Category: Shorts

Best wishes for a quick recovery to Joan Baez (69 years old) who fell out of a tree on the grounds of her home, reportedly suffering minor injuries.

From an AP story

1960s songbird Joan Baez is “resting comfortably” at an undisclosed location after falling 20 feet to the ground from a treehouse — a treehouse she purposely had built without walls because she wanted to sleep among real birds at her Woodside, Calif., home.

[…]

Baez is known for such songs as “Blowin in the Wind,” ”Forever Young,” ”Diamonds & Rust” and “Sweet Sir Gallahad,” and once had a relationship with rocker Bob Dylan.

That’s a rather Dylan-centric thumbnail of her career, but I guess I couldn’t offer a better one. Somewhat amusing is the choice of labeling Bob as a “rocker” with whom she “once had a relationship.” Everything is shorthand. To rewrite an old quote: When the glib shorthand becomes fact, print the glib shorthand. Still, Baez’s career could never be summarized without substantial reference to Bob Dylan. I’m not sure that the same in reverse could be said about Bob’s career.

The history, in any case, will be written by the victors.

Via Joe Carter (Fine-Tuning an Argument and a Universe) I followed a link to this page on Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist who has identified twenty-six “parameters for the universe [which] must have values falling within narrowly defined ranges for life of any kind to exist.”

It certainly makes for some fascinating reading, and if you like you can click the button below for an appropriate musical accompaniment. The parameters are listed below the clip. Continue reading “Life’s a Miracle”

I’ve written in this space on the great American poet Samuel Menashe, on one or two occasions. In the latest edition of the magazine Poetry, the erudite Ozzie (long transplanted to Britain) Clive James has some reflections on his work, as part of an essay titled “A Deeper Consideration.”

All Menashe’s poems give the sense of having been constructed out of the basic stuff of memory, a hard substratum where what once happened has been so deeply pondered that all individual feeling has been squeezed out and only universal feeling is left. The process gives us a hint that the act of construction might be part of the necessary pressure: if the thing was not so carefully built, the final compacting of the idea could not have been attained. There could be no version of a Menashe poem that was free from the restrictions of technique, because without the technique the train of thought would not be there. Even when he writes without obvious rhyme, he has weighed the balance of every syllable; when he uses near rhymes, the modulations are exquisite; and a solid rhyme never comes pat, but is always hallowed by its own necessity.

Indeed.

On a personal note, I’ve found that both the brevity and religiosity of Menashe’s poems makes some of them rather ideal for use as reflective “graces” before meals. One I’ve grown to like in that role, for instance, is titled Whose Name I Know. Menashe is Jewish, and the special sacredness of the name of the LORD from the Hebrew Bible is the inescapable and imponderably resonant context here.

WHOSE NAME I KNOW

Whose name I know

Published in Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Project).

Via The Hill:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Wednesday that President Barack Obama should find someone’s “ass to kick” regarding the budget deficit. Continue reading ““Find some ass to kick on budget deficit””