recent acquisitions

The Best Book on Mozart

"His categories assume unwarrantably that the composer always expressed his art more personally when transforming tradition than by conforming to it, that Mozart, in short, was most Mozartean only when most radical. That is particularly dangerous with this composer because it may prevent us from recognizing that Mozart could be as inspired when he conformed to tradition as when he was revolutionary. The refusal to acknowledge that Mozart often showed his genius when he was most conventional has inspired such foolishness as Theodor W. Adorno's rueful assertion that Mozart, unlike Beethoven, could not always write the way he wanted, or Glenn Gould's attempt, by performance as well as writing, to demonstrate that Mozart in his last years had become an inferior composer..."

a bunch of swell Django linkage...

via birthday boy ::: wood s lot ::: the new Common-place---an issue on money, including the Pine Tree Shilling...

missed the beginning last week but the second episode of Canada's best tv show Intelligence is on tonight at 900...

more on the Joy Division pic

"...at times, the studio sets and sluggish pace means the film could be a portrayal of the northwest of England anytime between, say, 1959 and 1979. In truth 1980, the year Curtis committed suicide, was actually as bleak and cold as the hole in the number ‘0’. The full onslaught of the New Right agenda, led by Thatcher, was becoming self-evident. This was the year that unemployment hit two million for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Nuclear war felt inevitable. We were all going to die - or so many people believed. In such a context, ramalama punk pop sounded increasingly flimsy and threadbare. All of a sudden, former punk bands evolved into something far more intense and foreboding, bleak and brittle, twisted and metallic: a soundtrack for the oncoming economic and social depression..."

fans of Bebel Gilberto should check out this rare & lovely 1989 album by her mom Miucha, which includes an early appearance by BG...

Thomas Gainsborough as a boy
The Shelleys & Frankenstein's
Sappho


via below, from excellent Look and Learn magazine, illustrations and picture library...

good article on "Children's Encyclopaedia" editor Arthur Mee--

"Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia is nothing like an encyclopaedia, or, rather, it is perhaps the prime and supreme encyclopaedia - an encyclical. There is no A-Z arrangement; indeed, there often appears to be no conscious arrangement to it at all; the material simply circles and circulates in and around itself, a vast labyrinth of facts, fancies, niceties, delicacies and wonderful minutiae. There are stories, and diagrams, and illustrations, and articles about animals, and history, and biography, and biology, and "Great Thoughts", and "Things to Do and Make", and "Plain Answers to the Questions of the Children of the World" such as "Why do I laugh and cry?" (Answer: "You laugh and cry because you are 'made that way'.") In any given issue you might find advice on how to keep a hedgehog as a pet, or how to make a fiddle from a cigar box, and examples of "The Jolly Pictures the Cave Men Made", and an essay on "How to Feel the Pressure of the Air", and musings and ruminations on Chaucer, Michelangelo and the meaning of beauty, distance and courage ("The Great Words that Stir the Hearts and Minds of All Mankind")..."

local fall flora & fauna

Joy Division's poor Ian Curtis gets dug up for the fascist kitsch version of the Jim Morrison treatment...

"This year, the U.K. Japanese restaurant chain Yo! Sushi began offering a boxed meal named in honor of Joy Division's most famous song. The Love Will Tear Us Apart salmon and tuna box set includes a selection of nigiri, maki and sashimi as well as a salad topped with a piquant sunomono dressing. And even more incongruously, in April, the sportswear company New Balance commissioned artist Dylan Adair to design two pairs of limited edition Joy Division running shoes, one featuring the iconic pulsar wavelength artwork from the "Unknown Pleasures' " album cover..."

::: wood s lot ::: reminds me that it's Wallace Stevens birthday...

Lewis Carroll--The Hunting Of The Snark - Fit the Fifth: THE BEAVER'S LESSON

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

Then the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan
For making a separate sally;
And fixed on a spot unfrequented by man,
A dismal and desolate valley.

But the very same plan to the Beaver occurred:
It had chosen the very same place:
Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word,
The disgust that appeared in his face.

Each thought he was thinking of nothing but "Snark"
And the glorious work of the day;
And each tried to pretend that he did not remark
That the other was going that way.

But the valley grew narrow and narrower still,
And the evening got darker and colder,
Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill)
They marched along shoulder to shoulder.

Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky,
And they knew that some danger was near:
The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail,
And even the Butcher felt queer.

He thought of his childhood, left far far behind --
That blissful and innocent state --
The sound so exactly recalled to his mind
A pencil that squeaks on a slate!

"'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!" he suddenly cried.
(This man, that they used to call "Dunce.")
"As the Bellman would tell you," he added with pride,
"I have uttered that sentiment once.

"'Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;
You will find I have told it you twice.
'Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,
If only I've stated it thrice."

The Beaver had counted with scrupulous care,
Attending to every word:
But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair,
When the third repetition occurred.

It felt that, in spite of all possible pains,
It had somehow contrived to lose count,
And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains
By reckoning up the amount.

"Two added to one -- if that could but be done,"
It said, "with one's fingers and thumbs!"
Recollecting with tears how, in earlier years,
It had taken no pains with its sums.

"The thing can be done," said the Butcher, "I think.
The thing must be done, I am sure.
The thing shall be done! Bring me paper and ink,
The best there is time to procure."

The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,
And ink in unfailing supplies:
While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,
And watched them with wondering eyes.

So engrossed was the Butcher, he heeded them not,
As he wrote with a pen in each hand,
And explained all the while in a popular style
Which the Beaver could well understand.

"Taking Three as the subject to reason about --
A convenient number to state --
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out
By One Thousand diminished by Eight.

"The result we proceed to divide, as you see,
By Nine Hundred and Ninety Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be
Exactly and perfectly true.

"The method employed I would gladly explain,
While I have it so clear in my head,
If I had but the time and you had but the brain --
But much yet remains to be said.

"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been
Enveloped in absolute mystery,
And without extra charge I will give you at large
A Lesson in Natural History."

In his genial way he proceeded to say
(Forgetting all laws of propriety,
And that giving instruction, without introduction,
Would have caused quite a thrill in Society),

"As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird,
Since it lives in perpetual passion:
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd --
It is ages ahead of the fashion:

"But it knows any friend it has met once before:
It never will look at a bribe:
And in charity-meetings it stands at the door,
And collects -- though it does not subscribe.

" Its flavor when cooked is more exquisite far
Than mutton, or oysters, or eggs:
(Some think it keeps best in an ivory jar,
And some, in mahogany kegs:)

"You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:
You condense it with locusts and tape:
Still keeping one principal object in view --
To preserve its symmetrical shape."

The Butcher would gladly have talked till next day,
But he felt that the lesson must end,
And he wept with delight in attempting to say
He considered the Beaver his friend.

While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks
More eloquent even than tears,
It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books
Would have taught it in seventy years.

They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned
(For a moment) with noble emotion,
Said "This amply repays all the wearisome days
We have spent on the billowy ocean!"

Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became,
Have seldom if ever been known;
In winter or summer, 'twas always the same --
You could never meet either alone.

And when quarrels arose -- as one frequently finds
Quarrels will, spite of every endeavor --
The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds,
And cemented their friendship for ever!

from the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar....

Loonie tops U.S. dollar not since the Ford administration...

38 versions of September Song...

historian Sean Wilentz on the recording of my favorite Dylan song "(Sooner or Later) One of us Must Know" & the rest of "Blonde on Blonde"--

"The lyrics are straightforward, even ordinary, tracking a burned-out love affair’s misunderstandings. Dylan experimented with the words inside the studio; the title chorus did not even appear until the sixth take. But the sound texture that makes “One of Us Must Know” so remarkable was built steadily, late into the night and into the next morning. After take seventeen, Dylan heeds the producer Johnston’s advice to start with a harmonica swoop. Crescendos off of an extended fifth chord, led by Paul Griffin’s astonishing piano swells (“half Gershwin, half gospel, all heart” an astute critic later wrote), climax in choruses dominated by piano, organ, and Bobby Gregg’s drum rolls; Robbie Robertson’s guitar hits its full strength at the finale. Intimations of the thin, wild mercury sound underpin rock & roll symphonics. Johnston delivers a pep talk before one last take—“keep that soul feel”—and Gregg snaps a quick click opener, and fewer than five minutes later, the keeper is in the can..."

thanks to Isola di Rifiuti for pointing me to

Lu Chi Wen Fu at an important juncture...


"Words may in time be exhausted, but not so that their sense is buried. A far-reaching thought attains its object only in the realm of the infinite.

The lyric, born of pure emotion, is gossamer fiber woven into the finest fabric;

The exhibitory essay, being true to the objects, is vividness incarnate;

In monumental inscriptions rhetoric must be a foil to facts;

The elegy tenderly spins out ceaseless heartfelt grief.

The mnemonic is a smooth flow of genial phrases, succinct but pregnant;

The staccato cadences of the epigram are all transparent force.

While the eulogy enjoys the full abandon of grand style,

The expository must in exactitude and clarity excel..."

Nanaimo/Victoria trees

don't miss the Alan Davies links on today's ::: wood s lot ::: or the fine cliff photos--

"The river is mirroring slate
and it's full of scurrilous crap
right up to the edge of the boats --
it's 4:38PM August 24th
the light bangs into the train."

nice interview with Peter Schjeldahl

"'A great critic,' according to Oscar Wilde, 'is susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.' So it is with Schjeldahl, a man burdened with the kind of sensibility that in others turns crippling. 'Give me a Rembrandt in a subway station toilet and a flashlight and I'm happy,' he told me over a diner hamburger. The owner of a contrarian, prickly personality a friend described as 'aggressively shy,' the 65-year-old critic has seen his share of difficulties: a bit of hard-earned penury, a divorce, problems with booze, a lifetime spent nursing his olympically formed doubt. About the latter, Schjeldahl quotes De Kooning: 'No fear but a lot of trembling.' Incredibly for a veteran of the trenches, his 'trembling' extends to writing at length. 'I'm a river navigator,' he told me later over a walk in Central Park. 'I need the bank behind me and one in front. Over 2,000 words and I'm toast...'"