Music continually reveals itself to be ultimately and somewhat oddly impervious to the ups and downs of the transient details that may even have played a part in its birth. Music retains its nature and spirit even as the culture that forms it fades away, much like the dirt that creates the pressure around a diamond is long forgotten as the diamond shines on.
— Read on www.patmetheny.com/news/full_display.cfm

Jazz is alive and well. Stunning piece of work from Pat Metheny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgcUeMy_kHY

Hey everyone, I got caught up and uploaded four new videos to our Youtube channel yesterday. Here they are:

The Christian Humanism of Willa Cather:

American Slavery:

George Washington, American Demigod:

The French Revolution:

In his own day and age, George Washington was the greatest and best-known man in all of Western Civilization. Washington (1732-1799), indeed, served as a pillar of Atlantis, recognized not only for his willingness to sacrifice his life for the great Republic, but also as the founder of the first serious Republic a weary world had witnessed since the martyrdom of Cicero. A true genius when it came to geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, he also read deeply in military history, biography, agricultural science. His loves, though, were hunting, adventure (as in traveling), and farming. Surveying, especially, allowed him to combine many of these loves into one. Ironically, given the status he attained as a living hero or demigod in his own lifetime, Washington suffered from a lack of liberal education, strange by the standards of his day. Much of what he knew of the classical world came not from a study of Greek and Latin (as with many of the founding fathers), but from his reading of biography and, especially, from his love of the Joseph Addison play, Cato: A Tragedy. Despite this, he earned innumerable classical titles during his lifetime, including: the American Achilles, the American Cicero, the American Aeneas, and the American Cincinnatus.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/george-washington-american-aurelius-bradley-birzer.html

The lesser Democrats (Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and now Biden) are minor comic figures from one of Tom Wolfe’s satires. (Think of The Bonfire of the Vanities.) Each has clawed his way to the top of a different greasy political ladder that stops well short of the presidency. And each now waves around his 10-point, single-spaced resume, crowing about how he followed all the rules, so now it’s his turn. It’s only fair. Watching such stunted people flail around at the end of their tethers is ultimately kind of … sad.

But Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg are different. They’re major characters, and from a more important writer. Each of them could have sprung from the pen of C.S. Lewis, and stepped out of the pages of the dystopian satire That Hideous Strength. In fact, the two candidates seem like colleagues at the conspiratorial think-tank, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.).
— Read on stream.org/democrats-2020-two-c-s-lewis-villains-and-a-bunch-of-tom-wolfe-lampoons/

Looking back at the album, Roland Orzabal commented, “Pop music was still a growth industry. It hadn’t sort of stagnated, stalled, diversified into streaming like it is nowadays. We were young, we were both good-looking and we had the right music. As we move further and further from that decade and you keep hearing ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’, in various forms I do think it is an era-defining album”.

Curt Smith “You would never normally get three songs that strong in an album. But balance that out with tracks like ‘Listen’, ‘The Working Hour’; all those things that give it air and give it time to breathe I think is what makes it something more than just the sum of its parts. I think the album had a lot more depth than a lot of those other albums of that time. And albums of more depth tend to stick around longer”.
— Read on www.udiscovermusic.com/news/tears-fears-big-chair-reissue/

Track 1: “The Trenches.” Under­scored by ambient whistling, rifle shots, and single notes struck on a piano, Brad Birzer’s voice fades in softly at first, repeating, and echoing over itself. He speaks C.S. Lewis’s description of his expe­rience in World War I: “The frights, the cold, the smell of human excrement, the hor­ribly crushed men still moving like crushed beetles…” 

Then, cue an electric guitar intro, a chorus of “This is war!” and, finally, drop in some heavy metal drumming.  

These are the opening lines and sounds of the pro­gressive rock epic chron­i­cling the meeting, devel­oping rela­tionship, and, ulti­mately, failed friendship between J.R.R Tolkien and Lewis. Birzer, pro­fessor of history, wrote this seven-track album, “The Bardic Depths,” in col­lab­o­ration with pro­gressive rock musician Dave Bandana. 
— Read on hillsdalecollegian.com/2020/02/brad-birzer-writes-lyrics-for-progressive-rock-album/

To transcend or to break through this delusion of progress, a true scholar, Hulme continued, must attempt to see the gaps in both senses, recognizing them and allowing them to exist. In other words, much like Friedrich Hayek will proclaim with the “knowledge problem” several decades later, true scholars must be humble and be content with knowing what we do not know. The modernist, of course, hates ignorance more than anything else, and in his blind zeal to know all things, he will create “knowledge” where no knowledge is possible, thus truly derailing centuries upon centuries of fine work and of understanding of the human person. Ironically, in his hatred of religion, the modernist merely creates a new, shallow, and false religion. The modern, Hulme understood, is nothing short of a full-fledge Gnostic, ultimately seeing the universe as pre-determined, mechanistic, and absent of free will.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/te-hulme-religious-attitude-bradley-birzer.html

http://robertburns.org/works/61.shtml’

FROM ” Epistles to J . Lapraik”

Lapraik was a minor Scottish songwriter and poet but he was a lover of Scottish songs and poems and hence a man after Burns’ heart. Here Burns describes his method at producing poetry straight from the heart. Burns shows great sincerity, honesty, modesty and courage. Burns had earlier made an apology in the Preface to the Kilmarnock Edition at his lack of Latin and Greek. Burns also had very little knowledge of French or Gaelic (but certainly more than many as proved by his French quotations and Gaelic names and titles). Burns states his natural response to the world might have more poetic relevance than the (by then) almost hackneyed references to classical allusions. Burns humorously compares his poetic talents to those of university educated scholars whom he says in brilliant imagery go in as “stirks” (Bullocks) and come out as asses! How amusing, now to think people thought Burns semi-literate and unable to distinguish between the genres of poetry or prose (he as a master of both). These epistles are rich in the “lallans” (lowland) vocabulary of the Scots. Only Shakespeare, I believe, had contributed as many unique phrases and vocabulary to English and Burns essentially translated an entire Scots tradition in English with his own unique combination of rich Scots expressions and English. He valued the harmonic poetic and music treasures of the Scots thus preserving forever ,as a kind of causeway, English literature and ancient Scots literature making them one tradition.

***

I am nae poet, in a sense; 
But just a rhymer like by chance, 
An’ hae to learning nae pretence; 
Yet, what the matter? 
Whene’er my muse does on me glance, 
I jingle at her. 

Your critic-folk may cock their nose, 
And say, “How can you e’er propose, 
You wha ken hardly verse frae prose, 
To mak a sang?” 
But, by your leaves, my learned foes, 
Ye’re maybe wrang. 

What’s a’ your jargon o’ your schools- 
Your Latin names for horns an’ stools? 
If honest Nature made you fools, 
What sairs your grammars? 
Ye’d better taen up spades and shools,  (taken up spades and shovels)
Or knappin-hammers.  (stone-breaking hammers)

A set o’ dull, conceited hashes 
Confuse their brains in college classes! 
They gang in stirks, and come out asses,  (the go in bullocks…)
Plain truth to speak; 
An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus  (since)
By dint o’ Greek! 

Gie me ae spark o’ nature’s fire, 
That’s a’ the learning I desire; 
Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire  (puddles and mud)
At pleugh or cart,  (plough/plow)
My muse, tho’ hamely in attire, 
May touch the heart. 

Burns who “jingled” at his Muse later (Second Epistle To J. Lapraik) has the Muse assume the form of a worn-out servant girl.

The tapetless, ramfeezl’d hizzie,  (Heedless, wornout hussy or wench)
She’s saft at best an’ something lazy:  (Soft)
Quo’ she, “Ye ken we’ve been sae busy 
This month an’ mair, 
That trowth, my head is grown right dizzie, 
An’ something sair.” 

***

Nature, according to Burns places little value on material wealth. Amusingly he says the rich will return as savage, hungry wolves and the poor as gentle souls united by love and friendship. Clearly the meek shall inherit the earth.

***

O mandate glorious and divine! 
The ragged followers o’ the Nine, 
Poor, thoughtless devils! yet may shine 
In glorious light, 
While sordid sons o’ Mammon’s line 
Are dark as night!