Amazing Apology

Posted on July 8, 2019 by JMN
Olney_vicarage

By T. Sulman – Martin, Bernard (1950), John Newton: A Biography, William Heineman, Ltd., illustration between pages 222 and 223., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11258269

The man who wrote the words of “Amazing Grace” was a reformed English slave trader. He wrote the following:

“I am bound in conscience to take shame to myself by a public confession which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent or repair the misery and mischief to which I have formally been an accessory.” (John Newton, 1788)

It’s the most abject, poignant, unvarnished, soul-baring, unsparing, uncowardly and realistic apology uttered by mortal man that I have encountered. The moist evasions drooled through clenched teeth by today’s “men” reek of slobber by comparison. A world in which “I’m sorry that you were offended” is the excuse for so much offense is a sorry world.

If there’s a heaven, I hope John Newton looks down from it. Our misery and mischief are enduring, but his words were an atonement.

(c) 2019 JMN

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The Saving Grace of Dinghies

Posted on July 6, 2019 by JMN
dinghy

Photo illustration by Susan Derges.

I have had a soft spot in my heart for the humble dinghy since boyhood. At age 14 I ordered the plans for building a one-design sailing dinghy called the El Toro. Regrettably I never got the thing built, but I kept the plans for years. This essay on dinghy rowing by Heidi Julavits is sweet, clever, lyrical — a modest gem, like a dinghy.

Dinghies… demand humility, as well as a basic grasp of buoyancy and physics… They become unstable when incompetent, rash or hubristic people get into them…

Learning to row a dinghy requires surrendering to the illogical: You need to first accept the seemingly counterproductive fact that to move the dinghy forward, you have to face backward…

… Rowing provides an opportunity to regularly identify and assess my imbalances, many of them a result of years of unthinking behavior… You must learn to always correct for them…

Mornings are best, before the wind picks up, because the water is glassy and promotes reflection. You can ask yourself hard questions about everything as you watch your past recede… What awaits you, you cannot see. With the help of a rock or a tree, however, you can take aim. You can reassure yourself: This is not your last chance to get it right.

(Heidi Julavits, “Letter of Recommendation: Dinghy Rowing,” NYTimes, 7-3-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

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Art… (and Love)

Posted on July 6, 2019 by JMN
milton glaser

Milton Glaser.

“Art and making things — particularly making things — are essential to our salvation,” [Milton Glaser] said. “I come to work every day and I sit down and I feel so happy, because I’m capable of taking something that exists in my mind and making it a physical thing. Whether it’s good or bad or art or not is irrelevant. But the act of doing it has kept my brain intact. I always say that retirement is this horrible conspiracy to prevent people from being alive. My God, who invented that?”

(John Leland, “Why This Famous Graphic Designer, at 90, Still ♥s NY,” NYTimes, 7-4-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

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Patrician Passion With an Accent

Posted on July 5, 2019 by JMN
vita virginia

Unafraid of mockery … Gemma Arterton, left, and Elizabeth Debicki in Vita & Virginia. Photograph: Piccadilly Pictures/Allstar.

The drama – featuring the kind of flat, chirruping upper-middle-class English accents that aren’t usually voiced on screen – is intriguing and uncompromisingly high-minded, right on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline, but interestingly unafraid of mockery.

(Peter Bradshaw, “Vita & Virginia review – a hothouse of patrician passion,” The Guardian, 7-4-19)

Talk more about the accent, please.

(c) 2019 JMN

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The Guardian on Relationships

Posted on July 3, 2019 by JMN

Olives

“How to tell your best friend you’re in love with them — by those who have taken the plunge”
(Sirin Kale, The Guardian, 7-1-19)

In days of yore this headline would not invite the interpretation that you love your best friend. It would imply, rather, that you love something about him or her that is plural. Eyes? Ears? Dimples?

Or it might imply that you love something plural contemplated by the two of you, such as hummingbirds or olives. I love them, too, but it’s hard to see why advice on how to tell this to your friend would be called for.

However, if this “them” you love is two or more third persons, then helpful advice from a newspaper column may indeed be called for. We’re talking polyamory, of which even your best friend may not approve.

(c) 2019 JMN

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“Sagacious Show in a Handsome Shack”

Posted on July 3, 2019 by JMN
brice marsden

Brice Marden’s “Cold Mountain Study” (22), from 1988, at “T” Space in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Credit Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.

Brice Marden’s artistic and cultural crossing of boundaries is exciting.

In the mid-1980s, the abstract painter Brice Marden veered from his early monochromes and grids to calligraphic circuits, inspired by his reading of the… poet Hanshan, or Cold Mountain… Black ink drawings made with sticks, feature lines and curlicues that dribble from the top of the paper to the bottom, like Chinese characters… Calligraphy serves… as the genesis of Mr. Marden’s abstractions…

Chinese poetry… became the passage through which… he could reconcile the expressiveness of gestural drawing with the rigors of the modernist grid. Finding that passage meant leaving safer shores, and learning from another artist (a poet, in this case) from a distant place and time….

(Jason Farago, “‘Brice Marden,’ What to See in New York Art Galleries Right Now,” NYTimes, 6-26-19)

(c) 2019 JMN

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New Old Proverb

Posted on July 3, 2019 by JMN

exclamation-mark

… “Skinfolk,” as the old proverb goes, aren’t always “kinfolk.”

(Jamelle Bouie, “Kamala Harris Doesn’t Have to Believe in Joe Biden’s Innocence,” NYTimes, 7-1-19)

This old proverb is new to me. It has the virtues of a good proverb: pith, spunk, rhyme, and fertile ambiguity resolvable by context. It also illustrates the vital role of skillfully used quotation marks.

(c) 2019 JMN

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Musico-Logic Circles

Posted on July 1, 2019 by JMN

Treble clef, stainless steel isolated on white background.
“Circular argument”: An argument whose conclusion is the same as one of its premises. (Quora)

I flail about in music theory, often ending where I started — insufficiently informed and grandly blogging my perplexity. To feed this cause I’ve been on the lookout for a stimulating case of circular reasoning. Cue Margaret Renkl, who writes today that “the
primacy of an informed conscience belongs as deeply to church tradition as the current brand of pastoral authoritarianism does.”

Here’s the helpful circle:

Catholics today don’t hear much about the primacy of an informed conscience because many priests take the position that a conscience at odds with the church is by definition insufficiently informed.
(Margaret Renkl, “How to Defy the Catholic Church,” NYTimes, 7-1-19)

My grasp of music theory is at odds with music theory! Undeterred now, I find the primacy of an informed conscience to be a stirring phrase. It will goad me while I mount Rocinante and break lances with the diatonic scale.

(c) 2019 JMN

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Shooting Stardom: When Teenyboppers Write Subheadings

Posted on June 29, 2019 by JMN
balvin bunny

Bad Bunny, left, and J Balvin teamed up for “Oasis,” an eight-song collaborative album that was released as a surprise. Credit Left, Christopher Gregory for The New York Times; Right, Julien Mignot for The New York Times.

Two of the biggest Spanish-speaking global pop superstars discuss joining forces for the first “Watch the Throne”-style pairing in Latin music.
(Joe Coscarelli, “How J Balvin and Bad Bunny Made Their Surprise Album, ‘Oasis’,” NYTimes, 6-28-18)

In the universe of Spanish-speaking musical artists there is a sub-group who are global pop superstars. Within that sub-group, there co-exist in diminishing numbers the little global pop superstars, the bigger global pop superstars, and the biggest global pop superstars.

Among the biggest global pop superstars are found J Balvin and Bad Bunny. What distinguishes them from the other global pop superstars is that they have achieved superstardom on a global scale in pop music — in Spanish.

And surprise! They have made an album. No disrespect intended for these two excellent artists — they’re both on my playlist. It’s the ripe rhetoric of the NYTimes that invites a friendly grin. But these are the puffy times we’re in, language-wise.

(c) 2019 JMN

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“Our Blue-Eyed Girl”

Posted on June 29, 2019 by JMN
sargassum

A worker cleans a beach in Tulum, Mexico, on 15 June. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

… Tourism secretary Miguel Torres Márquez tweeted a video of a pristine Cancún beach with the comment: “We’re looking after Cancún, ‘our blue-eyed girl’ and all the beautiful beaches of the Mexican Caribbean.”
(David Agren, Seaweed invasion threatens tourism in Mexico’s beaches as problem worsens,” The Guardian, 6-28-19)

A morbid sargassum bloom-and-rot cycle is befouling beaches from Cancun to Belize. The fatuous tweet of the Mexican bureaucrat adds a whiz of male-pattern badness to the Augean tide of human effluent corrupting the Caribbean.

(c) 2019 JMN

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