It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms

[sovay]

Tonight's culinary experiment: beef Wellington. Success!

Then we watched Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), so it was either a tremendously English evening or just a nice finish to a day that included an afternoon with my best cousins. (I am unable to determine from cursory research whether beef Wellington is an authentically British recipe; sources seem to differ, and I got this version from Gourmet. It was surprisingly uncomplicated to make.) The discovery of a Hellenistic temple to Bastet is not more awesome than civil-engineering slime mold, but it does make me happy.

Gotten from several people, as is probably appropriate: reply to this post and I'll tell you one reason why I like you. Then, if you feel like it, go forth and do the same.

Comments

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your kind encouragement -- it means a great deal to me. "Lapidary enthusiasm" is a great phrase! I find the depth and breadth of your scholarly pursuits inspiring, but even more so the passion, enthusiasm, insight, and discernment you bring to all of them. Life! Its abundant presence and expression in you and through you is a joy to encounter.

And on top of that, you sent me music I didn't know I needed.

Ahh -- am I reading you right? You are finding you did need it? I admit to having been super curious what you would make of it all, especially the Tull, music so many people either dislike or simply don't respond to but which has been for me a lifelong source of pleasure and illumination.

[sovay]

I admit to having been super curious what you would make of it all, especially the Tull, music so many people either dislike or simply don't respond to but which has been for me a lifelong source of pleasure and illumination.

No, they're music I needed and didn't know it—I'm not quite sure how they were off my radar for so many years, given their intricate lyrics and their non-crystally approach to the folk tradition. (There's a whole spectrum of folk-influenced music that I have trouble listening to because it borders on—or outright falls over into—the twee. This is not the case with Jethro Tull and I was pleased to discover it, because titles like "Jack-in-the-Green," "Cup of Wonder," or "Dun Ringill" could go either way. As it is, the first of these is probably going to become a favorite song. I feel strongly about green-man imagery; this was my first published poem.) They're not quite the same flavor of weird as the Incredible String Band, but they sound like there are some common lines of descent. And all the songs you have given me are stories, which I also like. So, yeah. Success. I don't have the technical vocabulary to discuss Vagn Holmboe with the specificity he deserves, but he has an odd, recognizably classical, slightly allohistorical feel to his music, a half-step off from the structures or the dissonances the listener expects. There seems to be a strong folk component, but I'm not sure where it's from—Eastern Europe? No, wait, a bit of jazz just went past. Are klezmorim allowed a piano? Hey, the grotesque. And so on. I very much like the results, and I'm glad to have another twentieth-century composer to add to the mix. Thank you.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all of that. The Mythic Delirium Archive is quite right to call your first published poem a classic. I had watched and listened to the video of you reading it a month or so ago, but only read it for myself for the first two times (there will be more) just now. And it is extraordinary, pitch perfect, and very much a spiritual ally to Tull's "Jack-in-the-Green" (the link is to a video of a live performance just days before the song was released on the Songs from the Wood album in 1977; on the studio version, singer/songwriter Ian Anderson plays all of the instruments). I love how you weave Jack's woes and wiles into a modern landscape, and yet he remains wholly himself, most vividly evoked, the grave concerns you -- and he -- express growing only truer and more urgent with the passage of time. I love "a hothouse seedling / teased into midwinter flower." It reminds me of a sentence I wrote in 1997, "They touched his senses into flower," which Steve Erickson recently cut (one of many cuts I approved, for complex reasons) from the very story of mine just published, a dozen years after its composition, in Black Clock. I love your gentled windowsill plants, his brown hands catching on your skin (which says so much about the exquisite delicacy and tenderness of his hands, however earth-textured, however fibrous and dirt-moist and densely woven they may be, and all in the language of your skin, so much in that brief phrase!), "the pliant taproots of his toes. / He is dying. His kisses / are the inner coils of a fiddlehead / and begin to taste like the dry snap / of a bloodless fallen branch." Just brilliant! "[B]ones curl verdant into vine"!

So my first seeing of your poem's title in a list somewhere is what made me wonder if you knew Jethro Tull, and that lead to my making that collection for you. I love all of the songs thereon, have for a very long time, but the ones that I think have moved me the most are "Skating Away," "Dun Ringill," "Velvet Green," "Pibroch," "Journeyman." All of them have continued to open up over the years, beautifully so, deepening with familiarity. I really enjoyed your comments, and hope those songs continue to grow on you.

One reason I think Tull may have been off your radar is that their career path has not been through folk circles so much (though they have had a long almost sibling-like association with Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span; Ian Anderson produced and most of Tull's members at the time played on Maddy Prior's 1978 album Woman in the Wings) as late 60s and 70s British rock and roll: their second album, 1969's Stand Up, was only displaced as the number one album in Great Britain by the release of Abbey Road.

Your comments on Holmboe were more than eloquent -- you describe his music in ways I never would or even could, yet I responded to your evocations with delighted recognition; you helped me to hear his music anew. Indeed, I responded to your comment by more or less immediately listening to both compilations again. A pleasure! The strong, articulate reactions of friends to what I have written or shared often send me back to the works in question, and in ever-varying ways I find that their reactions help me to both rediscover and to return to the feeling of first discovery; yours particularly strongly. That experience is perhaps one of the greatest joys of friendship and community, for it renews and refreshes whilst wending its ways both inward and outward. I can only reflect your earlier compliment back to you: anent lucidity, lapidary enthusiasm. Bless!