A High School Memory -- Smile

Yes, I know it's getting pretty corny, but I'm in that kind of mood tonight.

I miss you just once a day, these days, but it's all day long;

Once a Day, All Day Long, Connie Smith

I Still Miss Someone

Incredible to think that this was a) written by Johnny Cash; and, b) it was on the b-side to one of his other hits. What incredible talent. Truly amazing.

And Emmylou's voice is simply angelic.

I Still Miss Someone, Emmylou Harris

I Will Always Love You

The back story to this song is incredible -- at wiki:

I Will Always Love You, Dolly Parton

Back in 2004, I suppose, it was cryin' time (again):

It's Cryin' Time,  Buck Owens and Emmylou Harris

I do think that Emmylou Harris, along with Dolly Parton, had a most angelic voice.

Cryin' time began when I walked out your door.

Ah, To Dance Once Again In That Atrium ...

... to sleepwalk ... back ...

Sleepwalk, Les Paul

Dance Me To The End Of Life

I remember dancing in the atrium of a house in Yorkshire. And tonight, I am led back to that house.

Dance Me To The End of Life, Leonard Cohen

******************* 

Nothing below the break has anything to do with you, us, or Yorkshire, so no need to read any farther. But not surprisingly, weekend nights are particularly difficult. I was up in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the last couple of days. I guess if I can't be in Yorkshire, Provinctown is a good second choice. Provincetown is wonderful. The people are wonderful. Incredibly friendly.

On the way up to Provincetown, I always take a side trip to visit the Yellow Umbrella Bookstore in Chatham, at the elbow of the cape. On so many levels, the Yellow Umbrella Bookstore may be the nicest bookstore, bar none. I always enjoy asking the co-owner/co-manager (?) what she is reading, and her selections are always so interesting. I enjoy talking with her. This time she mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald; surprisingly (there's that word again) I had not heard of her, and yet "In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945," according to wiki. I had already picked out the book I was going to read, so I told Ms Yellow Umbella I wouldn't be buying Penelope Fitzgerald this trip, but maybe the next trip.

I had already picked out Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, c. 2006, I guess (the copyrights vary, depending).  So, now in between reading Mayflower, and checking messages at my Bakken blog, I am surfing through YouTube. Before midnight. After midnight, I surf and post my meanderings on a different site.

It is incredible how great the songs were in that 18-month-period centered around 1969. My surfing brought me back to Marmalade's "Reflections of My Life." I had forgotten that was a 1969/1970 song, also.

Reflections Of My Life, The Marmalade
And now, I'm doing better.

Massachusetts, The Bee Gees

1969

It's nice to have this on in the background, while working on something else. It's the complete album.

It was 1969.

I do believe I would consider this the first album that I truly enjoyed. This was the beginning. I suppose by then I had been listening to the BeeGees for a couple of years. Interestingly the album took on more meaning in my life in subsequent years, and it is still one of my all-time favorites.

The Best of the Bee Gees

You Showed Me So Many Things I Had Never Seen

I'm sure I have posted this video, but I am enjoying it again ...

Stumblin' In, Chris Norman, Suzi Quattro
Of course, none of this has anything to do with us, but there is an occasional phrase in the song that reminds me of my halcyon days in Yorkshire --- you were so young, and I was so free .... and stumblin' in. You were the one.

When I Grow Too Old To Dream, Vera Lynn
We'll Meet Again, Vera Lynn

Remember When

< Remember When, The Platters Sometimes a song is all I have.

Sunday Afternoon and Memories of Yorkshire

Many thoughts brought me here, but here are sixteen:

Sixteen Reasons, Connie Stevens

American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson, 2013

I completed my first reading of this book.

I particularly enjoyed it because of all the references to other literature that I have read since beginning my aggressive reading program in 2002.

This was an advance copy; it did not have an index, and I don't know if the "final" edition will. So I took a few notes and placed them at the link.

I wonder if we don't all die a little bit at a time over the years. For me, a lot of me died in 2004. An aggressive reading program prevented worse.

Norah Jones

I'm at my favorite coffee shop -- a Starbucks in the New England area -- it comes as close to reminding me of the Yorkshire tea shops.  It's a stretch, but ... what can I say? It brings back memories of Yorkshire.

Overhead, a Norah Jones song. Huge memories of Yorkshire.

And so it goes.

From Another Blog

The following is a "cut and paste" from another of my blogs.

I normally don't do this, quote from a book that I am reading and enjoying, but the spirit moved me, and so here it is.

I continue to read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This is a well-researched book of debt from an anthropologist's point of view.

So, from his chapter on the Middle Ages:

That was the entire point. By doing so, Buddhism, unlike Islam, produced something very much like what we now call "corporations" -- entities that, through a charming legal fiction, we imagine to be persons, just like human beings, but immortal, never having to go through all the human untidiness of marriage, reproduction, infirmity, and death. To put it in properly Medieval terms, corporations are very much like angels.

Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta) -- a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural person of whom he is composed" -- was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries -- as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds.

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine ....

All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assuming that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it. They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages --as well as the most enduring.

They have, of course, changed a great deal over time.....The ones that came closest were, perhaps unsurprising, monastic orders -- above all, the Cistercians -- whose monasteries became something like the Chinese Buddhist ones, surrounded by mills and smithies, practicing rationalized commercial agriculture with a workforce of "lay brothers" who were effectively wage laborers, spinning and exporting wool....

There are a number of reasons I am enjoying the book, and a specific reason why I chose this passage to quote, I suppose.

First, when I was in eighth grade, or thereabouts, age 14 or so, I suppose, I wanted to be an anthropologist, though I did not know specifically that "word." I just knew the subject area I wanted to study. A friend of my father heard that and gave me my first real adult book to read: The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey.  (The first real adult book that I recall reading at about the same time was a hardback copy of a very different kind of book: it was called something like INA, with the "INA" embedded in "ImagINAtion." It may have been about the Insurance Company of North America. I forget. Be that as it may, I digress.

I first wanted to be an anthropologist, but did not know the correct word, so I said I wanted to be an archaeologist. (Until my dad asked me how much money archaeologists make.)

Fast forward thirty or forty or fifty years, and I find myself traipsing over the English, and more specifically, the Yorkshire countryside. I was enamored with everything English, or more specifically, everything Yorkish, then. Even the ubiquitous Land Rover. Serenity and beauty could be found on the grounds of the old abbeys and monasteries. With a friend, I visited many, and re-visited many more. For some odd reason, the Cistercian monasteries stood out; I remember them best. Perhaps it was because I had recently read The Seven Storey Mountain by a Cistercian monk,  Thomas Merton, whose prayer I had memorized. I learned later he had some skeletons in his closet, or at least one skeleton, but that did not diminish my enthusiasm for the Cistercian story.

It was a joy to find an "anecdote" taking me back to those halcyon days in David Graeber's book on debt. Who would have thought.

Maybe more, later.