What an intriguing idea: Reversing time to see your younger self moving forward in time as you move backward. What if everything that’s happening here has a reverse reality in an anti-world? Mueller’s poem plays with this idea of opposite motions. What would you need to have on hand to meet that self midway through life? The speaker of this…
Thaw by Edward Thomas Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass. Thomas wrote all his poetry in a three-year burst of creativity between 1914 and 1917. He had enlisted in 1915 and embarked for France at…
Not a very effective way to get children to love school and enjoy math. But looks like it was an excellent method for teaching subversion, resilience and resistance to authority. Good work Miss Moran. Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School by Jane Kenyon The others bent their heads and started in. Confused, I asked my neighbor to explain—a…
There’s a comfort in routines and familiar sounds. Some towns have a noon whistle. If you’ve lived near a school or a factory you’ll know a routine. If you’re close to a children’s playground you can tell the time of day as it fills up with voices when school gets out. My childhood had the Swindon railway works steam hooters to…
Wood On The Downs After Paul Nash by Martin Malone We have been here before. Uffington, Hackpen, Grim’s Ditch, Ogbourne St.George, Wayland’s Smithy, Sparshott Firs, Bishopstone and Barbury; all the trodden way from Overton to Beacon Hill. Each place its genius loci, a favourite colour: Ash-Blue, Ochre, Payne’s Grey, Terra-Verte, Lamp Black, Sienna. But today you ditch your winter…
How will artists and writers portray this Trumpian time of disillusion, delusion and deception in which we now live? All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. – Wilfred Owen Perhaps we can find some clues in the extraordinary exhibit World War I and American Art now showing at the the Pennsylvania…
March 25th marks the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire. In Shirt Robert Pinsky weaves in the Triangle Factory fire as he broods over the purchase of a shirt. He dwells with careful loving attention on the technical terms for shirt-making. His lists of esoteric terms and trades lead to moral digressions on Asian sweatshops, the Triangle fire, Scottish…
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; …
Caravaggio is one of the bad boys in the history of art with a biography so outlandish it reads like fiction. When he arrived in Sicily in 1608 he was wanted for murder in Rome and had brawled his way across the Mediterranean. There a story of his entering a church in Messina where he was offered a bowl of…
The Palatine Chapel is one of those must-see places if ever you have the chance. It was commissioned by the enlightened Norman King Roger II (Ruggero) and was consecrated on Palm Sunday 1140. It was designated a UNESCO World heritage site in 2015. It’s inside the palace of the Norman kings of Sicily that now serves as Sicily’s seat of the regional…
The Gallery of Modern Art is located inside the restored 15th century convent of Sant’Anna and has many works of art from the last 150 years. I always enjoy looking at depictions of schools and classrooms and I was very taken with this large painting – Gli Scolari (The Schoolchildren) – by Felice Casorati. Five students and a teacher with symbols…
Palermo has three outdoor markets and we managed to hit all of them. Two we found by design while foraging for supplies and the third on our walk back from the Palentine Chapel and on our way to the completely over the top Chiesa del Gesù. So a few scenes from the market and then on to Montreale. Lots of…
It rarely snows in Palermo but I was pleased to see the universal winter snowflakes on the windows of the elementary school. Our apartment is near the Piazza Marina in the center of which is the Giardino Garibaldi where enormous fig trees create what must be welcome shade in the summer. The largest tree in Europe was planted here in…
On the back-end of bronchitis I’ve been hacking, wheezing and coughing my way through Palermo with the long-suffering travel mate. Here’s part of the first day. First impressions: Grit – the sort that swirls around your feet – , garbage and graffiti. Everything seems pitted and pocked and either under construction or crumbling. Narrow streets with washing hanging from the…
A few images from a century ago to wish everyone the very best for 1917. War is lurking! This Reading (Pennsylvania) Times cartoon sees the threat of war lurking ahead. The US entered the war in April.