Highways and Byways: Earthshine

By Maik Strosahl

To quote the title of a recent article in USA Today, “The ‘da Vinci’ glow, or ‘Earthshine’ is coming soon. What is it?” (by Doyle Rice, May 18). If you don’t know what that is, the article explains it.
    The end of the article mentions that “The da Vinci glow is best seen a few days before and after a new moon, right after sunset or before sunrise.” The next full moon will be the “strawberry moon” on June 3, in case you’d like to try to view it.

     And below is a short poem to go with your reading of the article:

From the Alwinac: 1907-8: Alwin’s Gap Year, Part 1 Encore: The 1907 Farewell Playlist

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

In the leadup to his departure from the US, Alwin Schroeder’s 1907 farewell concerts started with a February 3 program at Boston’s Chickering Hall. Reviews of the Kniesel Quartet’s March and April 1907 concerts in New York, Boston, New Haven, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Louisville, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and other cities all make special mention of Schroeder, noting his incomparable skill and status as a solo and ensemble cellist on the occasion of his final US appearances. In Baltimore he received a 10-minute ovation, Philadelphia admirers gave him an inscribed gold watch, and in New York a “superb silver punch bowl” was his parting gift, presented after a eulogizing speech by the music publisher Gustav Schirmer. (Ever dignified and self-effacing, Schroeder himself never addressed his audiences from the stage, even to offer a few parting words.) During this period there was much speculation about the future of the Kniesel Quartet without Schroeder, and Franz Kniesel himself seriously considered disbanding it until a group of New York patrons funded his search for a new cellist from Europe. Here's what he played on these concerts….
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Read on…on the Alwinac website itself…. (It includes a link to listen to the playlist.)

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: 1907-8: Alwin’s Gap Year, Part 1

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

“His technical command of his noble instrument is infallible, his tone full and pure and his style free and genial, like his personality. It is said that he has more friends than any other musicians that have lived in the United States for any length of time, and he is affectionately known across the breadth of this country as “Papa” Schroeder. His loss to the Kneisel Quartet will be irreparable, but he will return again and again to this country for concert tours.”
                                    Indianapolis News, April 6,1907, p. 9

Alwin Schroeder spent the 1907-8 season in Europe, then returned to the United States. This was not his original plan. What happened? Before getting to the reasons that he came back, I will explore the motivations for his decision to leave the US.
    First, some context. The preceding season (1906-7) was Alwin’s 16th year as the cellist of the Kniesel Quartet. This ensemble was then at the apex of its powers and popularity, and was hailed in many quarters as the best quartet in the world. Season after season, Schroeder had been heard regularly in solo performances on the quartet’s concert tours throughout the US. But for the four transplanted European musicians, there had always been a longing to return to the old world, to be remembered and recognized on their old stomping grounds before their powers waned. They said as much in 1903, when they resigned their principal positions in the Boston Symphony Orchestra to devote themselves to quartet and, in the case of Kniesel and Schroeder, solo playing. Four years later, the quartet’s many admirers were “astonished” to learn that Schroeder was leaving the quartet and the country to settle in Frankfurt, Germany. Why would he want—or feel he needed—to go?....
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Read on…on the Alwinac website itself…..

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

All Over the Place: “The Territories of Noncompliance” from The Katy Trail...

By Michael H. Brownstein

The Territories of Noncompliance

The boundaries of disobedience

are not the boundaries of the great river,

no rain in weeks, it collapses

into the boundaries it has made for itself.

This morning the sky fills itself with granite,

thick and darkening, thunder and little else.

​Acting Citizen: ​My Name Should Be on the List

By James Knudsen

WHAT?!?! 
HOW MANY?!?! 
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!!
    I am insulted. I am aggrieved. I am HURT.
    For seven years I have been taking shots at Donald J. Trump. Some of my best work has been devoted to mocking the Putrid Platinum Pompadour. I have dropped one-liners that served no purpose in advancing the column’s message. The only reason they were there was to take a well-earned jab at the Orange Menace. And several articles exist SOLELY to make fun of the twice impeached, one-term, former head of the executive branch. All this is not enough to warrant a place on Russia’s list of sanctioned individuals. Sad.

From “The Scratching Post”: The Great Hurdle

By Ken Marks

[From the original on The Scratching Post, May 26, 2023, published here by permission of the author.]

Humans, being social animals, have a dread that surpasses all others, including death. It’s the dread of becoming an outsider. Getting over this hurdle is the foremost task of our lives.
    Outsiders despair of finding a social niche. They’re not like prison convicts in this regard. Convicts find acceptance, albeit dubious, in their own populations. Nor are outsiders like those we ostracize. An ostracized person has been deliberately excluded from the company of others. Outsiders are people who simply drift away from social norms, like an unmoored boat that gradually moves into the open sea. The most common word for them is loner. The cruelest among us prefer to say loser.
    Sadly, many do not clear the hurdle. Their fate is suicide, the second leading cause of death in America for 10- to 14-year-olds and 25- to 34-year-olds. Those who do clear the hurdle owe their lives to strong psychological defenses, perhaps complemented by some just-in-time therapy.
    For both groups, the challenge to their selfhood presents itself in the same way. As preschoolers, the value of conformity and popularity become disturbingly clear. Adults coach us on the rewards of “going along,” but they needn’t take the trouble. Then comes the terrible realization that social acceptance is far from certain. Some kids reject you because of something “off” about you. Some are just plain mean. Sometimes neighbors are too, like the old man who curses at you when your ball rolls into his yard. Even teachers can be openly unfriendly. They’re doing “hard time,” and therefore so should you. That’s when our defenses kick in. Most of us see we’re not the only ones who are hurting, and alliances form. These are what I call affiliations of the wounded.
    Along with the affiliations comes a nascent identity, an assemblage of descriptors we sort into “that’s me” and “that’s not me.” The sorting requires a painful self-assessment. To soothe the pain, we attach our identity to palliatives. They are calming, habit-forming behaviors that are introduced to us by our affiliations. Their effects can be constructive or destructive, or they can be harmless quirks. They take hold of us for a lifetime.
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[Read the rest on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2023 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Name Games

For Micetro

By William mOrriS DEaN
(aka Wosden & Moristotle)

Yesterday my “email friend” Maik Strosahl explained the formula he used to derive an alternative nickname for himself – “Micetro” – a nickname he characterized as expressing his creative essence: being a maestro of his poetic craft. Anyone who follows his columns can readily attest to that mastery.

Highways and Byways: The New Adventures of Micetro/Of the Fruit, Good and Bad

By MIChaEl sTROsahl
(aka Maik Strosahl)

Through the magic and literary trickery of Moristotleland, “Hobnobbing with the Philosophers” hasn’t missed a Wednesday, even though it has been a couple weeks since I wrote anything for submission.
    Things are changing a bit for me. First, I returned to the road on May 1. Some personal responsibilities resolved themselves, and an opportunity came to clear up some of the nagging financial baggage I carry by going back to driving, still with the same company.

Goines On: Don’t count

Click image for more vignettes

Goines had nothing to post for the day. He had spent the morning working outside to install some 2-foot fencing around plants that rabbits especially liked and half the afternoon trying to settle some nicknaming issues with a columnist.
    He was headed upstairs to see what he could do about a post when Mrs. Goines asked him whether he’d done his exercises yet. He hadn’t, but he agreed that right then was a good time to do them. He went into their exercise room, took off his shoes and emptied his pockets, and lay down on his back atop their stack of two mats.

Fiction: Her Name(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

My one-block street goes straight to a high school. I look out a window all day every day onto that street, only because my laptop rests on a desk so that sunlight falls on it. Through the window I can see if it rains, or really, if rain has brought down sticks or limbs from three huge oaks onto my front yard that I must clear away before I mow. Woodpeckers love those oaks, and sometimes a hawk visits. When it snows or freezes, I can gauge road conditions by how many cars brave my one-block street, always the last one salt-trucks clear. But mostly, I watch students heading from left to right to school and returning from right to left at 2:30 in the afternoons.

All Over the Place: “A Color to Life” & “An Image at Dawn”from The Katy Trail...

By Michael H. Brownstein

A Color to Life

Breathe in a color.
Blue will do.
Attach it to green.
Open your eyes.

Let the blue and green blend to orange.

Let it transform into sunlight.
Let it explode into stars.
Let everything free.
Breathe in another color.

Titania (a sonnet)

By Eric Meub

[In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon, king of the fairies, plays a trick on Titania, his queen: he plies his sleeping consort with a potion that induces love at first sight. Meanwhile, Oberon’s servant-sprite Puck has mischievously turned the head of a local workman into that of an ass. Of course, it is this monstrosity that Titania sees upon waking….]

Titania

It’s in the script: you’ll never get to choose

A paramour from your exclusive class.

So ask yourself, what have you got to lose?

There’s something visceral about an ass.

Fiction: I Am a Prayer(Excerpt from the novel)

By Michael Hanson

[Editor’s Note: I Am a Prayer is the author’s latest published novel (Atmosphere Press, November 15, 2022). It is about loss and gifts, and the efforts we make to find meaning in life when tragedy is an inescapable aspect of love. Raymond Shackleford’s journey takes him to a variety of venues — from a dance club to the depths of his own past — but it will be a chance encounter with a stranger that changes everything.] 

My friend Lauren always said, ‘Write the ending you want.’

On Franklin Hill Farm: The Grunt of Death

By Bettina Sperry

The grunt of death. That’s what I once heard it called in relation to horses dying during a race.
    In safety engineering, there are no accidents, just preventable injuries and deaths. Yet the horse racing community cites horse deaths as a natural part of the game – an expected outcome for some horses. Or so the arguments go, some of them claiming that track-related deaths are greatly exaggerated - after all, it used to be worse.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Gratuitous Sax

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

The things you think about while walking around an Amazon warehouse.
    From 2015 until 2018, I worked at IND1, one of the largest warehouses for the company. I was a picker, walking 10-15 miles a night picking items, scanning them and tossing them in big yellow totes, then putting them on a long conveyer to be sent toward packing or to be guided toward a trailer bound for another warehouse halfway across the country. It was monotonous.
    Many times I would let my mind wander through the mods, writing notes on scraps of paper to be worked out later. We were not allowed our phones on the floor.

In Memoriam: William A. Johnson

June 6, 1946 – April 27, 2023

By Moristotle

Bill and Pamela Johnson were our neighbors for the first few years we lived in Mebane. We joined them for one of their family dinners, at which we (and my cousin André Duvall) met their children – Bill’s daughter Jen and son Nick, Pam’s son Luke Brouillard and daughter Eileen Gabrielli (and her husband Joe). And the Johnsons (along with neighbors Steve and Kathy Laughead) attended the party my wife threw for my 70^th birthday.

Love is the Only Entrance (a poem)

At Central Carolina Community College
Creative Writing Program, October 2015
[Ashley Memory: Exploring
the Joys of Creative Writing]

By Ralph Earle

[First published in The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015) and originally published here on May 15, 2018 by permission of the author.]

We descend into the rocky womb-like cave

where Zeus’s mother kept him secret from

devouring gods until his time arrived.

Our guide gives us candles. Later

we discover Eleusis, of the mysteries,

All Over the Place:“Observation Near a Cave” from The Katy Trail...

By Michael H. Brownstein

Observation 

Near a Cave

The cave cricket falls onto the path some of the time

and does not know what to do.

The mole rises up for air in the light of day

and loses himself to a world of confusion.

Bend towards the cool shade, the moist underbelly of soil.

Can you not taste it? Can you not know a change in temperature?

In this direction everything bright and yellow, too smooth,

and in that, exactly how you like it, dark and comforting.

Take a break in the measure of things. Let the difference

come into you. Everything will be all right. You will make it to safety.

Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Poetry & Portraits: Sondheim

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Sondheim
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on August 13, 2016, and republished on May 12, 2018.]

Has no one seen? Has no one yet been told
      a star is being born in me at last?
Who grouses I’m too old, that I’m a mold
      from which one character alone is cast?

Who Is Storm Large?

Photo by John Rudoff (2014-02-14)

She’s big

By Moristotle

[Originally published on May 11, 2015, as “Second Monday Music: Who Is Storm Large?”]

I had never heard of Storm Large until a friend in Oregon wrote me that she and her husband were going to a Storm Large concert for their wedding anniversary last week [eight years ago]. It was performed with the Oregon Symphony in Portland on Friday, May 1 [2015], and was, my friend reported, heavily attended by people of all ages:

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Spinsters

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

Sometimes, the strangest things can take you back. Take this internet photo, for instance.
I loved to read as a child, but did not enjoy it when forced in school to read a few chapters and discuss them afterwards in class. So when we got to Great Expectations in junior high, I earned my first “C” by “forgetting” to read the assignments and only passed the quizzes and tests by reading the Cliffs Notes. I did enjoy the book when I finally got to it on my own terms.

River (a sonnet)

By Eric Meub

[Originally published on February 8, 2014, as “Second Saturday’s Sonnet.”]

An unexpected gust puffs flames into

the candles, blowing suns across the glow

of water. Flashes let the waves slip through

like fabric over muscles in the flow.

Masonboro Inlet (a poem)

Photo of author in his book
The Way the Rain Works, Sable Books

By Ralph Earle

[First published in The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015) and originally published here on May 8, 2018 by permission of the author.]

The jetty starts in a barely perceptible

uplifting of sand and extends

stone by stone into a jagged hem

of breakers that undulate in the distance.

All Over the Place: “In Indian Country....” from The Katy Trail...

By Michael H. Brownstein

In Indian Country
Heat and Fire Rhyme

In the wash between the Missouri and the palisades,

heat and fire rhyme.

Sky has breath, water afterbirth, and down the graveled path

past cattails, marshes and poison ivy quagmire and film:

Synonyms.

Every stride, meter. Every bend, a new line.

The horizon, another stanza.

The small back of dusk, the white stream of light, a lake at dawn,

simile,

trees, shadow, wind against a shrouded sky,

earthbound color,

the easy scent of spring after a good rain,

perfumed clean bath water clear.

Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

From the Alwinac: A Composition Update and Remembrance of Dimiter Christoff

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

It has been about a year since, on a fine spring day in 2022, after the last April snow “surprise” hereabouts, I started to compose. I had little prior evidence of my own abilities as a creator of music, unless you count a number of arrangements I have done of others’ music, and in some ways perhaps these do count, but the act of writing a new piece of music requires a level of inspiration and confidence that I wasn’t convinced I had. Aside from a modest store of musical knowledge and experience, what really did I have to go on?
    Twelve months and more than fifty brief pieces later, I can say that a small kernel of inspiration goes a long way. Most of the way in fact. It’s what Beethoven called the poetic idea, or what Bruce Adolphe in his wonderful new book on composing refers to as the vision stage of the creative process. It can be a mood, a rhythm, a melodic gesture, an intriguing quotation from literature, a photo or other image, a blade of grass, anything. Not necessarily anything grand or elaborate, or even all that specific. For many of the pieces I have composed (most for piano), my inspiration has come from students whose choices of musical parameters such as tempo, rhythmic motif, interval size and direction, and character have excluded other choices I might have made on my own and provided a more sharply defined and differentiated starting point for each student’s piece. As with any other type of inspiring kernel, these pre-determined aspects help guide and speed my journey down a creative path that is unique for each piece.

    I have long marveled at others’ ability to thrive under what might be considered self-imposed creative constraints. My father’s very successful forays into the sestina form in poetry, where a set of pre-determined words must end each line in a pre-determined order that shifts from stanza to stanza, come immediately to mind. So do the always arresting works of Bulgarian composer Dimiter Christoff, who rarely used an interval wider than a whole-step. I too have discovered the hidden delights of such constraints, and find myself eagerly seeking them. One of my more recent solo cello compositions uses just four notes (albeit over four octaves). Others tend toward direct repetition over motivic development or transformation. One recent composition for cello and piano is limited to textures reminiscent of Beethoven, while another evokes those of Chopin, and a third those of a pop ballade. Sometimes my initial plan plays out much as expected, but with many pieces it morphs into something else along the way. I enjoy stepping back and hearing what is taking/has taken shape and how it happened, and to wonder at the very existence of something that wasn’t there before....
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Read on…. [it gets better and better, says the editor]

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

Heavenly

Detail from “Sunset”

Paintings by Shirley Deane/Midyett

By Vic Midyett
[c. 1952–2/11/2022]

[Published originally in the “Tuesday Voice” column on May 5, 2015.]

Shirley has completed two new paintings, both commissioned.

Book Review: Tripping to Dickeyland

5 years ago today:
“An elegy for 

James Dickey”

By Moristotle

[Apropos my recent poem, “For My Grandmother Effie [Dickey Dean],” we republish this review from May 4, 2018.]

There’s something very special about an audiobook recorded by the author, and Michael Hanson is an excellent reader. My paperback copy of his tribute to his mentor, the poet and novelist James Dickey, arrived from Amazon weeks ago.

Hobnobbing with the Philosophers: Poetry Month Wrap &The Evening in Silk

Detail from “The School of Athens”
a fresco by Raphael (1483 – 1520)
[Click image to call up
all published instalments]

By Maik Strosahl

What a month! I just love to participate in as many poetic events as possible in April for National Poetry Month. And with the project I announced in my “Ghosts of the Allagash” post, it turned into an adventure.
    I made a sign and took it with me while handing out the origami booklets I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Goines On: La petite mort

Image from
Les Ballets de Monte Carlo,
Jean-Christophe Maillot
[Click image for more vignettes]

Often, when Goines felt death near, he thought of the French phrase “la petite mort” – literally the little death – closely associated with the ecstatic few moments of sexual orgasm. But those moments preceded the death referred to – the brief lapse into unconsciousness that can follow orgasm. Those moments felt nothing like the...nothingness that Goines expected of death. Those moments were the opposite of death – they were longings to live, to thrust forward, to go on and on and on.
    But wasn’t that why Mother Nature endowed orgasm with such an exaltation of feeling, precisely to urge her creatures to keep on mating, procreating, and going on? Goines’ death would be little compared to potential generations to come....

Cheap Sacred Wine (a poem)

By Ralph Earle

[First published in The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015) and originally published here on May 1, 2018 by permission of the author.]

Pale green, pear-shaped
half-gallon wine bottle
layered with different-
colored seeds—millet,