Tune of the day #52

I spent one summer of my childhood back east visiting the Martian side of my family. While I was there, I listened to my Aunt Margaret’s records, including this one. Years later at a Steven King concert (not that King; the other one (another Winfield winner)), King would play a bit of an old tune and give the first person to identify it a set of guitar strings. This was one of the tunes, and I was able to give a guitarist friend a new set of strings.

Tune of the day #51

Happy the Man, featuring Kit Watkins on keyboards, was active in the later 1970’s, when radio had become hopelessly stupid.1 I didn’t learn that they had existed until I finally got online around the turn of the century and discovered websites devoted to prog rock.

Today’s quote: classical edition

Victor Davis Hanson:

What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship’s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject’s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs—caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire—all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites—class privilege, the “establishment,” male dominance—were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla’s adolescent rants.

Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea, and Lysistrata.

Slavery? “No man is born a slave,” wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.

The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.

Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped—whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians—a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.

Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian’s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the “settler colonialism” of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as “assimilationist” or as a sort of proto–melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian–Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.

Cops, a guinea pig and a zither

Here’s a ghost story — sorta — by James Thurber

The Night the Ghost Got in

The ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915, raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I am sorry, therefore, as I have said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps.

They began about a quarter past one o’clock in the morning, a rhythmic, quick-cadenced walking around the dining-room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother Herman in another; grandfather was in the attic, in the old walnut bed which, as you will remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps. They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining-room table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back steps, which dropped directly into the dining-room; I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate-rail; I couldn’t see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table; at regular intervals a board creaked, when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis but were expected home at any time. I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost.

Continue reading “Cops, a guinea pig and a zither”

Today’s quote

Ted Gioia:

It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads—so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.

They used to call it extortion—pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm.

War, values and pianos

David Dubal:

During the Civil War, a Union general and his troops marched into Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the intention of destroying the little Confederate town. Looking at a beautiful mansion, the general walked in, saw a fine grand in the parlor, and began playing. Upon hearing the music, a beautiful young woman descended the long staircase. After a few minutes of conversation, the pair discovered that they had both studied in New York with the same teacher. The very next day, he again came to her home and they played duets. On taking his leave he said, “You and your piano take the credit for saving Holly Springs.”

I am amused by present-day politicians who mourn the death of what they call “family values.” I would tell them to call for the return of the piano in the home. Before the endless proliferation of canned music, mothers played for family and friends a variety of music, from hymns to sentimental popular songs, while feet moved to the current dance craze, and many a romance began near a piano. There may even have been flashes of radiant beauty when mother played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. D. H. Lawrence describes almost unbearable nostalgia for a mother playing to her child in his magnificent poem “Piano”:

Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.