Listening and learning and turning.

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The post title comes from an old Loggins & Messina tune, 'Watching The River Run', and is a remembrance of days gone by and my friend Morley Ayearst. Here it is on YouTube (with Kenny & Jim all grown up). Defunct bookstore on Queen Street East, Toronto: Truth be told I rarely went in there. In the last years they were not open very often and the clerk didn't know much about the books they had. Last thing I bought there was Joseph Heller's 'Closing Time' and that was a let down, disillusionment. It was easy to see the bookstore was on the way out - I thought of offering my services but never quite got 'round to it.

 

The GNP of Brasil is the worst among the G20 ... And the worst education too ... The people don't know what GNP is nevermind G20.

Hey buddy, what's written there? I don't know how to read! I'm just looking at the pictures! Newspaper headline: Brazil is one of the worst in world education ranking.

 

The country of the COPA.

I have to watch BBB 14. / Which one will go over the cliff? / I'm going to make a donation to Genoíno. / The World Cup is ours! / I have to get into Facebook. The government gets the people it deserves ...

 

Every year they do exactly the same thing. Interesting ... At one level the two images immediately above could correspond to fundamentalist visions of sin & hell. Sorry about that, must'a bin a Freudian slip. I shot an arrow in the air. It came to earth I know not where. One doesn't learn everything at once and sometimes even the best lessons are not what they seem at first; a very slow process altogether. Here, try this one:      "It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to." (Bob Dylan, 'It's Alright Ma', 1965) cf.     "It matters not how strait the gate, ... I am the master of my fate." (William Ernest Henley, 'Invictus', ~1900) cf.     "The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled." (Felicia Dorothea Hemans, 'Casabianca', 1826)   There's just a hair's breadth between sense & nonsense, divine & daemonic, even less. "... at pettiness which plays so rough, walk upside-down inside handcuffs, kick my legs to crash it off, say 'OK, I've had enough. What else can you show me?'" Then again, you never can tell. Read H.L. Mencken's 'Notes on Democracy' (1926) and Mark Twain, say, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876) and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1884) in the context of American iconoclasts (of whom our Bobby Zimmerman is one). Then 'compare & contrast' 'em (as they used to tell us to do - good advice). compare: to speak of or represent as similar, from Latin comparare to pair together, couple, match, bring together. contrast: to place in such juxtaposition as to bring out differences strongly, from Latin contra against + stare to stand, withstand. confer (cf.): bring together for joint examination, from Latin con together + ferre to bear or bring. Comin' back from camp, down a long hill on the Cowichan Highway in the old black van one afternoon. A slant-6 lasts forever until it doesn't. Moe & his brother Jimmy & Erik I think, an me; when it started blowin' oil. Threw in another quart but it blew that too. Coasted into four-corners where it meets the Island Highway and eventually got home from there somehow I guess. Loggins & Messina playin' loud enough to be heard over the engine noise. Moe smilin'.

 
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