3/1001 Bradburian Nights, and FryeDay

Recent sunset over the inlet

Short Story: Graven Image, by John O'Hara (from Fifty Great Short Stories edited by Milton Crane)

Essay: "The Tin Fiddle," chapter 6 of The Supper of the Lamb - this could be considered cheating as it's not called essay, but what is an essay? Merriam-Webster defines it as :

1.

a: an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view

b: something resembling such a composition.

I think Mr. Capon's book counts as a collection of essays. The chapters are all compositions, and fairly analytical/interpretative literary composition at that, and all from a limited or personal point of view.

As an aside, I am really enjoying the book. It is one that truly refreshes the inward vision of things. I listened to a podcast on focus by Andrew Huberman, a neuoroscientist and a professor in Stanford's department of neurobiology, and he said that the way to refresh our focus and pay attention so as to learn is to direct our vision toward the area we want to learn from for about 60 to 90 seconds. Our eyes, which he says are brain matter protruding from our skulls (which is incredible to think about), direct our attention and our attention is key to learning.

Father Capon's book is like that. It is a continous direction of attention, with each chapter being a different place to settle our gaze and really SEE. His chapter on the onion is especially vision-enhancing. All the produce in my kitchen had a halo of beatific glory after reading it.

Poem:

Huswifery

by Edward Taylor

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.

Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate

And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.

My Conversation make to be thy Reele

And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:

And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:

Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.

Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.

Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,

All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,

Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill

My wayes with glory and thee glorify.

Then mine apparell shall display before yee

That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

"...teachers should understand something of the practicality of literary training, at every stage of development. We begin by teaching children to read and write, on the ground that that is the most practical subject in the world, illiteracy being a problem on the same plane as starvation and exposure. But when we get to literature we tend to talk about it as though it were one of the ornaments of life, necessary for the best life, but a luxury for the ordinary one. It is essential for the teacher of literature, at every level, to remember that in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination. We often do not realize this until an actual event with some analogy to literary form takes place; but surely we do not need to wait for a president to be assassinated before we can understand what a tragedy is and what it can do in creating a community of response. Literature, however, gives us not only a means of understanding , but a power to fight. All around us is a society which demands that we adjust or come to terms with it, and what that society present to us is a social mythology. Advertising, propaganda, the speeches of politicians, popular books and magazines, the clichés of rumour, all have their own kind of pastoral myths, quest myths, hero myths, sacrificial myths, and nothing will drive these shoddy constructs out of the mind except the genuine forms of the same thing. We all know how important the reason is in an irrational world, but the imagination, in a society of perverted imagination, is far more essential in making us understand that the phantasmagoria of current events is not real society, but only the transient appearance of real society. Real society, the total body of what humanity has done and can do, is revealed to us only by the arts and sciences; nothing but the imagination can apprehend that reality as a whole, and nothing but literature, in a culture as verbal as ours, can train the imagination to fight for the sanity and the dignity of mankind."Northrop Frye, 'Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship' in The Stubborn Structure