The Beatles - Who Was The Best Musician?

I came to this question by way of the class the government requires of me. We were talking about cover versions one day. The instructor is a musician on the side; he has been a guitar player for 20 years. I mentioned Ike & Tina's version was a better version than The Beatles. He gave no indication of having heard their version. He agreed Tina's vocals had to add something to the song, but denied better musicianship. Now, I grew up with Playboy seeming to always name Paul McCartney the best bass player every year they did the best musicians of the year. I think John Lennon was a great rhythm player. George is a good guitarist and I have seen him in a video clip and admit he was outclassed the more the Sixties went on. I have heard drummers denigrate Ringo in favor of Keith Moon or John Bonham, and I disagree. Ringo does what a great drummer is supposed to do—keep the band together.

I decided the question could be answered by looking at which of the four were asked to play on other's records.

 Paul McCartney discography - Wikipedia

George Harrison discography - Wikipedia

With apologies, Mark David Chapman made this entry a bit unfiar. John Lennon discography - Wikipedia

Ringo Starr discography - Wikipedia

Almost no one asked Paul to play bass on their records, Harrison got bored with the music business, I think Lennon collaborating with Elton John and David Bowie needs attention, but The Beatle who people wanted playing on their records was Ringo.

 Make of this as you will.

 

sch 9/22 

Writing, Plays and Books: Hemingway, Salman Rushdie, Lolita, Dorthy L. Sayers

 Rereading “The Odyssey”:  Translations and the Film (Thornfield Hall)

Every decade there is a popular new translation. In the 1970s and ’80s, it would have been Richmond Lattimore’s, with its pared-down style, then considered closest to the Greek.  And Robert Fagles’  gorgeous, lively translation, published in 1996,  outdid Lattimore’s in beauty of language and poetic style.   And now there is Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, published last year, which was praised by Jorie Graham and Lee Child.

Of course seeing  the film of The Odyssey  – twice –  has inspired me to reread the epic poem (Fagles’ translation).  Before I make a few comments about Book 22, let  me talk about the cast of the movie.

Short, to the point, and a post I agree with in the most part. I have not read The Odyssey since the movie came out, but i do not recall it leaving me tired. 

I like how this documentary points out the difference between Hemingway as a man, a writer, and a myth.

 

Christina Anderson: “Man In Love” (The Yale Review), I have draft plays I need to get back to, but they worry me since I know so little about stage craft. Ms. Anderson annotates her play. I like the play. Her annotations give me ideas.

More Hemingway! I was disappointed by For Whom The Bells Toll when I read it again in my fifites. This podcast almost restored it for me. 

 

Another play excerpted in The Yale Review, S. Shakthidharan: “The Sun’s Song”.

The Sun’s Song, by contrast, has an all-male-identifying cast and consists of several acts and intervals. It alternates time periods and takes place across many different parts of the globe. It is the story of a father and a son, and it delves into questions of masculinity and intimacy; the wild earth and the wild in us; the politics of climate change; and the consequences of not dealing with your own hurt. I hope it will premiere in 2028, although it is still very much a work in progress. I am sharing an excerpt of the current draft below, along with annotations to provide insight into the play and my artistic decisions. 

Again, I learned from the excerpts.

 

Not sure if I ever posted this style analysis of Hemingway and feeling too lazy to check myself.

 

 I am not sure why Jonathan Frazen gets on my nerves. That he is about my age and from the Midwest and can damn well write, I ought to be less cautious about him. It goes back to The Corrections and a sense that he treated Midwesterners as bumpkins. That he's way smarter than I ever could have been might be in there anyway. All the same I read what I can about and by him, such as The Guardian's profile piece Jonathan Franzen: ‘It’s still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long’. 

Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no! When he’s working on a scene, trying to capture a character or get the tone right, he’s not thinking in moral terms. “If you’re really engaged with that, it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul,” he says. “I don’t really care about bettering my soul. I care about getting it right,” he adds. And then, the reflexive edit: “Which is a pretty good ending line.” 

A review of Library of America's Nineteenth Century short stories:

 

I know why I like Toni Morrison, another Midwesterner. She looks at America without blinking, without any sense of picking easy targets. Reading Tracing Shadows from Lapham’s Quarterly reinforces my bias.

That said, to pretend that just because an author was not racist, their character’s point of view or diction is not racial would be just as much of a folly. In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison reflected, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference...Every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” In other words, when it comes to the way race works in literature, denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.

Morrison’s posture was instead to treat race and racism as worthy of interest, but unworthy of debate. Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence or distorted presence of race in American literature, she told us: Look again! No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it? This begins with something as simple as the act of noticing.

 But I have spent too much time with Indiana's history of racism.

Morrison’s reading of Moby Dick spilled beyond “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken.” In a 1990 interview about her argument, the journalist Bill Moyers declared to her, of the bestselling books on the eve of the Civil War: “Your people never show up in the novels of that time.” Morrison gently contested this, saying, “Well, they do. They show up...It’s in Melville, it’s everywhere in Poe.” These are aesthetic figures rather than three-dimensional characters: “getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the nineteenth century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with…classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.” 

She raised a pattern in Moby Dick as an example of this complex symbolism: “He gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They’re paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg is the shadow of Ishmael. They all have them, and they work together in tandem.” She explained that, “even though the realistic representation is not there, the information, subtextual information…is all self-reflexive, it’s all about the fabrication of a white male American.” This is one meaning of her title, which also appears as an uncanny refrain in her 1987 novel Beloved: “Unspeakable things unspoken. Always we are defining ourselves by the other.”  

No kidding. My research project has brought home to me that liberty exists only in opposition to tyranny, including slavery. That it has no definition other than as dialectic.

In her brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn in Playing in the Dark, she castigates the way critics of Twain’s 1884 novel had thus far tended to “focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, at the same time voicing polite embarrassment over the symptomatic racial attitude it enforces.” Morrison, by contrast, never dismisses or defends the racism in that novel in her writings on it. Instead, she considers its aesthetic and ideological function—and its narrative one: “Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed...freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.” 

Lolita has never rested easily with me, a brilliantly written novel about characters I do not like, but the following has me seeing more that might make me more sympathethetic.

 There is now a documentary about Salman Rushdie being almost killed. I offer you two reviews.

‘The damage was much worse than I had imagined’: the shocking inside story of Salman Rushdie’s survival (The Guardian)

It is hard to say which time zone of the film is more viscerally shocking: the grisly footage of Rushdie being stitched and stapled back together in 2022, or the murderous hatred that roars out from news headlines in the months and years following the fatwa. In the US, the office of the Riverdale Press newspaper is firebombed after it runs an editorial about the book defending free expression; in Pakistan, six people are killed in riots; in Japan, a translator is stabbed to death; in Italy, another translator is stabbed in his home, while, in London, an effigy of a mutilated Rushdie is paraded through the streets by a furious crowd, some of whom declare on camera that nothing less than hanging will satisfy them 

Knife review: Salman Rushdie doc is a potent reminder of art's power amid persecution (Robertebert.com)

This is a simple but strong document about the importance of art as a way to comment on the world, the artist’s resilience in the face of the controversies their work might inspire, and the determination not to let violence be the answer to everything. These may seem like obvious concepts, but as this film clearly shows, we need constant reminders. 

For something a little lighter, two videos about Dorthy L. Sayers. I think there is a bit of an oversell of her as neglected but then I am one of her fans.

The Maine Review

sch 9/20

 

 

 

 

 

 

Closing Out Tuesday

 Went nowhere to my embarassment.

I did get the email thinned out.

Now for things I want to share.

The Mutants (Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal)

A Zeitgeist of the Bizarre (TAP Magazine)

Speckbohnen (German Green Beans) 

Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency (The New Republic)

 

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Trying To Take a A Vacation

 No writing this week and trying to cut down on the time spent on the computer. The first has worked, but not much success on the latter.

I got out yesterday to Walmart and Goodwill. I have a new belt and winter coat (I hope).

Film Historian Karina Longworth Shares Her Tinseltown Book Canon 

Today, I went to Asian Market and to Ball Memorial. There was someone at the hospital's entryway asking if we had been exposed to measles. Not a good sign, I think.

Talked to DM for about an hour on the phone. 

I have not been able to sleep well. I am still doing that tired but cannot sleep thing. I want to go out this evening but I am getting to the point where I cannot keep my eyes open. Is it me or the apartment? I felt peppier outside.

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Testing Reality: Diesel in Indiana, Trump & Greenland, Kash Patel

I am supposed to be the demented one, right? Fighting hard not to slip back into a depression that sees the world as disgusting and worth burning down that alters my take on reality, right? Yeah, well, I have got the depression under control and still I think myself standing outside the real world looking in. It's you people who are nuts.

Diesel prices surge past $7 per gallon, squeeze Indiana farmers as harvest begins (Fox 59) 

BOONE COUNTY, Ind. — According to AAA, Indiana hit its highest recorded diesel price average ever at $6.53 per gallon on Friday. Eye-popping prices are now appearing around central Indiana, some topping more than $7 per gallon.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense to go buy a whole bunch of fuel at $7 a gallon,” said Donnie Lawson, co-owner of Lawson Land and Cattle Company. “But maybe that’s the best thing to do because it may be at $8 a gallon here in a week or two.”

Corn and soybean farmers, like Lawson in Thorntown, are making some hard decisions to still turn a healthy harvest profit.

“This is the toughest it’s ever been in agriculture,” Lawson said. “And that’s from top to bottom.”

Thousands of gallons of diesel will be needed to fuel Lawson’s combines, tractors and other agricultural equipment. Last year’s harvest season in Indiana, the diesel average was $3.78 per gallon.

US and Denmark reach security deal after Trump’s threats to take over Greenland (The Guardian).

Even so, a Trump administration insider dropped a hint online that the US side intends to present whatever the deal actually is as an American triumph. Katie Miller, a former White House aide whose husband is Trump’s closest adviser, posted a map of Greenland covered in the American flag, with the caption: “ITS [sic] HAPPENING”.

Trump gets to claim he got a great deal which will probably be what we had before Trump started ranting. The same will happen with Iran. That is what you get when you and reality are not on speaking terms.

Maddow hits the mark: Trump is trying to rally his base. OTOH, more proof he has no concern for our rights.

 Vanity, vanity and we pay the price:

Are we Titanic passengers Having a good laugh about the iceberg?

  Trump voter interviewed. I really do not understand, I see such a gap between Trump's words and actions.

 This ought to be a SNL skit, not reality. Talk about your DEI hires.

Judge Luttig warns about the GOP’s plot to block Democrats from taking control of the House! 

 

sch 9/20

 

Latest Items From My Constitutional Law Project

 Price v. State, 622 NE 2d 954 - Ind: Supreme Court 1993 - Google Scholar

Sidle v. Majors, 341 NE 2d 763 - Ind: Supreme Court 1976 - Google Scholar

Randall T. Shepard - Wikipedia

Second Wind for the Indiana Bill of Rights   

THE INDIANA BILL OF RIGHTS 20_3_Twomley.pdf 

T.D., et al. v. Wrigley, et al. - 219866

"chancellor kent" - Google Scholar

Breese v. Smith, 501 P. 2d 159 - Alaska: Supreme Court 1972 - Google Scholar

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Second Treatise Of Government, by John Locke

Individual Rights Under State Constitutions in 2018: What Rights are Deeply Rooted in a Modern-Day Consensus of the States? - Individual Rights Under State Constitutions in 2018.pdf     

The Maturing Nature of State Constitution Jurisprudence - The Maturing Nature of State Constitution Jurisprudence.pdf

An Unnatural Reading: The Revisionist History of Abortion in Hodes v. Schmidt - An Unnatural Reading: The Revisionist History of Abortion in <i>H.pdf

Fry v. State, 63 Ind. 552 (Ind. 1878) | HallApproved.com

Madison & Indianapolis Railroad v. Whiteneck, 8 Ind. 217 (Ind. 1856) | 

The History of History and Tradition: The Roots of <i>Dobbs</i>'s Method (and Originalism) in the Defense of Segregation | Yale Law Journal

State v. Wilson, 543 P. 3d 440 - Haw: Supreme Court 2024 - Google Scholar

S0738248019000427jra 821..845 - div-class-title-reading-the-constitution-1787-91-history-originalism-and-constitutional-meaning-div.pdf

Allegheny Reprod. Health v. DEP'T OF HUMAN, 309 A. 3d 808 - Pa: Supreme Court 2024 - Google Scholar

The Chancellor's Ghost - The Chancellors Ghost.pdf

MEDICAL LICENSING BD. v. Planned Parenthood, 211 NE 3d 957 - Ind: Supreme Court 2023 - Google Scholar 

sch 9/19     

A Ringing Endorsement For Living In Indiana

Even better it points out the benefits of living in Indiana.

Public Health Professor Left Indiana; Found Fulfillment in New Mexico (Business Insider)

I packed my bags and moved to Kentucky for a master's degree in public health, then to Ohio for my doctorate in health education. I was hired as a faculty member at BSU in Indiana. In total, I lived in the Midwest for 15 years, with the last 10 in Indiana.

The small college town of Muncie averages more than a foot of snow each winter. Some winters in Muncie were really harsh, windy, and freezing for weeks at a time.

The last couple of weeks I am almost hoping for winter. The humidity and the heat have been giving my lungs trouble. Sneezing and coughing, I have been feeling like a mucus factory. No church today. I made the decision last night during another coughing jag. It wore me out. I almost thought I had decided wrong until another episode hit during the night. I had another when I finally woke this morning and during my walk to the convenience store. 

The good point about living in Muncie:

Between Muncie, Indiana, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, the biggest cost difference is in housing and healthcare. I bought a house in 2023, but I used to rent a two-bedroom, two-bathroom for $800 a month in Indiana in 2020, and that jumped to $1,050 in New Mexico. 

 Let us face facts, if you can live in Indiana then you can live anywhere. The weather can change from sunshine to rain in a day. At some points during the year, you can have rain, sleet, snow, and sunshine within an hour.

The humidity can be 100% and not rain.

Much of the central part of the state was swamp. If the wide swathes of cornfields disappeared they would return.

America is a country of conservatives and reactionaries, a history lesson:

Cohn lives through Trump. McCarthy was a bum.

 I passed a point very early this morning with my project. A section was finished to my satisfaction, the argument put together. Not that all points were finished. Of course, when I got into bed there were some details that could be added, but not ones that changed the argument. 

I intend no more writing this week besides for this blog. Books need read. 

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