January 2012
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Happy Birthday Wolfie
It’s the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756. He only lived for 35 years but he started his career early — a child prodigy from a family of musicians. He toured all over Europe, and wrote his first opera at age 11.
Glenn Gould plays the fast first movement (Allegro Maestoso) of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor to get you moving this morning.
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“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard...”
– Anthony Powell
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“Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not...”
– Happy birthday Lucinda Williams!
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“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion,...”
– Dave Barry
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Burns Night
Tonight might be Burns Night somewhere near you. That means haggis, music, poetry readings, and malts.
It’s an important date in the Scottish calendar and of all things Scottish - and a way to celebrate poet Robert Burns.
First held in Aryshire, Scotland at the end of the 18th century by Robert Burns’ friends on the anniversary of his death (21 July), the date has subsequently been...
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Virginia Woolf
It’s the birthday of Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882.
Her books include: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.
In A Room of One’s Own (1929) (which was based on lectures she gave at the women’s colleges of Cambridge) she wrote:
“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction… when I ask...
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Wild Nights!
Emily’s handwritten manuscript - poem 269
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!
~ Emily Dickinson
(Though I fear my nights are becoming about as wild as...
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“‘I don’t know’ means just what it sounds like: ‘I...”
– Minnie Driver helping men understand women in Esquire
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Happy Chinese New Year
It’s the year of the dragon.
Unlike the terrifying Northern European dragon mythology, the dragon in Chinese mythology brings good fortune and intense power.
Those who are born this year, or in any dragon year, are be honoured, according to local custom. It’s said that dragons are fearless, ambitious, passionate and self-assured - but also conceited and slow to accept help from...
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“I am here to live out loud.”
– Émile Zola
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Today's Birthday Party
Blowing out candles at the table today are Sir Francis Bacon (1561) and Lord Byron (1788).
Bacon was a philosopher, a statesman, an essayist, and a champion of modern science. Queen Elizabeth named him Lord Chancellor but he was convicted of accepting bribes in 1621, and banned from political office for the rest of his life.
He spent much of his intellectual life challenging Aristotle’s...
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"Those Winter Sundays" By Robert Hayden →
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“If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”
– Vince Lombardi
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Shoveling Snow
If day after day I was caught inside this muffle and hush I would notice how birches move with a lovely hum of spirits, how falling snow is a privacy warm as the space for sleeping, how radiant snow is a dream like leaving behind the body and rising into that luminous place where sometimes you meet the people you’ve lost. How silver branches scrawl their names in tangled script...
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snow is coming... →
THE WHITE
These are the moments before snow, whole weeks before. The rehearsals of milky November, cloud constructions when a warm day lowers a drift of light through the leafless angles of the trees lining the streets. Green is gone, gold is gone. The blue sky is the clairvoyance of snow. There is night and a moon but these facts force the hand of the season: from that black sky...
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“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
– T.S. Eliot
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“Keep passing the open windows.”
– John Irving
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“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.”
– Woody Allen
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Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them. - A.A. Milne
The author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books was born on this day in 1882.
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Blacking Out Your Blog to Protest PIPA, the...
tumblr asked me when I logged in today if I wanted to ” Black out my blog for the rest of the day to protest PIPA.“
I chose not to - because I think it mat be more effective to post a bit about what PIPA is all about (I can’t wash the education out of me)
Thanks to action by a broad and bipartisan coalition of Internet users, companies, and organizations, ...
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“Sometimes you get the sense that the Creator is getting to the point of...”
– Tim Allen (in Esquire)
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Touch (FOX) →
Hmmmm…
TOUCH, a “preternatural drama in which science and spirituality intersect with the hopeful premise that we are all interconnected, tied in invisible ways to those whose lives we are destined to alter and impact.”
Coming to FOX
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“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think...”
– Haruki Murakami
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“Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories’ shadows—and...”
– writing optimism from Joy Williams
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“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned to swim.”
– Frida Kahlo
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“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however...”
– Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)