 2012, 2:28 pm

NYT Front Page

On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

Go to article »

On April 20, 1889, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany who led his country into World War II and was responsible for persecuting millions of Jews, was born. Following his death on April 30, 1945, his obituary appeared in The Times.

Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »

 

On This Date

By The Associated Press

1792 France declared war on Austria, marking the start of the French Revolutionary wars.
1812 Vice President George Clinton, a former New York governor, died at age 73.
1836 The Territory of Wisconsin was established by Congress.
1889 Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria.
1902 Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the radioactive element radium.
1912 Fenway Park in Boston and Tiger Stadium in Detroit opened.
1939 Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox.
1940 RCA publicly demonstrated its new electron microscope.
1971 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.
1972 The manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the moon.
1980 The first Cubans sailing to the United States as part of the massive Mariel boatlift reached Florida.
1999 Two students went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives.
2008 Danica Patrick became the first female winner in IndyCar history by capturing the Indy Japan 300.

Current Birthdays

By The Associated Press

George Takei, Actor (“Star Trek”)

Actor George Takei (“Star Trek”) turns 75 years old today.

AP Photo/Matt Sayles

Jessica Lange, Actress

Actress Jessica Lange turns 63 years old today.

AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

1920 John Paul Stevens, Supreme Court justice, turns 92
1924 Leslie Phillips, Actor (“Harry Potter” films), turns 88
1936 Pat Roberts, U.S. senator, R-Kan., turns 76
1941 Ryan O’Neal, Actor (“Love Story,” “Paper Moon”), turns 71
1945 Steve Spurrier, College football coach, turns 67
1964 Crispin Glover, Actor, turns 48
1972 Carmen Electra, Actress, turns 40
1976 Joey Lawrence, Actor, turns 36

 

Historic Birthdays

Adolf Hitler 4/20/1889 – 4/30/1945 German leader of the Nazi party and dictator of Germany (1933-45).Go to obituary »
72 Johann Agricola 4/20/1494 – 9/22/1566
German Lutheran reformer; helped introduced Lutheranism to Frankfurt
76 Odilon Redon 4/20/1840 – 7/6/1916
French painter, lithographer and etcher
81 Daniel Chester French 4/20/1850 – 10/7/1931
American sculptor; works included Lincoln’s Memorial
93 Charles G. Curtis 4/20/1860 – 3/10/1953
American inventor; devised a steam turbine
54 Howard Vickery 4/20/1892 – 3/21/1946
American naval officer; vice admiral of the Navy (1944-46)
78 Harold Lloyd 4/20/1893 – 3/8/1971
American motion-picture comedian
90 Joan Miro 4/20/1893 – 12/25/1983
Spanish artist of abstract and Surrealist art
79 William Dollar 4/20/1907 – 2/28/1986
American ballet dancer, choreographer and ballet master

 

via learning.blogs.nytimes.com

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

April 20

MORNING

“I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
Job 19:25

The marrow of Job’s comfort lies in that little word “My”–“My Redeemer,” and in the fact that the Redeemer lives. Oh! to get hold of a living Christ. We must get a property in him before we can enjoy him. What is gold in the mine to me? Men are beggars in Peru, and beg their bread in California. It is gold in my purse which will satisfy my necessities, by purchasing the bread I need. So a Redeemer who does not redeem me, an avenger who will never stand up for my blood, of what avail were such? Rest not content until by faith you can say “Yes, I cast myself upon my living Lord; and he is mine.” It may be you hold him with a feeble hand; you half think it presumption to say, “He lives as my Redeemer;” yet, remember if you have but faith as a grain of mustard seed, that little faith entitles you to say it. But there is also another word here, expressive of Job’s strong confidence, “I know.” To say, “I hope so, I trust so” is comfortable; and there are thousands in the fold of Jesus who hardly ever get much further. But to reach the essence of consolation you must say, “I know.” Ifs, buts, and perhapses, are sure murderers of peace and comfort. Doubts are dreary things in times of sorrow. Like wasps they sting the soul! If I have any suspicion that Christ is not mine, then there is vinegar mingled with the gall of death; but if I know that Jesus lives for me, then darkness is not dark: even the night is light about me. Surely if Job, in those ages before the coming and advent of Christ, could say, “I know,” we should not speak less positively. God forbid that our positiveness should be presumption. Let us see that our evidences are right, lest we build upon an ungrounded hope; and then let us not be satisfied with the mere foundation, for it is from the upper rooms that we get the widest prospect. A living Redeemer, truly mine, is joy unspeakable.

EVENING

“Who is even at the right hand of God.”
Romans 8:34

He who was once despised and rejected of men, now occupies the honourable position of a beloved and honoured Son. The right hand of God is the place of majesty and favour. Our Lord Jesus is his people’s representative. When he died for them, they had rest; he rose again for them, they had liberty; when he sat down at his Father’s right hand, they had favour, and honour, and dignity. The raising and elevation of Christ is the elevation, the acceptance, and enshrinement, the glorifying of all his people, for he is their head and representative. This sitting at the right hand of God, then, is to be viewed as the acceptance of the person of the Surety, the reception of the Representative, and therefore, the acceptance of our souls. O saint, see in this thy sure freedom from condemnation. “Who is he that condemneth?” Who shall condemn the men who are in Jesus at the right hand of God?

The right hand is the place of power. Christ at the right hand of God hath all power in heaven and in earth. Who shall fight against the people who have such power vested in their Captain? O my soul, what can destroy thee if Omnipotence be thy helper? If the aegis of the Almighty cover thee, what sword can smite thee? Rest thou secure. If Jesus is thine all-prevailing King, and hath trodden thine enemies beneath his feet; if sin, death, and hell are all vanquished by him, and thou art represented in him, by no possibility canst thou be destroyed.

“Jesu’s tremendous name

Puts all our foes to flight:

Jesus, the meek, the angry Lamb,

A Lion is in fight.

“By all hell’s host withstood;

We all hell’s host o’erthrow;

And conquering them, through Jesu’s blood

We still to conquer go.”

via view.lists.biblegateway.com

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Levon Helm, RIP & Thank You for the Music! The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (11 25 1976)

via youtube.com
Levon-helm-the-band-gi

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

"Like a faithful dog… she comes to me"

‘…In Jerusalem, hope springs eternal. Hope is like a faithful dog. Sometimes she runs ahead of me to check the future, to sniff it out, Then I call her: Hope, Hope come here, and she Comes to me. …’

After a family visit to Jerusalem, Bono signed out from the King David Hotel by citing a poem from ‘Open Closed Open: Poems’ the final collection from Yehuda Amichai, regarded by many as Israel’s greatest modern poet.

Note on pic: my front door.

P1536