“I have quested all my life for truths and I wallow in bromides. The bromides themselves wallow in truth.” (From My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn 1959). How apt this seems to your hosts, for we have quested after truth, never more so than here in the US of A. Yet bromides keep appearing, more real than life itself. In Richmond, Virginia, at the Museum of the Confederacy we have been subject of the most warm and open hospitality (when perhaps what we deserved was hostility (or contempt) for our naivety). Then as Albert (Einstein) says “Of course we don’t know what we are doing, that is why it is called research”. It seemed to us that the South were still trying to justify their actions and demean those of the North – not without a little justification. Yet….
Back to the Blog – which has had a wonderfully eclectic mix this week.
Starting with Quentin’s “The House and The Boat”, wherein he states “Houses and boats, are like books. Only when they have been caressed by a sympathetic hand, imbibed by a sympathetic mind, and the ideas and voices within are shared in a symbiosis of mutual regard can there be a ‘transference of soul.’”
We introduced our first Restaurant Review, with Carol Barrow. She loves family-owned ones – “You know the kind: where the waiter is the owner and he remembers you and your family and what you like to eat. He makes sure your water glass is full because he cares. He wants you to come back.”
On his very first visit to America Quentin had this to say, “The further I went the more the contradictions rain down upon me, I am losing my sense of definition, black is not necessarily black and white has gone fuzzy and in between, beyond this, the general “friendliness” of the locals is deeply unsettling.” in First Impressions
“Silent Sam” by George Entenman is the story of an ongoing saga around the meaning of a statue of a Confederate Soldier erected at the University of North Carolina in 1913. Passive and not so passive complicity abound!
Endette Hall is having difficulties with the Lower Orders, Ira Maine reporting “because of my mother’s failure to maintain properly acceptable standards during her stay, it has been difficult to hold my head up as I go about my duties”
In our Musical Dispatch this week “Flight or Fight” Bob Marley’s Babylon system gets a mention:
We refuse to be
What you wanted us to be;
We are what we are:
That’s the way it’s going to be. If you don’t know!
You can’t educate us
For no equal opportunity.
Followed by a reference to Fear and Loathing with regard our 2013 election campaign. The racially based and debased Intervention continues.
Poetry Sunday brings us “a glorious poem by Seamus Heaney concerning another great man: his father.” with such insightful comments from Ira Maine. Enjoy this work.
Regards
Cecil and Quentin
Somewhere on the Mississippi