….another 3rd grade tour

An historical society docent of course doesn’t mind talking about the same stuff with every tour group, and the groups with kids reliably ask the old familiar questions.

The eager 3^rd graders making the pilgrimage to the historic district along the Charles River in Natick, MA, prove the point. Sometimes it’s not easy to encourage a sensible understanding of the context of “350 years ago,” but the kids are all too ready to engage in such thinking in their own terms.

In a few years maybe they’ll be ready to expand that thinking just a bit:

Another 3^rd grade tour

Well, yes, Anna, this is the same river

   the Nipmuc Indians knew in 1651

it was here, they fished in it

and, yes, they saw ducks like those

   on the other bank over there,

and, no, it’s not too deep,

but, here’s another way to look at it:

the river is new today,

it’s filled with new rain,

it carries a different twig over the dam,

it swirls new bubbles

   from the fish we didn’t quite see,

the river has forgotten the feel of a canoe,

   forgotten how to turn the mill wheel,

it has learned to ignore

   the ever louder sounds that crowd the air,

and it sniffs in surprise

   each time new toes are dipped in its currents,

and those ducks on the other bank

   are new this year, too.

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Published July 29, 2016, at Whispers

The times they are a-changin'....

Blame the men!

Gee willikers, six miles an hour!

Women who pioneered electronic music

"...the peregrines..."

Software upload

"Many waters cannot quench love."

Why doesn't every headline say "stupid"?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“Mannish Boy”….hold that thought

When McKinley Morganfield was born 103 years ago, nobody knew that he would become “the father of modern Chicago blues.”

That’s because nobody knew he was Muddy Waters. That didn’t come out right away.

Lucky for us, folklorist Alan Lomax “discovered” Muddy Waters” in 1941 and made the first recordings of the unshackled voice of the blues that would make such an enduring, personal statement in such fully dimensioned classics as “Rollin’ Stone,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Got My Mojo Workin,’” and “Mannish Boy.”

If you’ve never heard Muddy’s voice, listen to him here, singing

“…I spell mmm, aaa child, nnn
That represents man
No B, O child, Y…”

Waters can make you a believer about the good qualities of a mannish boy, in a Delta blues kind of way.

He was one of the genuine musicians who seriously influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones—who took their name from the classic Muddy Waters song.

Waters didn’t have to wrap his lips around the microphone to sing his full-throated songs that invoke zest, and longing, and desperately earnest immersion in life, always up to the hilt….

His mojo never stopped working.

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Alexander's Ragtime Band

Johnny says "drink up!"

Book review: Dead Wake

Hatred is now legal in North Carolina

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Probably you know that languages evolve, and words and patterns of speech and even pronunciations change over time, sometimes rapidly….

Sometime when you’re in a full body cast you can read up on The Great Vowel Shift in the English language in England (roughly 1350-1600).

Today’s lesson is a bit less formidable: raise your hand if you know when “O.K.” became part of American English.

Okay, here’s the answer:

In the 1830s, some young folks with a bit of education thought it was groovy to misspell words and then use the resulting abbreviations as slang (guess who probably didn’t quite know what the kids were talking about….). Such as “OW” meaning “all right” (the misspelled form was “oll wright”) and “KG” for “No go” (“Know go”).  Cool, right? Know, really.

So, “O.K.” showed up….that is, “oll korrect” derived from “all correct.” Wicked.

It first appeared in print—as part of a joke—on March 23, 1839, in The Boston Morning Post. You gotta believe that early 19^th century journalists had the same awesome sense of humor that pervades the news media today.

So, like, our constantly changing language, GP, y’know?

(“go phigure.” You knew that, right? Cool.)

Alexander's Ragtime Band

Johnny says "drink up!"

Lest we forget

Book review: Dead Wake

Lap dogs, not watchdogs

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

"A Man of Feeling…"

Christopher Morley (1890-1957)

Journalist, novelist

Morley once contributed a few words to an advertisement for Leary's Book Store in Philadelphia:

"…Why do the literary journals say so little in honor of man's only nirvana, the Secondhand Bookstore?...A Man of Feeling always frequents the secondhanders."

Exactly. I find that I am never annoyed by spending another few minutes in an old bookstore where there are used books stacked floor to ceiling….

If that makes me a "Man of Feeling," well, yes, I plead guilty.

Sadly, Leary's—despite Morley's kind words—closed its doors in 1969.

Requiescat in pace.

The boob tube....

Your great-grandmother didn't have a teddy bear

When safety standards were more interesting....

The wisdom of William Cronon

Homeward

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

You can call him Quake

About 2,885 years ago, a man was born in Mesoamerica, in what we now call Mexico. We know only two things about him: he died about 750 B. C., fighting against the Zapotec empire; his name was 1-Earthquake.

Among the tens of millions who lived in ancient times in the American hemisphere, 1-Earthquake is the earliest whose name we know.

1-Earthquake

In the Mesoamerican cultures that flourished three millennia ago, the day of birth often was an augury of the future of the newborn, and often the birth date was adopted as a name. 1-Earthquake was the Zapotec name for the 17^th day of their 260-day sacred calendar.

It is apparent that the name was carved as two glyphs in the stone threshold of a temple in San  José Mogote, near the city of Oaxaca. This is the earliest known writing in North or South America that can be accurately dated: 750 B.C.

Urban site in Zapotec empire

Note the date.. At about the same time as Rome was founded (753 B. C.), when  the early Greeks were emerging from their own Dark Ages, and when much of Europe was populated by the “barbarian” Germanic and Celtic tribes, there were civilizations in the Americas like the Zapotec and the earlier Olmec, that had sophisticated cities, governments, organized religion, art, agriculture, commerce, astronomy and mathematics.

Source: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 243.

Book review: The Kingdom of the Kid

"That's not my job"

Surprise!

The Six Grandfathers

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.