Elizabeth Ten-Hove considers two centuries of change…
A thousand things on earth I deem more fair:
The crowds and concrete, cars and pigeons bold,
I hardly think majestic; yet they hold
A sort of fascination, and I dare
Not call the chaos ugly, and be done.
The towers, temples, theaters still rise,
Among their younger brethren, to the skies;
The air, though hazy, yet admits the sun.
But so much more is different; now the chime
Of bells calls only Argument to prayer;
A thousand tongues lend Albion their rhyme;
Niqab and veil are no longer rare.
Fair Britain stands upon the banks of Time:
Across this bridge her future lies, but where?
John Ahern writes,
(Emphasis on the not.)
There are a lot of common avenues of arguing about Church music that I think are seriously flawed and particularly destructive because they may be arguing for the right music for the wrong reasons. Here I’m simply outlining the ways I think are particularly unwise—perhaps in another place I can begin to outline the ways I think one ought to do it. (The bold affirms what I do not.)
Ella scribbles a parable.
The cobblestones in front of the sage’s house rippled along the street like choppy waves frozen, and before she had noticed them, she tripped over them and fell. Pain ran through her knees and her hands; and she could hear her heart in her temples with the pace of running feet, although she was no longer running. She wiped her palms on her threadbare skirt and left a few rusty streaks. Panting, she got to her feet again just as the sage came out of his open door with his crimson robe furled around him.
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Elizabeth Ten-Hove muses…
Eye dialect—the use of nonstandard spelling to represent particular accents and dialects—is a long-standing and rich literary tradition in English. Before spelling became relatively standardized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the written word was simply an approximation of the spoken word: Chaucer spells good “good” and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight renders it “god,” not because the former was educated and the latter ignorant, but because they pronounced the word differently. After standardization, a new possibility opened up to writers: by deliberately avoiding standard spellings, they could represent distinctly different accents. View Full Post
John Ahern writes,
In reading some of the fairy tales of both the Grimms, Anderson, and various others, one salient feature of a great many of them is this concept of the Forbidden Fruit. A Forbidden Fruit is something irresistibly desirable for little better reason than that it is forbidden. It isn’t an impulse based in the usual human desires, psychological, physical, or otherwise, but simply an impulse to do something because it’s off limits.
(Note: this is not an April Fool’s prank. If I say something odd, it’s because I’m odd).
After reading C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy last summer, particularly after finishing Perelandra, I found myself annoyed at all the people who had recommended them to me as great Christian literature. Now, this annoyance is just because I’m immature, but after I got over being annoyed, I still felt the same distrust of the books.
Admittedly, the books are good writing. I found them to be fascinating, and my attention never lagged while reading them. Each book tells a complete story, yet the storyline drawn over the complete trilogy is always apparent and cohesive. What was begun in Out of the Silent Planet is continued in Perelandra, and completed in That Hideous Strength, despite the books being so different.
And in these books, like in The Chronicles of Narnia, I found a lot I loved, and a lot of good, solid teaching. Nobody communicates Christianity as cleverly and as subtly as Lewis does.
But that’s the problem. View Full Post
John Ahern scribbles deliriously,
Some storm-tossed sailors have just landed on some coast outside Africa. They’ve just been saved from a gale sent by Juno, who has a thing with these Trojans. Venus, who has a different thing with these Trojans (Aeneas happens to be her son), comes whining to Zeus, calling him out for not keeping his promises to the poor, destitute Trojans. Not particularly worried about pandering to the special interests of lobbyists—he is a somewhat partisan figure himself—Jove consoles Venus, telling her that, in fact, the Trojans’ luck will turn. They’ll settle in Latium and someday have an empire. Bigger than anybody else’s. An imperium sine fine.
A friend has often remarked that he is grateful for not having an mp3 player. He explains that this forces him to remember and create more music on his own, rather than depending on a piece of electronic equipment.
Being between mp3 players myself, I can see what he means. It’s nice to turn off the radio, and sing a hymn, or try to remember the new piano piece I’m learning. But I’m still saving for a new ‘magic music box’. View Full Post
John Ahern revisits the haunts of his youth (???),
Let’s say I collaborate with a friend of mine who lives in Buffalo. We decide to chose the first man each of us sees on the Main Streets of our respective towns wearing a leather jacket or the first girls we see wearing pink or the first boys we see with caps backwards. Suppose we give these pairs of people pieces of paper to write a story on. They oblige us and write a story. Now, suppose these two people, one from Grand Junction, CO, and Buffalo, NY, both write stories about a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico who, after 40 days of not catching anything, finally reels in an enormous marlin. It then gets eaten by sharks.
John Ahern writes,
This may be somewhat confusing, since I’ve posted on here before about Classical music being dead and Classical music really being an output of Classical Greece. Using two different definitions of the word Classical about the same issue is hard enough—here, I’m going to add a third. When I say “classical education”, I mean the liberal arts and sciences. Think Dorothy Sayers. Classical and Christian schools. That classical. This is about applying the concept of paideia to music.
