To thine own self be true

The prompt firing of a 40 year teacher with background in Indigenous culture. In reply to a gr. 12 student who said priests killed and tortured residential kids and left them to die on the snow, he pointed out the fact that many Aboriginal kids died of T.B. and other diseases. For correcting a blatant lie and for stating a fact, he was canned, demonstrating that political correctness is a ‘party line’ that will not tolerate certain truths or physical facts. 

“You tend to spark the big flame of enthusiasm in people.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Flower_Book_by_Edward_Burne-Jones

My continuing search for Beauty and things beautiful starts another week….

Edmonton city council. UCP. Federal Liberals. GOPs.

on buying “WAH” and “making WAH” as shown by those dumbass, conformist tv car commercials. These ads are designed to make sheep not individuals.

for finishing 45th in a tournament during which he passed another golfer a tampon as a sexist joke.
I don’t get it. What blind, ignorant space do these fools live in? The Golf Channel should be ashamed of themselves, giving tacit approval to this pouting, sexist has-been.
Did anyone ask legendary on-the-same-course broadcaster Dottie Pepper what she thought about all this?

The one dramatic series we watch regularly; over 22 seasons with 2 different detectives.
The above DVD shown was the first season of John Barnaby, played by Neil Dudgeon.

The series is set in an imaginary British area with different murders (3 or so, sometimes gruesome) each show. Atmospheres have often had a supernatural or weird edge. Several red herring characters typically in a show. Thoroughly engaging scripts, acting, scenery, camerawork, and music (spooky theremin theme).

The John Barnaby series also features two cute dogs so far (top: Sykes–retired, deceased, and below: Paddy).

(Pronounced mo-beels.)

Alexander Calder shuttled back and forth between Europe and the U.S. and became world-famous as the maker of moving mobiles, kinetic art, (though he preferred the term ‘objects’) stirred by air currents and physics basics.

His unique airy sculptures were made from balls of wire (which he carried around with him) and cut-out and painted metal and plastic pieces. His large civic and gallery sculptures (‘stabiles’) were the same kinds of abstract shapes created in painted (often red or black) pieces. Very controversial when they first appeared in public places, they quickly won fans and critical appreciations, transforming public spaces and the previous limited notions of what sculpture were.

He was a playful spirit who liked entertaining crowds and audiences, putting on circuses in his early days, then clownishy interacting with his air sculptures. His works are uniformly light, humorous, and mind-boggling in tone.

The below entertaining documentary (also available on YouTube) lays out his life, career, art works, and style. Highly recommended.

(University Days–left: Arthur Hallam; right: Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

“‘Tis better to have lov’d and lost,/Than never to have loved at all–“

This is the most famous poem about friendship, grief vs. ‘moving on’, physical change vs. permanent memory, and obsession. Tennyson and Hallam were close young friends in their early 20s who met at Cambridge and were members of the famous Apostles group. The popular, talented, philosophical Hallam wrote a very positive review of his friend’s first book and Tennyson was admitted to the Apostles, though he was from humble origins in Lincoln.

Hallam died suddenly abroad and his death greatly affected Tennyson for the rest of his life. The influence of Hallam can be seen throughout Tennyson’s work from “Ulysses” to “Idylls of the King”.

The 120+ sections “In Memoriam” took 17 years to write and was actually a series of poems in four-line stanzas with an ABBA rhyme scheme which reveals the author’s circular and repetitive shifts between grief and attempted resolution. If you listen to the online reading of the complete poem by–I should add–an excellent female reader, it takes 2+ hours in total  (can be done in installments if preferred).

The death of Hallam was obviously the most important event in Tennyson’s life, something greater than his marriage or events of family members/family life. He was clearly motivated and obsessed by Hallam, who was a very popular charismatic young man and a Cambridgean ‘bright young thing’. He even named one of his sons after Hallam.

Nature is constant throughout he poem; the poet uses many memorable natural images. Tennyson, after all, was a post-Romantic, and this melancholic work influenced aesthetes and poets who came after him such as Christina Rossetti, Hardy,  and Housman, even T.S. Eliot in the early 20th century.

Tennyson was the Victorian poet who epitomized best the struggle between romance and reality, notably on the facts of change and of time passing. He was also influenced by the era’s conflict between Darwinian evolution and Christian doctrine. So, in the poem, he embraces both/simultaneously the desire to mourn in excess and the recognition that one must move on and forward in reality after death. 

A couple of interesting olde editions of the poem:

(1900ish U.S. leatherette ed.)

(1897, Ford, Howard & Hulbert (US) ed. nicely illustrated by Harry Fenn: below pages)

(Tennyson describing himself going to Hallam’s house after his death.)

(Tennyson describing the ship bringing Hallam’s body home from abroad.)

(Hallam remains present, yet, simultaneously, Tennyson knows he is dead.)

(Tennyson’s inner conflict: he is aware of the fact of physical change, but cannot let go of his friend and memories of him.)

Much as I love Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Chopin, I could not live without my complete Telemann boxset with its 5 Tafelmusik CDs and Telemann’s exquisite Overtures.