No national testing policy and egging on the quarantine protesters into stupid, dangerous, socially irresponsible civil disobedience and breaking the law.
Yesterday, though, his “beautiful” “gift from the heavens” which he had strongly endorsed repeatedly–the anti-malaria drug–was shown, by four world studies, to have no benefits and a higher death rate.
He has, in fact, been actually counselling death for his base and others with his recommendations and endorsements.Thus, death by Trump.
The amazing Emily Dickinson who wrote the most compact metaphorical poetry in English. She showed that a woman writer needed no one else but her imagination to bless her own work. She is the supreme spirited poet of the dark night of the individual soul. The Johnson Harvard edition is the the only book you need for getting to know her.
Virginia Woolf, whose stream-of-consciousness prose writing remains a Shakespearean pinnacle in women’s literature, has, likewise, long impressed me. The best novels, of course, are ‘incandescent’, a word she uses to describe Shakespeare’s work. She is also the top woman essayist of all time and we are fortunate that her husband Leonard collected many of these pieces in the posthumous essay collections issued.
If you want to read the best analysis of European and North American women’s lives from Shakespeare’s time on to the late 19th century, A Room of One’s Own is a must-read. She pointedly described the limits and limitations of early women’s lives and reviews the slow progress women writers made, notably by Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot. Freedom, wider experience, and “incandescence” are what make for great writers like Tolstoy and Shakespeare BTW.
(A beautiful reading of a veritable feminist classic)
If I had to recommend essays, Room would be a foundational classic. If one wanted to learn about Life and consciousness, To the Lighthouse is a great stretch. But if you want to read a poetic masterpiece, then The Waves will do, though you must totally abandon any conventional notions of what a novel is.
(from the 1955 Johnson edition)
first line number and poem number
A narrow fellow in the grass–986
Because I could not stop for death–712
Before I got my eye put out–327
Dare you see a soul at the white heat?–365
“Hope” is the thing with feathers–254
I cannot live with you–640
I died for beauty, but was scarce–449
I dwell in possibility–657
I felt a funeral in my brain–280
I heard a fly buzz when I died–465
I like to see it lap up the miles–585
I taste a liquor never brewed–214
I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs–508
Much madness is divinest sense–435
My life closed twice before its close–1732
My life had stood a loaded gun–754
Safe in their alabaster chambers–216
Tell all the truth but tell it slant–1129
The brain is wider than the sky–632
The props assist the house–1142
The soul selects her own society–303
There’s a certain slant of light–258
This world is not conclusion–501
“Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
—Heart of Gold, Heart of Lead
Rejecting the d-hive paradigm
and prevailing winds of
“All’s right with the world”–
the ear candy,
grasshopper minds,
vested interests,
and lowest common denominator,
my very free will transcends
a cognitive dissonance
and depressive realism,
moves instead
toward sweetness and light,
Buddha nature,
first magnitude,
binary stars,
the je ne sais quoi and
ad libitum of
blue-sky thinking,
the entre nous of
high kindred spirits
savoir vivre,
and magic hour.
Multiply this times other AB towns, Canadian towns and cities and you start to see the hit the economy is taking and will continue to take. It’s hard to imagine how sports venues will ever be full again and the exorbitant salaries of athletes will ever be afforded.
In terms of neighborhoods, I was driving around the city recently and everywhere there were stores, hotels, and food places closed. Now imagine only 40% of those ever reopening. I patronize a number of select small businesses, but I can’t imagine even now how they all of them will ever make a go of it.
What will happen to schools and post-secondary institutions is anyone’s guess. Some are already going bankrupt. There is no question that there will be major structural changes and reduced staffs later no matter what. The New Normal.
And what will happen to all these permanently leisured workers? What will happen to all the kids who no longer go to school? Hard times are definitely coming. Previously, I noted the world-wide figure of increased poverty to be 1/2 billion. How many of those will be usually employed people in Canada?
And what will happen to the millions of Canadians who no longer can afford to pay their rents, mortgages, and feed themselves and their families? No wonder the U.S. food banks are running out to feed all the needy lining up for miles. The same will happen here; it’s just a matter of time.
So, building and finishing LRT, let alone repairing all the damaged road infrastructure of Edmonton, how will that be done, let alone afforded? This city is in for a major decline, fall, and bankruptcy.
While T refers to the coronavirus as the Asian or Wuhan virus trying to stir up racist sentiments among his crazy base, the fact of the matter is that Asians are heavily involved in health care systems everywhere as doctors, nurses, and caregivers. They are on the frontlines. They are leaders and heroes in the front line trenches. Indisputable fact, truth, evidence.
A 1936 signed copy.
…………………………………………………………….
The first poet, whose work resonated for me, was Robert Frost in 1966. My artsy grade 11 English teacher read and illustrated two poems (“The Road Not Taken” and “Birches”) by drawing what they would look like on ye olde chalkboard. The other poems we studied then were “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “After Apple-Picking”, classics all. I was also further intrigued by “Once by the Pacific” and “Design”.
I took a Modern American Lit course at U of A and studied “The Tuft of Flowers”, “Death of the Hired Man”, “Acquainted with the Night”, “Desert Places”, “Two Tramps in Mudtime” and “Departmental”. Later, through teaching, I would come to know many more in the Frost canon.
In fall, 1990 and 1994, I made two trips to places where Frost lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I stayed at the Lord Jeffery Inn in Amherst, Mass. where he stayed when he was visiting and presenting or teaching at Amherst College.
Driving into Derry, N.H., you immediately pass West-Running Brook, which was the title of one of his best poems and one of his books (1928).
West-Running Brook in 1990.
The Farm was where he first lived and wrote before he went to England (partially because his wife Elinor wanted to live “under thatch”) and became famous with the publication there of his first two books in 1913 and 1914. He had been given the farm to work by a relative, but was fairly casual about it; he also taught a bit to make ends meet.
Frost’s chair; he used to put a specially-constructed board across it to write on.
“Mending Wall” is one of his famous poems about the custom of New England farmers going out in the spring to reorganize their rock walls separating their properties. 1990: me beside the wall that inspired the poem that led off his second book North of Boston.
You can see the same wall on the right; this picture is taken behind the barn at the end of a field. When the farm fell out of the family’s hands, the field became an auto junkyard, but was later restored to something resembling its original appearance by the state.
Hyla Brook, at the end of the field, takes you into the woods. There is a brochure for the walk. The coin was purchased from the modest store in the barn which has other Frost memorabilia.
Heading north to the top of New Hampshire, you eventually reach The Robert Frost Place near Franconia. These are the White Mountains across the road from the Place.
You drive up to the Place which is where the family first lived when they came back from England with Frost an overnight, suddenly well-known literary success.
1990: I took the liberty of sitting down where the Frosts likely sat down on the porch during the day to look at the White Mountains.
Inside, Frost’s modest desk looks out the back toward the bush.
There is a mountain trail at this attraction, as well, beginning behind the house.
Two ‘stations’ on the walk. The lower recalls his woodpile poem.
What you see of the back of the house from the start of the walk.
Alone, after Elinor’s death and the tragic suicide of his son Carol, Frost sought refuge and escape in a cabin in Ripton, Vermont. Kathleen Morrison, a professor’s wife, living on an adjacent property, got involved in his life, looking after his meals and his business affairs. It’s been suggested that “The Silken Tent” was written for her. In the photos above, the graveyard and family grave of the Frost family in Bennington, Vt.
I came across the program for Frost’s funeral in Amherst. Prof. Mark Van Doren read (in order) the following poems: “Revelation”, “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”, “The Secret Sits”, “To Earthward”, and “The Telephone”, “The Silken Tent”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, “Acceptance”, “I Could Give All to Time”, from “The Lesson for Today”, and “Away!”
The book on the left has all the Frost poems. I used the illustrated Untermeyer paperback book with my senior-high English classes in the ’70s and ’80s.
His publisher put out a nice volume with photos which included a vinyl record of the poet reading 8 of his works.
This is a nice book introducing younger kids to his poetry.
This book picks up Frost’s story after the two aforementioned family deaths. It is amply illustrated and gives many insights into Frost’s character and beliefs by the woman who knew him well/best in his later life.
An example of how New Hampshire tried to have the last say on whether Frost was a Vermont or New Hampshire poet. I should mention, too, that Ripton and Bread Loaf College were close to each other and Frost taught at the latter in many summers.
One of many awards and commemorations. He won the Pulitzer Prize 4 times.
This is the definitive CD reading of his poems with a handy book to follow along. The poems read are listed; some famous ones are not here including “West-Running Brook”, “Once by the Pacific”, “Acceptance”, “A Considerable Speck”, and “Death of the Hired Man” found on other LPs and cassettes.
Caedmon led the way in recording Frost. There is also a good LP of Frost talking and reading to a select group of Yale students, kidding along with them. He had a good sense of humor and joked about some of his poems to get a rise out of his audience. He was quite the performer in close company.
This is the 1963 film which won an Academy Award for documentaries. It has recently been re-released at long last on DVD.
The 1988 video which has many readings, biographical information, and critical response. It presents the darker side of the poet’s soul well.
Robert Frost has long been a key part of my literary sensibility. He influenced me with his depictions of Nature, his use of imagery, rhythm, rhyme, and colloquial language, his wide range of topics and themes, and was the first poet to truly speak to me. I have learned much from his work and still consider him America’s top nature poet.
A little fuzzy, but shows a compass gift I received with “The Road Not Taken” quoted in full.
of kids dying who would return to schools soon. Sick. The low no. of needless deaths makes it all ‘worthwhile’ and ‘profitable’, no doubt, to re-open. Doubly sick.
The GOP and Fox crazies (Drs. Phil and Oz) are spilling out of the woods. The Age of UnReason south of the border continues as Florida opens beaches and the “Lock her up” chant is back for women governors who can’t please the Trumpian evangelicals and rednecks. Death-lovers like their master/faux-god.
Many millions unemployed.
And food lines for the public at large.
What goes around comes around.
You could say the same about COVID 19 and the Spanish flu world-wide event.
