Dylan Thomas on poetry

I've been studying Dylan Thomas and his poetry for a paper I'm writing, about his play "Under Milk Wood." In my reading today I stumbled upon this quote which I love:

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.' But you're back again where you began.

You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

- Dylan Thomas, "Notes on the Art of Poetry"

A thought

The real value of poetry lies
not in expressing a moment
but
in expressing the thing of which
the moment itself
is but an expression.

The Christian Imagination edited by Leland Ryken

For the upcoming CM Conference, I'm going to be reading The Christian Imagination edited by Leland Ryken; they've also listed an article by Alfie Khon about education (Tim and I read that last night) and a short story by Tolkein. The Christian Imagination is a collection of articles by various authors like Tolkein, George MacDonald, Francis Schaeffer about "the relationship between imagination, belief and words." I'll post a very brief synopsis after each chapter. You can see the list of readings they'll be doing on their blog.

The conference is in a couple months. I'm also reading The Lord of the Rings with our local CM mom's group. I've finished the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, and I'm re-reading it - partly because I want a second look, and partly because we have a six-week schedule for each book and I don't want to get ahead.

My project of proofreading Parents' Review articles has been neglected the last few weeks.

Food Safety Modernization Act

The Common Room calls it CPSIA for farms. As far as I can understand it, for the sake of food safety, only certified-safe food will be allowed to be sold. It makes me wonder if the food co-op raid in Ohio a couple of months ago is only a foretaste of what we can expect to see all over the US.

A birthday

Almost spring today! That is, the calendar says three days to go, but I think it's here already. I'm sitting on a hill on campus, overlooking the baseball field, where there is a game going on--spring training, I think. The sounds from it come up the hill a little delayed: I'm hearing the clap of the ball in gloves and the dull clink of the bat (they use aluminum bats) a moment after I see things happen. I was going to post a picture of my view, but my phone won't cooperate. It's working now!

We are studying Elizabeth's reign in humanities right now (which always makes me think of summer for some reason). Shakespeare is putting on plays at the Globe and Sir Francis Drake's navy just held off the Armada in the Channel. England is happy with their victory, happy with their new Anglican religion, and happy with their Queen. "Now is the winter of their discontent turned to summer by this bright sun--" --of York, Shakespeare said, but I think it can be said of Good Queen Bess as readily as Edward IV. (Or was it V? bother.)

Well, I don't want to write a long post, because if I do it will be all rambling and wambling, but I couldn't let the day pass without mentioning a birthday. Rusticanda has been around four years today! Quite a bit has changed since then--I'm in college now, and brother J is in highschool, and brother L is almost a teenager, and Miss M--well, she's become Miss M :D. We've taken trips, read books, discussed much, and seen seasons change--and now this blog is chock-full of good memories. So--a happy birthday to it! and I hope it sees many more full, changing, blessed years.

The End of Gardening?

The CPSIA lead-certification law was just the beginning; now the government, prompted by Monsanto, plans to outlaw food co-ops, organic farming and backyard gardening.

Look up this bill on google: HR 875

Or, start with these links:

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=12671

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Monsanto-s-dream-bill-HR-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090309-337.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1566685/food_safety_modernization_act_hr_875.html

Tree Idenitification

We're starting the Outdoor Hour Nature Challenge. The first week, we're to look for a couple of things to research and identify. We found a tree - the only one in our yard that's never been identified - and a mossy ground cover.

The tree is going to be difficult now. I looked up winter twig identification, but the twig is budding and you're not supposed to use new shoots, which is what the twigs are. But the buds aren't opened to leaves that can be identified. So I guess we're at a dead end until the leaves fully sprout. This is the tree we'll be watching come spring - the dead leaves under it, the trunk, and a budding twig. It has long pods with black flat seeds, my son says. It could be honey locust. Or some kind of willow. Or not.





And here's the other thing we're going to identify. It's from a patch of almost flourescent green mossy ground cover. This is one tiny plant pulled from the patch. It's less than an inch long, roots and all.



I'm guessing it's climacium, a moss that can be a ground-cover. Look at this picture - it looks very much like our specimen.

Bookish glee

You can tell a lot about someone by what makes them excited. So I guess this post will say a lot about me. But-- I had a very cool moment in humanities class today. We've been studying the Renaissance, and last class my professor (who is a bibliophile) was telling us about his collection of books. Today he brought in one of his old books for us to look at. And when I say old, I mean it: this was a 1525 edition of Theophylact's Gospel commentaries, in Latin, with the original leather binding. It was in beautiful condition: the paper was heavy, the print was clear, the binding was worn but intact. My professor got it as a gift from a friend who found it at a library booksale, somewhere in Illinois, for the bargain price of $1. (It's worth tens of thousands!) I got to look at it after class and read a little of it. The page layout looked just like one of Howard Pyle's books, with the decorative caps and ornamental title illustrations and side-note summaries. It was hard to realize that I was holding something printed before the founding of the US, before the Pilgrims, before Queen Elizabeth, before Shakespeare. That must be something like how the scholars of the Renaissance felt, when they were rediscovering classical writings and having fresh conversations with old manuscripts.

Dr. Seuss Meets the CPSIA

This is funny! It begins--

"In the town of Beddubble, far out on the Moor,
There lived a small tot, who was not more than four.
Little Annabelle Ruth (her close friends would recall)
had swallowed the string off a dilly-dunk ball..."

You can read the rest here.

E.M. Forster: The Machine Stops

I'm at the beginning of this short story, which was written in 1909. It's about a world in which people live in a safe, enclosed bubble and communicate, listen to music, do whatever they want - at the touch of a button.

The CPSIA bill made me wonder aloud with Tim how far the government intends to go in creating a safe environment for children - will it end by children being raised in hermetically sealed padded rooms? (Of course, the padding would need to be phthalate-free . . .) After all, even the world itself is made of dirt, and who knows how much lead might be in dirt.

And Tim said it reminded him of a short story he had to read for AO. It's here; I've only just started it. But I'm finding it eerily possible of the direction we could be going in:

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs . . . she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. "

"Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?"

I wonder what, in 1909, could have given anyone the idea that this kind of thing could ever be possible, even in the imagination?