Culture – Page 18 – Scripturient

The difficult art of reading poetry

2014-04-20 2014-04-20 Books & Reviews / Culture / Poetry & LyricsLeave a comment

Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue. Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us. Identified originally by Kenneth Burke, who, as Bloom calls him, was a “profound student of rhetoric.” Bloom references Burke in his introduction to The Best Poems of the English Language (Harper Collins, 2004), which he both edited and selected. I’ll get back to that book, in a separate post, and discuss whether they are actually the “best” or in fact whether anyone can make such a claim for another reader. ……… click below for more ↓

Spoon River: Smith, Goodman and Masters

2014-04-18 2014-04-18 Books & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

VERY well, you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms. While we, seekers of earth’s treasures, Getters and hoarders of gold, Are self-contained, compact, harmonized, Even to the end. Edgar Lee Masters: Thomas Rhodes; from Spoon River Anthology, 1915 What is is about poetry or musical lyrics that moves us so differently than just prose? ……… click below for more ↓

Oooh, shiny….

2014-04-09 2014-04-09 Culture / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Religious texts are full of admonitions about avoiding temptation. The Lord’s Prayer tells God to “lead us not into temptation.” Fat lot of good that does. We can find the way ourselves, thank you. Not only do we lead ourselves there, we go willingly and eagerly. Pushing and shoving aside those who stand in our way to reach temptation. Ever see the crowds in the mall on Boxing Day? Psychological texts, magazines and sites are full of secular advice on resisting temptation, too. It’s our brain’s “executive control” functions that fail use when we succumb to our impulses. And fail ……… click below for more ↓

Thinking about a new ukulele

2014-03-23 2014-03-23 Musical Instruments / Personal Reminiscences / Science & TechnologyOne Comment

I’ve been thinking seriously of adding another ukulele to the herd. A tenor resonator, or resophonic, like the Kala shown above. That’s the re-designed 2014 model. I’ve played earlier models, including the 2013 version with the strings attached to a tailpiece (see photo below, left). The 2014 design (shown above) anchors the strings back into the cover plate, which I expect will be a better design; it looks cleaner, too. But I believe the biggest change is that the through-the-plate model has more tension on the biscuit (see below). And I like Kala products, too. I really like resonator instruments ……… click below for more ↓

Marcus Aurelius

2014-03-21 2014-03-21 Arts / Books & Reviews / Education & Learning / Philosophy / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

I continue to be profoundly moved by the wisdom of the classical authors. It’s often hard to accept that some of them were writing two or more millennia ago: many seem so contemporary they could have been written this century. Of late – within the past year or so – I’ve been reading Lucretius, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Elder*… and more recently Marcus Aurelius. I’ve had a couple of versions of his Meditations (written ca. 167 CE) kicking around on my bookshelf for decades. I’ve dipped into it many times before today, but never really read it for more ……… click below for more ↓

CPLUG songs and more

2014-03-18 2014-03-20 Collingwood / Culture / Musical InstrumentsLeave a comment

CPLUG – the Collingwood Public Library Ukulele Group – has so far proven a very popular group. We started with 17 people at our first monthly meeting and more have attended each time: 34 people came out last month! I’m hoping to continue this trend and see as many this week at our next meeting (March 19). You can read about our group in this newspaper story, here. We are dedicated to enjoying making and learning music in a friendly, supportive community group setting. We need help! We need songs, song leaders, helpers, tuners and ukuleles. And of course ukulele ……… click below for more ↓

Reading: A Canadian tragedy… or not?

2014-03-02 2014-03-02 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Education & Learning / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

The map above might show the making of a serious tragedy for Western and especially Canadian culture. It indicates in colour which nations read the most. Yellow is the second lowest group. Canada is coloured yellow. In this survey, Canada ranks 10th – from the bottom! Twenty countries above us have populations which, on the average, read more per week than we do. That surprises and shocks me. And it disappoints me no end. I’m not only a voracious reader, I’m passionate about books, language, reading and writing, and have been on the library board for 20 years actively helping ……… click below for more ↓

Lucretius and the Renaissance

2014-02-23 2014-02-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Education & Learning / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

It’s fairly clear, even after reading only a few verses, why Lucretius’s didactic poem, On the Nature of Things – De Rerum Natura – made such an impact on thought, philosophy, religion and science in the Renaissance. It must have been like a lighthouse in the dark night; a “Eureka” moment for many of the age’s thinkers. For others, especially the church leaders, it must have arrived like a mortar shell among their intellectual certainties and complacencies; shattering walls and window. An act of war that threatened to tear down whole schools of thought and belief. While today his descriptions of atoms, ……… click below for more ↓

The 2013 Great Gatsby

2014-01-19 2014-01-19 Arts / Books & Reviews / Film & Reviews / Music & ReviewsLeave a comment

Watched the 2013 film of The Great Gatsby last night. The first half was spectacular, grandiose and captivating, if somewhat over the top. Like Busby Berkeley meets The Fifth Element. Extravaganza, spectacle and excess. The film doesn’t feel like it’s set in New York of the Jazz Age. It’s too shiny, too polished, too mechanical, and not gritty enough. That’s actually okay, and had director Baz Luhrmann chosen to make Gatsby into a scifi film set not the roaring twenties, but rather some futuristic world where the fashion craze is for 20s’ costume, it could have worked better. It would ……… click below for more ↓

Saving Fubsy from Lexicographical Caliginosity

2014-01-16 2014-01-16 Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My WritingLeave a comment

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: Naked women! naked women! What about that, eh? A fubsy window? A short ……… click below for more ↓

The Wild Women of Wongo

2014-01-14 2014-01-14 Arts / Film & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Who can resist a film with a title like that? Or Zontar, the Thing From Venus? Robot Monster? Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet? The Atomic Brain? Clearly, I can’t. I love this stuff. B-films, especially scifi B-films. But I am a tad disappointed with this Mill Creek package.* I recently received the set of SciFi Classics Collection: 50 Movie Pack, a 12-DVD collection, cover shown on the left. It turned out to be the same set I already had, just with a different cover, and a substitution of four films from the original lineup. Damn, that was $10 wasted. Okay, ……… click below for more ↓

The Music of the Templars

2014-01-12 2024-08-06 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / History & Biography3 Comments

For the past 25 years, I have had a mysterious page in Latin, held in a cheap picture frame, and stored in a closet for many years. It’s a two-sided page from a book, printed in black and red letters. I bought it at a used-book store in Toronto back when I lived there and frequented such stores. I rediscovered it last week when cleaning out my workroom to create a ukulele space. The page is roughly 21 x 14 inches (53 x 35 cm) and in very good condition, for its age. It’s also quite beautiful, especially to anyone ……… click below for more ↓

To err is human. And bureaucratic.

2014-01-09 2014-01-09 Arts / Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsLeave a comment

Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum, et tertium non datur. To err is human; to persevere in error is diabolical; there is no third option. Bit of a tough love phrase, that one. Most of us know this as the later paraphrase of Alexander Pope: to err is humane, to forgive divine. Yes, he wrote “humane” because that’s how they wrote “human” in the early 18th century. And he was making a statement about critics, not about religion. But you get the drift.* Pope’s phrase is a staple in politics. To err is human, and governments are composed of people. In ……… click below for more ↓

Makes you feel happy, like an old time movie

2013-12-25 2013-12-25 Arts / Culture / Music & ReviewsLeave a comment

There’s something touching about a classic film, something magical about a B&W movie, about a film shot between the wars in that period of recovery and optimism; a film that was new when my parents were young, full of life and hope. A movie from the days before CGI, before green screens and 3D. Before slasher films, before graphic sex and graphic violence. It’s a combination of art and innocence, of technology just starting to blossom, of storytelling finding new avenues for expression and sometimes not quite sure about it. Others are bold statements about style and expression; avant-garde art.* There ……… click below for more ↓

Selling the electric upright bass

2013-12-17 2013-12-17 Arts / Musical Instruments / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

My first experience playing a bass guitar came when I was asked to join a local garage band in the mid-1960s. I was learning rhythm guitar back then, inspired by the Beatles and the wave of British pop bands that flooded the airwaves from around 1962. But they already had two of those. They didn’t have a bass player, though, so I became the bass player. Not a terribly good one, mind you, but it was a fun experience. As soon as I left, a year or two later, I went back to rhythm guitar. But bass stuck with me ……… click below for more ↓