Grim got me started listening to Jimmie Rodgers and I've been exploring the early 20th century for other musicians like him. Although the style's different, Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) is a very worthwhile listen. Of course, I loved the blues long before I loved country, but Hurt is country blues, so there's something for all of us in his music.
He grew up the son of ex-slaves sharecropping the land they had been slaves on. In the 1920s he got a deal to record some of his music, but it didn't sell very well and then the Great Depression hit. He went back to sharecropping. In the 1950s the folk music revival hit and musicologists discovered his recordings. Eventually, one of these musicologists found him on his farm and he started touring and recording again in the early 1960s. He's known for old-time, folk, blues, spirituals, and country, though it seems he most often gets labeled country blues.
Here's a good spiritual:
Here's some live blues:
1. The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliff
The King Arthur Trilogy is a worthy retelling of the Arthurian stories for a younger audience, Amazon listing it as for ages 9-12. At several multiples of that age, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. She based her version on primary sources but, like any good storyteller, has added to and shaped the stories, weaving them into a coherent whole. In particular, she is skilled in her presentation of the characters in the story, while remaining firmly within the tradition. This is the best introduction to the whole of the Arthurian stories I've found. After reading this, someone new to the stories will have a good grasp of the essential elements and story lines and will be well-prepared to tackle more complex versions of the stories.
Sutcliff retold a number of other classical stories for this age group. I believe that her Black Ships before Troy has become the standard introduction to the Illiad for younger readers in much of the classical education and homeschooling community, which she follows with The Wanderings of Odysseus. She also has Beowulf, Dragon Slayer. I'll be adding these three books to my "read for fun" list.
2. The Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of the Merlin
The Daily Wire has made a 7-episode series from the first two of Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle series of novels. It focuses on the bard Taliesin and on Merlin's life up through being advisor to Uther and setting the stage for Arthur.
Overall, I thought it was very well done. The production was as high quality as I've seen in any TV series, the acting was good, the story is well-told, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Two possibly unique aspects of the story is that it weaves in Plato's story of Atlantis as background and it presents Merlin as a Christian wizard, though still with one foot in the pagan world.
My only complaint is that near the very end Merlin experiences a severe internal conflict which is just difficult to show on screen and so comes across a little flat. A possible solution might have been to add a couple of imaginary scenes running through Merlin's mind to show that conflict. That said, overall, it was an excellent show and I'll watch it again.
Alas, it is currently only available by subscribing to the Daily Wire. I got a discounted one-year subscription and have been enjoying it. They have a number of conservative movies and a number of programs on history, mythology, and of course tons of political talk, their bread and butter. They also have a number of conservative-friendly children's shows. For me, it was worth a one-year subscription, but I doubt I'll re-up.
Here's the trailer:
The late 19th & early 20th century Austrian poet Rilke was recommended to me by a literature professor, so I gave him a try. Here are a few I thought were worthwhile. In this collection, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Rilke mostly gives us snapshots or vignettes with a single focus. His work was influential on a number of 20th century poets you might have heard of, such as Robert Bly, M. S. Merwin, and W. H. Auden.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
BYD said the Denza Z featured “shattering high performance” with over 1,000 hp and the ability to sprint from 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) in less than two seconds, it didn’t reveal specifics....[New details show] the four-seat EV roadster is slightly larger than the Porsche 911 and closer in size to the Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe. The Denza Z is more powerful than both, with the 911 Turbo S delivering up to 701 hp and the Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe offering up to 1,153 hp.BYD’s electric supercar can reach a top speed of 217 mph and weighs 5,842 lbs (2,650 kg) for the hardtop version.The Denza Z will be available with a soft top and a souped-up track package that gains a massive rear wing spoiler.
SpaceX is set to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate himThere are competing schools of thought about the accumulation of wealth, among them the anarchist claim that “property is theft” and the Gordon Gekko theory of greed as a star-spangled virtue.... The more compelling argument against billionaires has to do not with the ethical implications of the extreme inequality that they arguably promote, but with the adverse real-world consequences, which you don’t have to be a fire-breathing Marxist to acknowledge. There is plenty of evidence that extreme inequality produces inferior and even perverse social outcomes.... But if [Elon Musk is] a stain on capitalism, it’s not because of his wealth. It’s because he exemplifies the idea of government as the plaything of plutocrats who shamelessly bend public policy toward private advantage. It may be difficult to excite class warfare in a culture that worships wealth, but people like Mr. Musk make it a whole lot easier.
Those aren't useful instructions; the headline writer has misled us. It's just griping.
The good argument in favor of billionaires -- trillionaires, now -- is that one person can make a decision about how to deploy substantial capital in efficient ways that a government, a corporation, or a committee can never. Musk is building space rockets and tunneling equipment that could build a Mars colony because he wants to, not because of fiduciary duty or because spreadsheets suggest it is wise. We are lucky that the world's richest man loves Buck Rogers rather than Karl Marx.
Concentrations of political power are always pernicious, and wealth is one way that power can be concentrated. To say that we got lucky is to acknowledge that it could have gone the other way; indeed, it has done, as with several rich men who might be named.
If you were wanting the promised instruction on how to hate properly, however, here is Chesterton:
"Up on the old white road, brothers,
Up on the Roman walls!
For this is the night of the drawing of swords,
And the tainted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,
Leans a little and falls.
"Follow the star that lives and leaps,
Follow the sword that sings,
For we go gathering heathen men,
A terrible harvest, ten by ten,
As the wrath of the last red autumn—then
When Christ reaps down the kings.
"Follow a light that leaps and spins,
Follow the fire unfurled!
For riseth up against realm and rod,
A thing forgotten, a thing downtrod,
The last lost giant, even God,
Is risen against the world."
Roaring they went o'er the Roman wall,
And roaring up the lane,
Their torches tossed a ladder of fire,
Higher their hymn was heard and higher,
More sweet for hate and for heart's desire,
And up in the northern scrub and brier,
They fell upon the Dane.
Once upon a time, North America was effectively Britain overseas. The colonists were Britons. They had British rights, British liberties, British privileges. Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights 1689. Around seventeen other Constitutional Statutes still technically in force.Then King George decided Americans had lost their right to keep arms for their own defence, and that taxation without representation was perfectly acceptable. The rest, as they say, is history. The United States of America was born, and its citizens kept all of their old British rights and added God-given ones on top of them....In 1920, Britain introduced its first serious Firearms Act. Before that, Britain had fewer gun restrictions than Texas.Understand why it happened. It was not about crime. It was about preserving the Executive from its own people, specifically from any possibility of the kind of popular uprising that had just remade Russia. Protecting the ruling class. Nothing more, nothing less.The constitutional safeguard of the citizen militia has also effectively been erased. It is almost impossible to find in Britain today.
If you keep reading, you find the criticism against the Administrative State that Weber mentions (see commentary on the sidebar). It overwhelms self-governance and replaces it with raw power.
The song sets it up as a reference to an older piece, though, and it is.
Here's a version with Merle Haggard, to link it up with our more usual era.
