Thursday, December 25, 2014

Merry Christmas!



Merry Christmas to family, friends, and random readers!  

May we all feel as Ebenezer Scrooge felt on discovering the joy of Christmas:

"I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!'' 

Monday, December 22, 2014

You Are Here


I took a walk in a nearby park on Friday.  The Parks Department had just opened a series of bike trails and provided an instructive map.




It is a comfort to know where you are.  I would like a map like this.



Saturday, December 13, 2014

I Like Lichens


Today I took a leisurely hike in the Mathews/Winters Park near Golden and took time to admire the various lichens on the rocks.

Wikipedia, in its ungainly way, informs us that lichens are complicated thingies:  "A lichen is a composite organism that emerges from algae or cyanobacteria  (or both) living among filaments of a fungus in a mutually beneficial (symbiotic) relationship. The whole combined life form has properties that are very different from properties of its component organisms. Lichens come in many colors, sizes, and forms. The properties are sometimes plant-like, but lichens are not plants."

Green lichens are so prevalent that many of the boulders have a greenish hue.





Individual lichens come in many colors: pale green, yellow-green, white, black, dark green, and orange.






Toward the end of my hike I spotted this rock covered with many strange lichens.  Or are they mosses?  Or marine creatures that have lost their way?


Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Earliest Writing by Ashley Sterne


Today I ran across the following letter to the editor by Ernest Halsey (1876-1939).  The letter was written in 1907, several years before Halsey adopted the pen name of Ashley Sterne and began contributing humorous quips and articles to London Opinion magazine.  The letter displays flashes of the Ashley Sterne flair for comic denunciation and his chauvinism in favor of British composers and corresponding antipathy toward German or "Hun" composers.

Both his powers of comic denunciation and his musical chauvinism grew stronger after the Great War.  Twelve years later, in Pan magazine (January 1919) he published an Ashley Sterne article called "Why Hun Music?"  It began: "In the programme of a recent vocal recital at the Aeolian Hall the recitalist – a foreigner – had, I see, the remarkable taste to include a series of songs by modern Hun composers, including two specimens by the Archbishop of Cacophony, Richard Strauss."

Halsey was a friend of the promising British composer William Hurlstone (1876-1906), who had died of illness the previous year.  The letter gave Halsey an opportunity to honor Hurlstone's memory.  



From Musical News (August 17, 1907):

British Works at the Promenades

To the Editor "Musical News"

Sir,- I heartily concur with Mr. Cyril Winn in his remarks on the omission of Mr. Charles Macpherson's Suite "Halloween" for the forthcoming Promenade Concerts, and at the same time I am wondering why no work of the late Mr. Hurlstone is included in the syllabus.  Of the works by this composer which are available for orchestra I may mention the Variations on a Hungarian Air (originally, I believe, played by Dr. Richter at a Halle Concert), the Suite "The Magic Mirror" (scenes from "Snow White and the Seven Little Dwarfs"), and the very fine Fantasie – Variations on a Swedish Air.  This latter was produced at a Patrons' Fund Concert (at which, by the bye, Mr. Henry Wood was present), and received another hearing at a concert of the London Symphony Orchestra in February 1906, under Mr. Charles Williams, so it has not been altogether neglected.  But it seems to me extraordinary that such works as these are not more readily taken up by conductors of our big orchestras on their own initiative.  The merits of these and other works, e.g., Mr. W. H. Bell's fine "Walt Whitman" Symphony and "The Canterbury Tales," Mr. Gustav von Holst's "Suite de Ballet" in E flat, to mention the first three works that come to mind, are sufficiently apparent to the veriest tyro, and should require no fillip from the musical Press or the the influence of those "in high places" to obtain frequent hearings.

I am not looking forward to the ceaseless performances of the Overture to "Tannhauser," Prelude to Act III. of "Lohengrin," that hardy perennial the "Peer-Gynt" Suite, and the overdone and clap-trap "1812" Overture; but I am anticipating with pleasure the production of the British novelties, with a pang of regret that the better-known Wagner, Grieg, and Tschaikowsky pieces have not given place to revivals of some, at least, of our own composers' works that have already met with approval from Press and public alike.

ERNEST HALSEY


Sunday, December 7, 2014

Go to the Birds and Consider Their Ways


I took a walk today to the nearby reservoir.  I passed a few geese along the way and took their picture.  I admit that the picture is unimpressive.  I couldn't even get them to form a straight line.


When I got to the reservoir I saw a great gaggle of geese leaving shore and paddling out into the reservoir.


After passing a great colony of gulls that were standing on a thin sheet of ice, the geese formed a long brown band that stretched part way across the reservoir.




The gulls formed a separate but equally impressive band of white.  Most of the gulls were taking a nap.




Go to the birds, thou stressed-out corporate drudge, and consider their ways!  They enjoy company and they value a midday nap.

  

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Leonard Merrick The Epic of the Heavenly Cook


I have just spent three hours googling the Internet to find a comic short story by Leonard Merrick (1864-1939), a largely-forgotten writer of novels and short stories in the early 20th century.  I had read the story earlier this year and wanted to read it again to savor the elegance of its initial exposition.

However, as I remembered neither the title of the story nor the characters' names, I had a devil of a time finding it.  But at last success!  The story is called "The Epic of the Heavenly Cook."  First published in 1925, the story was later collected in the 1932 anthology My Funniest Story.  I am not sure of the story's copyright status, so I will just give the first few pages as a taste of Merrick's ironic style.


The Epic of the Heavenly Cook

At a date when Parisians had good bread and manners, and there were still artists in Montmartre, a young man sat dining in the Cafe of the Heavenly Cook, and he called to the waitress: "Bring me a word, please."

"A what, monsieur?" said she.

"I want a monosyllable to rhyme with 'rose' and mean 'after hesitation, but tenderly'," he told her, impatient at the delay.

She neglected his order, but he found merit in the waitress.

The incident blossomed to acquaintance and ripened to romantic passion, on the young man's side.  Henceforth he went often to the little restaurant, begging of the dainty waitress another monosyllable that he never got.  While not averse from compliments and odes, Clementine, who was the daughter of the proprietress, knew her worth too well to say yes to an unfledged poet.  Especially as, when he did get a slim volume out at last, he was as hard up as ever, and the publishers repented their pluck.

Now, soon afterwards, the unavoidable necessity for paying his way compelled the suitor, whose name was Archambaud Blicq, to forsake poesy in Paris for employment in Rennes, where he had a cousin prospering with a department store; and our knowledge of the world would have led us to say that his exit from the scene would be the end of the matter.  But it was not.  For once we should have erred.  Strange to relate, the episode was to bear fruit twenty-five years later.

Twenty-five years later, an elderly gentleman, sauntering in the sunshine of the quays, chanced to pick from a box of dilapidated books, marked "4 sous each," a slender, soiled volume, with a broken back, "By Archambaud Blicq," which was not distasteful to him in parts.  Being an eminent journalist, with a column to write and nothing to write about, the elderly gentleman wrote a highly sentimental article about the broken-backed volume the fairness of its promise and the fustiness of its fate.  "What were the sufferings," he wondered wistfully, "of this Unknown, whose gifts, whose dreams, whose aspiring mind are revealed to me by accident long after his gallant hopes and bitter tears have " etc. etc.  And the praiseworthy publishers, having refreshed their memory and ascertained there would be no royalties to pay, took a sporting chance and advertised a new edition of the thing.

This time it let them down less harshly.  In strictly limited circles people mentioned the work.  Even among a few eccentrics, "Archambaud Blicq" became a transient cult.  And next, an out-at-elbows hack, with vague memories of Blicq, laboured for a square meal by contriving a biographical sketch, in which he narrated intimate falsehoods of his "lost comrade."  Labouring to the limit of his capabilities, he "deplored the fact that an unrequited attachment for a girl of singular beauty the Clementine of the odes who had been the daughter of a widow keeping a restaurant at Montmartre, had so wrought upon his comrade's mind that the ill-starred youth had destroyed himself in the Seine."

That he had dramatically broken his heart and committed suicide delighted his admirers.  The publishers were pleased with him, too.  They felt that Blicq had done all he could to forward sales.  And now the most ardent of the eccentrics were eager to identify the restaurant to lunch where the lover had languished, to pose where the poet had prayed.

Meanwhile, time had been proceeding with Clementine.  She had lost her mother, and found a husband, and content with the exchange, reigned cheerfully in the restaurant by his side.  Save for her figure, she was not without some faint resemblance to the dainty waitress of long ago.  What is called a "fine woman" by people who can't have too much of a good thing.  Her amplitude put no restraint upon her energies, and no patronne of the quarter bustled to more purpose than Madame Pidoux, or boasted a livelier turn for profits.  Pidoux acted as chef.  His taste inclined to women of liberal circumference, and in his loving eyes Clementine was no less fair than efficient.  A successful marriage.

At the hour of dejeuner one morning, Clementine, alert behind her counter of the Cafe of the Heavenly Cook, noted the entrance of two strange and inquisitive looking ladies.  In lieu of seeking seats, the ladies approached her, and the elder said, "Pardon, madame, if it is within your knowledge, would you be so amiable as to inform us whether this is the restaurant where monsieur Archambaud Blicq used to dine?"

"Monsieur what?" asked the fat matron shortly.

"We inquire about Archambaud Blicq," said the younger, in reverent tones.


[And so forth through the various comic developments until Archambaud Blicq himself, now a middle-aged shopkeeper and family man, chances to visit the Cafe of the Heavenly Cook.]