Tio_Narratore
Studies
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2008
- Posts
- 70,976
Hello Dragon we're just being silly...
Rosetta Stone
Wasn't she a multi-lingual street walker on Fremont Street in the '50s?
(and HP's British - shouldn't he be fluent in Latin?)
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Hello Dragon we're just being silly...
Rosetta Stone
She was a cunning linguistWasn't she a multi-lingual street walker on Fremont Street in the '50s?
(and HP's British - shouldn't he be fluent in Latin?)
She was a cunning linguist
Wasn't she a multi-lingual street walker on Fremont Street in the '50s?
(and HP's British - shouldn't he be fluent in Latin?)
She was a cunning linguist
You know, I did study linguistics at the City University of New York; I'm an accredited CUNY Linguist!
no
Not a chance; We didn't have that kind of education system where I lived.
She sure was multi-lingual; wrote in three languages.
I won't ask what that means.
Top Of The Class
Teacher's Pet?
Petting teacher
Sitting in the back row
At the back of the cinema
Saturday night at the movies
Who cares what picture you see ...
You're More Than a Number in My Little Red Book.
"There ain't no girl in my little red book
Who could ever replace your charms
And each girl in my little red book
Knows you're the one I'm thinkin' of..."
Walk On By
I Dionne Warwick (and Burt, of course...)
Walk On By
I Dionne Warwick (and Burt, of course...)
Dionne Warwick, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight - and Burt (of course!)
That's What Friends Are For.
Supersition - my happy dance music...
I Just Called to Say I Love You - Diane Schuur version
You Belong to Me
(As recorded by Patsy Cline, 2/12/62)
See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle
Just remember darlin' all the while
You belong to me
See the market place in Old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me
I'll be so alone without you
Maybe you'll be lonesome too, and blue
Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it's wet with rain
Just remember 'til you're home again
You belong to me
I'm gonna be so alone without you
And I'm hopin' maybe you'll be lonesome, too, and blue
Fly that ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it's wet with rain
Just remember til you're home again
You belong to me
Close your eyes and try to sleep now
Close your eyes and try to dream
Clear your mind and do your best to try and wash the palette clean
We can't begin to know it, how much we really care
We Belong - Pat Benatar
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
(WH Auden)
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
Betjemen, I know, but I was never a big fan of Auden... Especially after he did that bloody depressing poem for Four Weddings...
Oh migosh! How can you say that? So beautiful:
He was my North, my South, my East, my West,
My working week and my Sunday best
So mundane and yet lyrical. That's what I like about the 'Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love' poem, he acknowledges all the frailty and faults of humanity - which are their ultimate beauty. In Japanese, we say: the little flaw of imperfection, which makes the whole thing perfect.
Betjemen - Miss J. Hunter Dunn, "The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,"
Tennis.
(Have to take kids to beach now but back soon to avidly check Avengers' thread! )
Sunday Morning
by Wallace Stevens
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.
3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
4
She says, 'I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?'
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
5
She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
And now for something completely different ...
sometimes
i feel like a priest
in a fish and chip queue
quietly thinking
as the vinegar runs through
how nice it would be
to buy supper for two
- Roger McGough