Happy birthday, Mr. Shakespeare!

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April 23, Full Fathom Five, Hag-Seed, JudeMaris, Margaret Atwood, photoshop reconstruction, Shakespeare

 

April 23, the day we celebrate the birth of the Bard of Avon. Not surprisingly, we really don’t know when he was born, but he was baptized on April 26, 1564, so the date of the 23rd seems reasonable enough. Couple that with the fact that the 23rd is St. George’s Day, and that Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, it’s as good a day to mark his birth as any.

At right, we see the Chandos Portrait, generally believed to be of Shakespeare. But, as with so much of history, we are not certain.

In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel sings to Ferdinand, telling him that his father is drowned.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

And so, with Shakespeare, too. The bones he left behind have grown beyond anything he could imagine. All that was Shakespeare hath suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange. Consider, for example, what Margaret Atwood has done with The Tempest.

Atwood sets up the story in an almost embarrassingly simple-minded way–she has an egomaniacal theatre director get fired, and then take his revenge by taking a teaching job in a jail, where he has a class of inmates put on a production of The Tempest. And it’s amazing.

My purpose today is not to review Atwood’s book. You can read a very good review at The Guardian.

 

My goal today is to celebrate Shakespeare.

JudeMaris is a YouTube channel, responsible for a series of incredible Photoshop reconstructions of historical figures. Jude (A pen name for an M. A. Ludwig) takes existing drawings, paintings, sculptures, and verbal descriptions of historical figures, and set against a backdrop of his(?) own compositions, brings modern photo construction to their faces. The results are often breathtaking. I offer you Shakespeare today. But, trust me, if you grab a cup of coffee, you’ll happily spend the morning looking at JudeMaris’s creations.

Happy birthday, Mr. Shakespeare!

If I had a rocket launcher

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austin city limits, bruce cockburn, colin linden, guatamala, if i had a rocket launcer

Back in 1984, in the midst of bad electronic music, and daily reports of government-sponsored atrocities in Central America, came the sounds of Bruce Cockburn.

Here comes the helicopter — second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher…I’d make somebody pay

Good God, how I felt those words. I don’t like violence. I don’t like revenge, but on first hearing, this went straight to my heart.

I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher…I would retaliate

Guarded borders. Stinking torture states. 30 years later, here we are.

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation — or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher…I would not hesitate

Cry. That’s all we seem able to do is cry.

I want to raise every voice — at least I’ve got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher…Some son of a bitch would die

Can raising our voices make a difference? What is the good of a crummy little blog like this? I don’t know.

Let me leave the politics of this song for a moment and share artistry with you. Here’s Bruce Cockburn with Colin Linden punctuating the sound at Austin City Limits in 1992. It’s easy to overlook Cockburn’s brilliance on the guitar.

But don’t forget the message.

 

 

 

Robert Burns Day 2017

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an a that, Is there for honest poverty, Robert Burns

As a teenager, I was fascinated by Burns’s poetry. When I picked up a used “Collected Works”, I was dumbfounded to read his letters. His prose was clear, unadorned 19th century English. It was nothing like his poetry!

I felt cheated.

But not for long.

After digesting the horror of realizing that Burns’s poetic language was not his everyday speech, I came to understand what he was up to. Burns was capturing something essential about a Scots country dialect, and finding the music within. More than that, he was using the dialect (how accurately, I have no idea) to express the burgeoning Liberal ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. He wrote of the dignity and worth of country people.

And on that note, I give you a song of liberalism at its finest.

 

A Man’s a Man for A’ That
Robert Burns (1795)

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that;
The coward slave – we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that.
Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that,
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that,
The man o’ independent mind,
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

A Prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that!
But an honest man’s aboon his might –
Guid faith, he mauna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities, an’ a’ that,
The pith o’ Sense an’ pride o’ Worth
Are higher rank than a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

I’m an adult now?

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I'm an Adult Now, Moe Berg, Pursuit of Happiness, wonder

Yeah, I guess so. As the old joke goes, I knew I’d get old; I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast.

Back in 1986, The Pursuit of Happiness rocked Canada’s 20-somethings with “I’m an adult now” a comical look at the bewilderment of unexpectedly finding yourself to be an adult.

What could go wrong with a song that begins with

Well, I don’t hate my parents
I don’t get drunk just to spite them
I’ve got my own reasons to drink now
I think I’ll call my dad up and invite him

Now, 30 years later, I’m still an adult. And I don’t know how that happened.

 

November 11, 2016 Remembrance Day

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Currie Barracks, poppy, remembrance day, Sarcee barracks

November 11. Remembrance.

November 11 is a somber day for many. In Canada, we call it Remembrance Day. There is much to remember.

I was born in 1960, and my country was continually at peace until I was in my 30s. My children have grown up in a period of nearly continual war for our country, with our soldiers seeing combat in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Growing up in Calgary, my home was nestled between two military bases, called at the time Currie and Sarcee. Soldiers were part of everyday experience on the streets. Military vehicles and helicopters were an everyday sight. We even played on a pair of WWII tanks that were displayed at the entrance to Sarcee Barracks.

Although we were at peace, war was still in the air.

My father, like many of the fathers in the neighbourhood was a veteran of the Second World War. A few of the younger men had served in Korea. There were two seniors’ homes nearby; many of the residents loved to tell their memories to eager little boys like me.

How odd that my childhood was full of memories of war, with games of war with other boys, with the very real presence of soldiers and equipment, and peace. Glorious peace.

One small memory before I search for a way to conclude this piece. In my early teens—sometime in the early to mid 1970s—a couple of friends and I cut through a corner of the Sarcee base, on our way to trout fishing in the Elbow river. There was a firing range and a few out buildings in that corner. If there were no shots, we knew there was no one around to interrupt our shortcut. We walked past a small storage building and looked inside a screened window. The building housed hundreds of WWII targets: squint-eyed Japanese soldiers, crouching while holding machine guns. Every target identical, and every target the size of a small man. For the first time, I felt the violence of the long passed war. I felt the reality that these men I knew had been taught to shoot at a de-humanized caricature of men, so that they could one day shoot at the real thing.
I don’t know if they were still using these targets, 30 years after the conflict ended. It must’ve seemed cartoonish and comical to the soldiers if they did.

So what does this all add up to? I don’t know, really. November 11 is a day of remembrance. And I remember. I mostly remember my father, even though he found his wartime experiences to be rather uninteresting, so far as I could tell. I remember the men who smelled of pipe smoke as they told me stories that seemed unreal. I remember that November 11 was very important to them. And I remember that it is only by luck that I was not required to serve in similarly dehumanizing circumstances.

Puzzles, puzzlement and learning

Tags

learning, math, mind

Here’s a bit of an odd thing.

Everybody knows that the two circles are of different size. We might even remember the right words to say that they have different circumferences. Heck we might even remember the fact that the circumference is proportional to the radius.

The outside circle is bigger than the inside circle.

But in the video, they both look exactly the same.

What is going on?

The answer, I’m sure you know, is mathematical. Things are not what they seem.

Imagine that you were a student, and your teacher showed you this video. What would your reaction be?

If you were engaged in your work, or if you were engaged in physical work (maybe you’re a bicycle enthusiast), you’d be pretty amazed, I think. Because if this were true, wheels couldn’t work. Of course, if you were not interested in the material, but cared about your grade, you might ask, “Is this on the test?” Or maybe you’d not care at all, and turtle up for a bit. (Yes, I’ll return to the question of engagement at a later date.)

It seems to me that the worst thing a teacher could do now is to reveal the “solution” to the conundrum. To answer the question now would be to kill it. The answer is important, but it’s not important right away. What is necessary is to feel the question. What does the video purport to show? Could I replicate it somehow? Why does this crash my common sense to the ground?

So I won’t answer it today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after…