Camp Songs

*** This Fall I've committed to lead music for a once-a-week after-school kids' program at church (think VBS spread out over the school-year), and I've been all over the internet looking for new songs. These guys aren't terribly scriptural - okay, they aren't even slightly scriptural - but I am just delighted by their videos, and only wish there was something similar for goofy church music. (Totally a legit genre.) Speaking of which - do YOU have any favorite goofy church / camp songs? Leave a comment!

Word of the Day

Our house is in a hooroar, with the back kitchen all ripped to pieces for a face-lifting job, and we can't even find our way to the refrigerator without a compass. But I guess the dust will settle eventually.

-E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White, 446.

***

I must find some opportunities to work the word hooroar into my conversation. Perhaps when I have failed to read yet another critical work memo, I could casually remark that my email inbox is in a hooroar? Pretty sure I've also come across some hooroarific databases...

Nothing Special

You can map the lay of the land
Darling, you can describe the sad terrain
Let us survey all the borders
Sugar, don't it all still look the same?
And when you find there's nothing special
About that great big ole hole in your heart
Cause everybody's got one
Yeah with precious little time to talk about it

Nothing like the leaves round your front door
The stages and the pages
Yeah, you've been in love before
And the things you feel inside your bones
Those that won't leave you
Those that won't leave you
Those that won't leave you alone

-Bill Mallonee, "Nothing Like a Train"

News Flash!

According to the WSJ, Salman Rushdie will soon publish a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories! (HATSOS being a really excellent adult-kid book, in the splendidly winsome tradition of The Phantom Tollbooth.) Read an excerpt from the new book here.

Fairer than Florence

If men loved Pimlico, as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

-G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Joey Pensak in a recent newsletter

Oh, How I'd Like to Be Queen, Pa

Oh, how I'd like to be queen, Pa,
And ride in my kerridge to Kew,
Wearing a gold crinoline, Pa,
And sucking an orange or two.

Oh, how I'd like to be queen, Pa,
Watching my troops at review,
Sucking a ripe tangerine, Pa,
And sporting a sparkler or two--

With slippers of crimson shagreen, Pa,
And all of my underclose new!

-Joan Aiken, Dido and Pa, 20-21.

Many Sounds But No Noises

It was a beautiful September evening, windless, very peaceful. The park and the old, cream-painted houses facing it basked in the golden light of sunset. There were many sounds but no noises. The cries of playing children and the whir of London's traffic seemed quieter than usual, as if softened by the evening's gentleness. Birds were singing their last song of the day, and farther along the Circle, at the house where a great composer lived, someone was playing the piano.

-Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, 8.

Dear Diary

When I was young and full of beans, I used to keep a diary, only I called it a "journal" to make it sound more impressive. I wrote in it so steadily and over so many years that it is eight inches thick and contains probably the world's finest collection of callow and insipid remarks.

-E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White, 445.

Love and Science

There's one last thing
I'll tell you if I can
It is not love
That makes a non-stick frying pan
But a top secret trademark conglomerated most likely carcinogenic polyurethane compound spread in a microthin layer over a negatively charged alloy of aluminum, iron, lead, titanium, magnesium, iron, wine, beryllium, geranium, mesopotamian, and some other elements too
And since you're gone
I wish I'd stuck to you

-Josh Ritter, "Science Song" (listen here)

Rejection Letter

We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.

-Rejection letter, quoted in Brian Doyle's marvelous essay, "No"

Link o' the Day

I just discovered a bunch of free (!) recordings of Bill Mallonee performing live. Flowers is my new favorite - I quoted some of the lyrics in my previous post.

I'm also intrigued to learn that Bill's name is pronounced MALonee, like Melanie with an "Al". I've been saying MaLONee, like Baloney, for years...

Flowers

Flowers growing out of your desert
Flowers out of parched ground
Flowers coming right up through the cracks
Of the pavement in this old town
Flowering's not a science
It's more like a fine art
Flowers coming right up through the cracks
Of our beat-down,
Burdened,
Broken,
Bruised,
Bloody,
Bastardized,
Besotted,
Bespotted,
Bamboozled,
Little hearts

-Bill Mallonee

Reading the Fridge

Think about it a moment -- if there's a place in every house that's devoted to stories of every shape and sort and size, that has oceans of prose and photographs, gobs of poetry and paintings, posters and prints, essays and articles, quotes and notes, yards of cards, voices from all over the universe, stories from every corner of the compass, and those stories are read and pondered by all ages and stages of readers every day, well, isn't a refrigerator a kind of large humming book, then? With all sorts of treasures inside? And how many books have such extraordinary added value as being excellent caves for ale and ice cream? And how many books can ever be said to have also housed shoes, spectacles, and a former sparrow, as a certain refrigerator of my acquaintance has?

-Brian Doyle, "Brian Doyle Reads a Refrigerator" (Read the entire short essay here)

Psalms

So this summer I've been studying the book of Psalms with a bunch of college-type girls. At the beginning of the summer, we each shared a favorite Psalm, and we've been working through them week by week. Here's our list:

Psalm 1 - Beth
Psalm 27 - Emily
Psalm 32 - Lydia
Psalm 34 - Leta
Psalm 37 - Bella
Psalm 51 - Sarah
Psalm 131 - Ali
Psalm 136* - Courtney
Psalm 139 - Lissy

*See Bella's post on this one!

End-o-Summer Highs

1. Looking for shooting stars after Friday Night Bible Study
2. Toy Story 3 (finally!)
3. New laptop
4. Psalms
5. Piles of unread books, purchased earlier in the summer
6. Dainty diving contest @ the Swim Thing
7. Looking forward to Backyard & Hudson Valley Shakespeare

Tonight You Belong To Me

-Josh Ritter & Erin McKeown

***

So sweet.

Time...is Marching On

Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 320.

Bean Counters

History may dwell on stories of heroism and drama, but there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 241.

Idle Thoughts

I concluded that there were few troubling situations in contemporary life from which one could not distract oneself by wondering where the electricity had arrived from.

-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 209.

Rose Standish Does the Laundry

"Ho Rose!" quoth the stout Miles Standish,
As he stood on the Mayflower's deck,
And gazed on the sandy coast-line
That loomed as a misty speck.

"On the edge of the distant offing;
See! yonder we have in view
Bartholomew Gosnold's 'headlands.'
'Twas in sixteen hundred and two

"That the Concord of Dartmouth anchored
Just there where the beach is broad
And the merry old captain named it
(Half swamped by the fish)--Cape Cod.

"And so as his mighty 'headlands'
Are scarcely a league away,
What say you to landing, sweetheart,
And having a washing-day?"

"Dear heart"--and the sweet Rose Standish
Looked up with a tear in her eye;
She was back in the flag-stoned kitchen
Where she watched, in the days gone by;

Her mother among her maidens
(She should watch them no more, alas!),
And saw as they stretched the linen
To bleach on the Suffolk grass.

In a moment her brow was cloudless,
As she leaned on the vessel's rail,
And thought of the sea-stained garments,
Of coif and farthingale;

And doublets of fine Welsh flannel,
The tuckers and homespun gowns,
And piles of the hose knitted
From wool of the Devon downs.

So the matrons aboard the Mayflower
Made ready with eager hand
To drop from the decks their baskets
As soon as the prow touched land.

And there did the Pilgrim Mothers,
"On a Monday," the record says,
Ordain for their new-found England
The first of her washing-days.

And there did the Pilgrim Fathers,
With matchlock and axe well slung,
Keep guard o'er the smoking kettles
That propt on the crotches hung.

For the trail of the startle savage
Was over the marshy grass,
And the glint of his eyes kept peering
Through cedar and sassafras.

And the children were mad with pleasure
As they gathered the twigs in sheaves
And piled on the fire the branches
And heaped up the autumn leaves.

"Do the thing that is next," saith the proverb,
And a nobler shall yet succeed:
'Tis the motive exalts the action;
'Tis the doing, and not the deed;

For the earliest act of the heroes
Whose fame has a world-wide sway
Was to fashion a crane for a kettle
And order a washing day!

-Margaret Preston, "The First Proclamation"

***

It was my great honor to read this poem at our 4th of July festivities. My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of laundry!"