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.
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.
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.
Eight airmen dead after a B-52 crash. We’ve been flying the same planes since before any of us were born, on the same mission. They are the wall that keeps the world.
As I said at AVI's place, I tend to think that this "peace deal" is just an attempt to push the matter off until after the midterms, and that it doesn't really matter what it says because neither side intends to keep the promises being made. It is probably to our national dishonor that we are led by a man whose word doesn't mean anything, but we all know that it doesn't, so why worry about it? The horse is out of the barn; it'll come back or not in God's good time. For now, it's out of our control -- it's not like the other side has honorable men or women to offer as an alternative.
The one thing that should die with this peace, however, is the idea that Israel in some way runs the USG. My Israeli contacts are livid. They feel completely betrayed which, in fairness, is what the United States generally does to its allies. That's how you know you're a US Ally in good standing: you get betrayed by this government or the next one, usually sequentially. That also is probably to our national dishonor, but it is at least a demonstration of some kind of self-governance: we can't have permanent promises because we actually do change at least the top dressing of the government once in a while. The unwashed underwear, by which I mean the bureaucracy, tends to go unchanged decade after decade; but some top-level policies get reversed as the pendulum swings.
Not serious ones, I imagine, though serious psychology strikes me as a philosopher as a sort of joke. Psychology's history is mostly philosophy of mind without the possibility of falsification; I am told it's gotten better of late, but the replication crisis doesn't inspire a lot of faith in that assertion. All things equal, though, let's assume 'not the more serious psychologists.'
One of the very replicable findings about at least one measure of intelligence -- reading comprehension -- is that girls get it faster than boys. My elementary school broke the law (such differences already being forbidden) by sorting classes by reading comprehension level, so we had what the kids knew as and referred to as the 'high' 'middle,' and 'low' classes of intelligence. Since I learned to read well fairly early, my classmates were 26 girls and 3 boys, plus myself. The effects of that approximately 9-1 ratio, combined with alphabetical arrangement of students, were that I learned to talk to girls early. This has been an accidental but entirely beneficial outcome, as human beings sort by sex and by age cohort more than is rational. My friendships with women and with people much older than myself have been especially enlightening.
But it's not true, not remotely true, that anyone can learn anything. Try teaching anything. You'd think that one wouldn't get headway among educators, but somehow it has.
