Monday, March 18, 2024

Stradella

One of the most innovative and exciting composers of the 17th century, with hundreds of musical works to his name, Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682) led a rambunctious life encompassing TWO assassination attempts, a fraud, a love story, an abduction… and a lot of brilliant music.
~BBC4


Read more about Stradella's story here, where Frank Cottrell Boyce explains why he wrote a drama about Stradella's life. (Is it a spoiler to say that one of the assassination attempts was successful?)

For Music Monday, works by Alessandro Stradella:







Thursday, March 14, 2024

Pardoned by the lava of chance

E. Hirsch: You’ve said that you average about six poems per year. Why so few?
W. Meredith: I wait until the poems seem to be addressed not to “Occupant” but to “William Meredith.”



Happy Poetry Friday! Our family is doing something different for St Patrick's Day this year...adding a bit of Irish poet W.B. Yeats celebration to it. (BTW, Yeats and Yeatts are not the same, but they do have the same pronunciation.) One of our extended family members is wonderful at reciting poems and has made some videos for us to enjoy. I've planned a tea with scones and truffles and wee sandwiches. Maybe I will share a video next week if I can get permission.

Today's poem is by Pulitzer prizewinner William Meredith, who wrote "The Illiterate" which I shared in 2008 and still think of often. "Accidents of Birth" is one I know I'll also be returning to.

Accidents of Birth
by William Meredith

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion


The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the...

read the rest here

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{fiction, instead of lies} has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Tanita!

Renoir

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.
~Pierre-Auguste Renoir


I like support for trying things one is liable to mess up. Thanks, Renoir! Art Thursday:

La Grenouillère
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Le Pont-Neuf, 1872
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Self-Portrait, 1876
Pierre-Auguste Renoir


Monday, March 11, 2024

Harmonies

You try to do what you can to bring harmony wherever you go.
~Aaron Neville


For Music Monday, a "Ms. Mojo" video with her list of Top 20 Harmonies:



Can't leave out Boyz II Men. So good!



More harmonies:
Stay by Little Big Town
Go To Sleep You Little Baby by Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Alison Krauss
I Will Wait by Mumford and Sons
Save Me The Trouble by Dan and Shay
Colder Weather by Zac Brown Band
What others would you include?

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Not your shoe

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?
~André Gide



Hi y'all! Happy Poetry Friday! My birthday yesterday threw me off a little bit re: my blogging schedule, so I am pulling out things I liked on Instagram. First, Trevor Noah explaining why friends are like horcruxes. Also, here's literacy advocate Oliver Speaks.

Is something making you uncomfortable? Maybe you just need to let it go. Naomi Shihab Nye:

Todd Dillard from Invisible Chorus, in Only Poems:

Addendum: Dillard's How To Live is worth a read.

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Laura Purdie Salas has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Laura!

Reflectogram

The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
~Leonardo daVinci


For Art Thursday, an unfinished painting by DaVinci, but the infrared reflectogram version:

The Adoration of the Magi, infrared reflectogram
by Leonardo da Vinci
Preserved in the archives of the Opificio delle pietre dure
photo by Tangopaso


Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Feed my head

Age ain't nothin but a number!
And like a rare wine, you don't get older, you just get better...
Saffire, Middle Aged Blues Boogie



I am late for Music Monday! Today I was thinking about Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women. I remember seeing them play "How Can I Say I Miss You" before they released it on an album. I associate them with laughter and pizza.