— Malcolm Muggeridge, born in 1903
Morning Mediawire: Tiny dog's adventure inspires children's 'book'
Our old photos follow us online, and it’s become increasingly difficult to achievedistance from the past. That’s changed our politics and, perhaps, our thinking... Bessie Bessy Bestia in B&W
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel – Brain Pickings A good way to start is by making sure you don;'talk in ideological boilerplate and don't get your courage by joining a crowd. As Kierkegaard put it:"[A] crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction. Observe that there was not one single soldier that dared lay hands upon Caius Marius -- this was an instance of truth. But given merely three or four women with the consciousness or the impression that they were a crowd, and with hope of a sort in the possibility that no one could say definitely who was doing it or who began it -- then they had courage for it. What a falsehood! The falsehood first of all is the notion that the crowd does what in fact only the individual in the crowd does, though it be every individual. For 'crowd' is an abstraction and has no hands: but each individual has ordinarily two hands, and so when an individual lays his two hands upon Caius Marius they are the two hands of the individual, certainly not those of his neighbor, and still less those of the crowd which has no hands...For every individual who flees for refuge into the crowd, and so flees in cowardice from being an individual (who had not the courage to lay his hands upon Caius Marius, nor even to admit that he had it not), such a man contributes his share of cowardliness to the cowardliness which we know as the 'crowd.'
Unlike Jozef Imrich, Chekhov was a reserved man, his stories contain many descriptions of human suffering, his humour is not boisterous, his optimism is not blind and he never made much ado about his love of life: he loved life without protestations and without sermons...In 1894, on March 29 or 30, Chekhov was in Florence, behaving like a tourist, and writing to his sister Maria Chekhova, three years his junior:
“I’m worn out with racing through museums and churches (Malchkeon's Slavic notes circa 2012 AD). After seeing the Venus dei Medici I can only say that if she were dressed in modern clothes she would look hideous, especially around the waist. I’m well. The sky is overcast, and Italy without the sun is like a face hidden under a mask. Keep well.” He signs himself “Yours, Antonio,” and adds: “The Dante monument is beautiful.” [Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973]
His note reminds us of Keats in his letters to his sister Fanny, eight years younger than the poet. Maria was an adult, but we hear the same big-brother joshing and teasing. Both writers would die of tuberculosis and both avoided discussing the subject, tactfully hoping not to alarm their siblings. Both men are on the short list of writers we admire for their words and lives. Both could be beatified as the patron saints of writers – St. Anton, St. John (yet another one).
Cultural Appropriation Is Like Pornography (‘I Know It When I See It’)
Alyssa Rosenberg, considering Isle of Dogs: "At this point, there's a fairly clear consensus that white people shouldn't be cast as characters who are meant to be of other races, and that defining nonwhite characters by obvious stereotypes and obvious stereotypes alone is both objectionable and proof of artistic laziness. There is less agreement about what makes a person sufficiently knowledgeable about and sensitive to the concerns of a community that's not their own to put it into art, or about the line between appreciation and fetishization of another culture. (Not to mention the fact that members of a particular community may have wildly diverging opinions about these issues, raising thorny questions about who has standing to make these judgments.) … Read More
`I Long to Crowd the Little Garden'
By Houston standards, the winter was harsh. Many nights the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there. We lost half the flowers and shrubs in the front yard. Some turned black and looked scorched. Others withered and never returned – dry sticks and roots. The amaryllis survived and might at any moment blossom:“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade.” Clover has proliferated – not the worst of weeds.
We spent Good Friday morning in the garden, planting flowers. We bought roses, coleus, purple haze, marigolds, plumbago (which sounds like a disease), zinnias, phlox, hostas, day lilies, garlic and lavender to counter the garlic. I remember Seamus Heaney saying that a true poet knows the names of flowers and birds. Planting and weeding are the only time I get my nails dirty and look for the scrub brush. I feel kinship with Yvor Winters. He kept a garden --“Persimmon,walnut, loquat, fig, and grape” - and raised goats and Airedales. He was a rare academic who remained grounded, almost literally:
“I long to crowd the little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small
And taste it in a moment, time and all!”