Maggie's Farm

The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Brennan on the Moor. Only Liam remains of the original group. A piece by Rick Moran here.

The big sale is on until the end of August.

Long-time readers know how much we all love the Teaching Company. It's one of the ways we all try to continue to learn. But it's much more fun than school, because no single school could contain so many suberb and enthusiastic communicators - plus no tests or term papers. We use the CDs in the car and while working out.

I cannot praise these people enough. Look through their catalog to find the gaping holes in your education. In my family, we trade them around, but we only buy them during the sales.

Robert Frost's notebooks have been published. A quote from Ormsby's review at New Criterion:

As the Notebooks show, Frost was a sophisticated reader of philosophy; he knew the Greeks from Thales on and had read Hegel, Schopenhauer, William James, and Bergson (a particular favorite), among others. Here he isn’t making a case for some relativistic notion of truth (indeed, he isn’t making a case at all but having what he liked to call “a think”). Instead, he is winkling out the capacity of poetry to capture, in a single dramatic image or synechdoche, a “confluence” of colliding truths. The object of a poem wasn’t to concoct some slick “unity of opposites;” it was to find those words—“words that have been mouthed like a common tin cup,” as he put it—through which multiple oppositions could flash forth from a single point of compression. An early jotting states, “I thought I was an {acromatic} lense. I’m afraid I am a prism” (his brackets and spelling). Metaphor was one obvious “prismatic” device but for Frost’s purposes, the aphorism, the proverb, and, especially, the figure of synechdoche, offered higher powers of refraction.

Amazing footage. (a big h/t to Driscoll). I forwarded the YouTube to Dr. Bob, who has been doing a series of photo essays on the construction of the new bridge). Watch the guy rescuing his dog from the bridge. 

How do they produce so much sound? Every girl crazy about a sharp-dressed man.

From American.com:

The U.S. now has 125 opera companies. That’s more than Germany or Italy, and roughly as many Americans attend live opera performances as attend NFL football games. Jonathan Leaf examines a surprising phenomenon—beyond the Met.

If that is true, then why don't we have more opera on TV? I wish we did. Read the article here. Readers know that we like the Met, but are also very happy with the NYC Opera just next door. Other than in Lincoln Center, where in the world are there two opera companies performing next door to eachother?

He died at 89. A genius, or just pretentious? I don't know.

He always had excellent cinematography, and The Seventh Seal, which was ostensibly about The Plague, was darn interesting to watch.

I saw it the first time at The Thalia. 

Our friend at Sippican Cottage has a mind-boggling photo collection. For example, last night he emailed me a photo he had of the interior of Penfield Light, which we wrote about yesterday.

Where does he find this stuff? He won't say.

Penfield Reef, a long-time hazard to ships and boats, extends south from the Fairfield (CT) beach one mile into Long Island Sound. It is covered at high tide, but exposed otherwise as a broad ridge of sand, now reinforced with large riprap in parts so you can walk out - but not without slipping on slabs of rockweed.

Here's a photo of Jennings Beach, the wide and excellent town beach of Fairfield:

During the Revolution the Brits landed on this beach, marched a mile into town, and burned a few houses and the Congregational Church. I don't think they killed anybody. I knew a girl whose family showed the burn marks on the inside of their house. After the Brits began to march back to their boats, the owners quickly returned and put the fire out.

Many moons ago, an awkward, dorky, bookish young Bird Dog was rejected by a number of young fillies on that beach in the sunshine, and made out with one or two others on that beach in the dark. That photo brought back memories...

And I shot my first duck from Penfield Reef, just a few hundred yards away. In the good old days, the hunters would huddle on the reef with their Labs and get wonderful passing shots at the Bluebills buzzing around. I don't know whether they even allow it anymore, but a mile-long reef could accommodate quite a few duck hunters comfortably and happily.

On the southernmost tip of the reef sits Penfield Light, a handsome 1880s structure which was manned by a lighthouse keeper until 1970. The light is automated now. The place is well-known for being inhabited by a ghost. Here's Penfield Light at high tide:

The subject of Penfield Light comes up because the Coast Guard, which is responsible for navigation aids, has decided that they don't need to own it, and are putting it up for sale. It would be a fine dwelling for a non-social blogger who wants to get away from it all, and who wants to shoot their supper every day in the winter from the front porch, and to catch their fish dinner the rest of the year from their back porch.

Moonbattery noted that PETA is considering buying it, and using it as a place to study the souls of fish, or something equally PETA-ish. I would like to warn them off. In a good storm, spray and crashing wave tips reach the level of the roof. I doubt that PETA types would be comfortable with that much raw nature... not to mention the cormorant shit everywhere.

The world is full of insanity. Dr. Sanity offers a collection each Sunday, and always links our relevant pieces. Make it part of your Sunday afternoon ritual. I believe it is important to label insanity for what it is, or we could lose our fragile grip on reality.

I do not recommend that anyone waste any time on Shakespeare's plays without listening to Prof. (and Shakespearean actor) Peter Saccio talk about them first.

For us, it has been like being half-blind, and finally getting the right glasses.

Prof. Saccio's retirement from Dartmouth is a huge loss for the College, but anyone can listen to his course via the Teaching Company's recordings. A bit expensive, but if your library doesn't have them, ask them to buy them.

Listening - and re-listening - to Saccio is a pure delight. A quote from the piece in Dartmouth Life:

On the day of the lecture, Saccio begins almost dispassionately. "The death of Falstaff," he says, "is a short passage, in prose, related by simple characters leading common lives."

And then he begins to act the parts of those characters, explaining between lines how Shakespeare employs biblical allusion, Elizabethan thought and culture, word play and stage direction. He describes how Falstaff, near death, plays with his bedclothes and examines his fingertips, noting that contemporary doctors tell him that what Shakespeare portrayed four centuries ago is grounded in the physical reality of death.

The room becomes electric.

Saccio continues, "For Falstaff, in his final moments the world is getting smaller and smaller. He is 'focusing down'—as dying people do." He points out a reference to the 23rd Psalm towards the end of the scene and begins, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want..." and the classroom becomes utterly silent, spellbound.

Breaking the silence, Saccio concludes, "I've been trying to enter into Shakespeare's imagination. He imagined a scene that was peaceful, hopeful, bawdy, silly, childish, drunken, lecherous and terrifying—terrifying both physically and spiritually. All at once, in only 40 lines. I put my cards on the table," he concludes. "The man could write."

Photo: Leon D. Black Professor of Shakespearean Studies Peter Saccio

I do not understand the physics of Bussard Fusion, or whether it can ever be commercial. Interesting that California wants to fund it, though.

Update: Above story is not true. Thanks, reader.

It is 40 years since the silly and juvenile 1967 "Summer of Love." Cinnamon Stillwell remembers it. Quote: 

Among '60s disciples, it's an article of faith that everything that came out of that summer was a boon to American society. This has certainly been the impression conveyed through popular culture. Rarely are the more pernicious offshoots of the social and political experiment known as the Summer of Love referenced in the glowing and groovy portrayals seen on PBS and the History Channel.

But in its haste to dispense with all tradition that came before, the Summer of Love generation threw out much of the good along with the bad. The attempt to live in a manner that is essentially unsustainable led to a proliferation of divorce, drug use, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the perils and problems associated therewith. Too many people left their families, became addicts, and in some cases, lost their lives.

When all social boundaries are tossed aside and self-fulfillment becomes one's raison d'etre, society breaks down and, with it, all sense of morality. Seen in this light, the Summer of Love starts to seem more like the Summer of Folly.

Exactly. Read her whole piece.

The Irrawaddy, you may recall, runs south through the center of the nation I still call Burma. Photos from the cruise here. Photo of the luxury cruise ship, calling at a port, below.