Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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April 23, 2012Back againTaking a break, I said; now I have not written here for eleven days. Disgraceful. Well, one needs a few days to recover from a vacation. And now I have had to buy a new suit and book another weekend for the dog in a kennel because we are going to a wedding in New York this coming weekend. This means that tomorrow I have to take the dog to the vet for some anti-kennel shots. Tomorrow afternoon DIrecTV are coming around because she who must be obeyed likes to watch TV and she hasn't been satisfied with three cable providers so far. (Of course they are each horribly deficient in one way or another; their websites are a pain in the ass and one wonders if anybody is in charge of these operations.)
And a few days before we went away she, I mean we, decided to unpack boxes of stuff we hadn't seen since moving from Texas nearly ten years ago, so the table in my mancave (e.g. basement) is covered with stuff to be taken to a charity shop, and there is wrapping paper and empty boxes all over... And my desk is piled high with stuff I would like to do but can't get to. And I bought a piece of software a couple of weeks ago called declick or click repair which even I ought to be able to use to clean up an LP when I dub it into a digital format, but I haven't had time to play with it. (I can't even find it at the moment, which is a bit worrying.)
And I responded to a question about a book that changed my life as a favor to a friend of a friend of a friend, so this afternoon I have to talk for an hour or two to some college kid in Ontario. I don't know if any book has ever changed anybody's life, but the book I nominated is Sir Henry, by Robert Nathan. He was the author of nearly 40 novels, including Portrait of Jenny (1940), which was made into a movie; it was about a man who falls in love with a girl in a painting and then he meets her but it turns out she drowned in a boating accident a century or so before. I belonged to some sort of fantasy book club when I was in high school, and I guess most of Nathan's books had a spooky side to them, so Sir Henry was a selection in 1955. It is a fable about a knight errant and his dog and his horse and his adventures with ladies and a dragon and so on. It had a big effect on me because my junior English teacher, Charlotte Moody of blessed memory, asked to borrow it and read it and talked with me about it, and was one of the first grownups to talk to me as though I were a grownup.
Nearly all of Nathan's stuff is out of print now, but I still have my original edition of Sir Henry, and reading it again this week I remember that there were other reasons why the book had an effect on me. It was about growing up in Kenosha. Everything important seemed to be a secret from poor Henry, who believed in happiness but it was always somewhere else, not where he was. He was lucky again and again, besting a dragon and then another knight (who was rather a bully), and even though he kept falling off his horse, but Henry believed that he was not lucky, although he collected two ladies, another horse and a feather bed along the way. The dragon, the horses and the dog are also important characters, all making observations to one another. Everything in the book is both funny and sad, just as in real life.
Anyway, you see that I have plenty of excuses for not blogging. I don't know how Terry Teachout does it. And I don't care. I am going to get old ungracefully. Not that I was ever graceful. Or young, for that matter.
April 23, 2012Colonial Williamsburg
A week ago Saturday was the 33rd anniversary of the luckiest day of my life, and my bride and I had a lovely dinner at the the Williamsburg Inn, one of the best hotels I have ever stayed in.
Colonial Williamsburg of course was the original capital of Virginia, and since the 1930s a lot of money has been pumped into it, because it has a lot of history associated with it: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and a whole lot of famous people had hung out there, and 80 or 90 houses and other buildings had survived, as well as the governor's mansion, and it has all been restored. I had been there once before, in 1989 I think it was, and I remember that a lot of people thought it was too tidy, too ticketyboo. But that is what the tourists want, just as in the National Heritage properties in Britain. In Williamsburg there was horse poop in the street; what could be more authentic than that? And the best part was: no music. No speakers pumping out pop songs or country music or anything else. Bliss!
April 23, 2012A garden in Williamsburg
This is the community garden in Colonial Williamsburg, where Ethne of course bought a few things, and we hauled plants all the way back up to Pennsylvania. She was there to give a lecture; a gardening symposium was being held in the museum, which is mostly underground, because nothing can be built or added that was not there in the original capital. The above-ground part of the museum was the hospital in the 18th century, effectively a looney bin.
April 23, 2012A view from the Inn
Here is a view from the courtyard of the Williamburg Inn, where we were having a drink. No snapshot can begin to capture the soft beauty of a spring twilight in Virginia.
April 23, 2012In the SouthOn the way down to Williamsburg we had spent the night at Fredericksburg, another amazing place loaded with history. The first battle of the Civil War took place in Fredericksburg, and if General Burnside had been better at his job, the war would have been over right there.
Walking up and down main street in Fredericksburg, window shopping and peeking in the antique shops, and again in Williamsburg, and in the hotels, we were struck, not for the first time in the South, by the friendliness and openness of the people. Young and old, black and white, strangers looked us in the eye and smiled and said hello. I found myself wondering if the South had not survived, with all the grief and turmoil of holding itself back for a century after losing its war of independence, without having suffered the materialist commercialism that has inflicted the North. And I wondered how long it would take the South to catch up. Or catch down.