Listening to Tchaikovsky…

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born 106 years ago today in Springfield, Mass.

In 1963, at a small ivy-covered three-storied brick building in upstate New York, I learned to read. As a first grader, we had Dick and Jane books. Forty-five years later, I remember turning the pages and thinking that this was pure twaddle. I was 6 and knew twaddle when I saw it. The pictures were simplistic, unsophisticated, and unengaging; there was no character development, no plot, and no conflict. They were stagnant and boring. There was no action: oh, yes, “See Spot run, run Spot run.” But that one verb (and not an adjective in sight) addressed the whole page or even the two page spread.

I did learn to read using the “look – say” method with a healthy dose of phonics.

But at home, I learned to love to read. I had books about Bartholomew Cubbins and Thidwick, the big hearted moose. These stories had danger and risk. King Derwin wanted Bartholomew to remove his hat but he couldn’t. [You’ll have to read the book.] And Thidwick’s antlers were increasingly over populated.

I loved Dr. Seuss – the drawings were wonderful: colorful, bold, and complex. You looked and looked and saw more and more: 500 hats, green eggs, and teetering fish bowls. I haven’t looked at a Dr. Seuss book in 45 years but I remember those outlandish characters.

And now I can appreciate what he accomplished.

In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Spaulding challenged Geisel to “bring back a book children can’t put down.” Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. ~ Wikipedia

Nine Months!

These are the books I remember:

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street   1937

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins  1938

Horton Hatches the Egg  1940

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose  1948

If I Ran the Zoo  1950

Horton Hears a Who!  1954

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  1957

The Cat in the Hat  1957

The Cat in the Hat Comes Back  1958

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories  1958

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish  1960

Green Eggs and Ham  1960

The Sneetches and Other Stories  1961

Hop on Pop  1963

Also the stories weren’t poetry until the aforementioned The Cat in the Hat. He started using a verse form called anapaest.

An anapaest is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one (as in a-na-paest); in accentual stress meters it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. ~Wikipedia

For example:

 Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house

Byron, TS Elliot and Yeats also wrote poetry using this form. I’m working on my poetry vocabulary and Theodor Geisel is a part of it.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” ~Dr. Seuss

It is almost noon and I see blue sky, patches of blue sky! It is so beautiful. About 50,000 homes still without power, peak number was 150,000. No work today…no where to park, no internet. Downed trees still being cleared. We should be operational by tomorrow. I hope you are safe and warm wherever you may be.

Power came back on this afternoon. It took about 4 hours for the heat and hot water to happen. It has been a unique experience. Being alone, in the dark for 14 hours for 3 nights. One night the cloud cover was thin enough that the full moon shown through. That was magical. Listening to the branches cracking, breaking, falling; the occasional Canada goose honking as it flew by. At times it was so quiet: no one moving, no wind, no traffic.

Thursday night lots of people were out walking and taking pictures. The novelty hadn’t worn off yet. The mechanical sounds of the plows and bobcats moving snow around was comforting. (The front loaders and dump trucks didn’t start removing snow until today.)

But inside on the couch I piled on layers and animals. When the temperature outside reached 38 degrees F on Saturday, my southwest windows helped to warm up the place. Passive solar heating.

I knew I was lucky to be dry, out of the weather, had enough food and water for all of us. I also did some personal reflection – sometimes hard to find time to let everything go and look at your life. But in the dark in the quiet. My boys asleep. My little tealight bringing a warm glow to my living room. I thought about how that lately I’ve gotten caught up in a circular nightmare of being tired of myself and feeling tired for being tired of myself.

But this experience snapped me out of my cycle. Nothing like 64 hours of having no control over just about everything in your life makes you realize that you do have control over just about everything in your life. With that I leave you with a poem:

won’t you celebrate with me

 I love my truck. It is hard to tell from this photo but I “waded” through the thigh-high snow, man handled the driver’s door open, cleaned off  some of the windshied using an old broom that I keep in the truck for such occasions, and then simply drove out of the space. The mean green machine!

 I haven’t had to dig out of snow since I got it in 06. I would never have dreamed of driving through the piled up snow except once one of my neighbors borrowed my shovel (which I keep in the truck for such occasions) and then started to shovel me out and said – hey you could just drive out. Changed my life!

With this truck, I actually love to drive in the snow. I feel amazingly in control and formidable. I don’t drive recklessly. But I’m not afraid. It is a wonderful feeling that I wish I felt more often in my life under other circumstances. It is a very powerful experience.

 It has been snowing since before I got up this morning. National Weather Service said it was suppose to turn to rain. I know this is crappy photo but it is the third one I took and the best. It is my view out my bedroom window of a three-story oak tree.

Charlie, Simon and I sat out on the balcony today while the sun was still up. I heard this noise and it took me a minute to realize it was a tree branch breaking. I saw quite a few of them on my way home from work today at 11am. I’ve heard it a few times since then too. It is a primal sound I think.

And then the lights went out…

Can you see it? A crack! I guess it came with the cold last night and the 8 inches of wet sloppy snow. It stretches from the edge by the passenger door to about a quarter of the way over.

Today I found the fourth 2009 Lincoln penny reverse side. The one that represents his presidency.

 I’m still looking for the third one – is the one representing his time in the Illinois capitol.

 Since I stopped eating fast food, I have lost my main source of the new coins. When I used to commute to NYC for work, I found new coins all the time. When that ended – my main source was the fast food places along the interstate. Woe is me.

You may have read in earlier posts that my sister, who lives 1500 miles away, has an uncanny and powerful mind-altering influence over me. She makes me watch television shows that I wouldn’t normally watch. She has succeeded in making me watch such shows as Supernatural, NCIS and now Castle and White Collar. It is a humbling position to be in. I managed to deter her efforts to make me watch the Mentalist: one of my few triumphs. She has not succeeded in making me watch anything on the sci fi channel.

 She recently launched an assault and managed to sink her fangs into my brain and now I’m embarrassed to write that I’m watching Chuck. A mindless and wonderfully cast tv show set in southern California (i.e., beautiful people, beautiful scenery, beautiful apartments and beautiful nerds) about a man who “is saving the earth at $11.00 an hour”, or something like that. I succumbed last week to her barrage of hints, suggestions and threats. I watched a couple of episodes and the spell descended on me like giant wet Kleenex. I lost my will to resist and last night I OD’d. We watched 3 episodes in a row on tvgorge.com, we were linked by free wireless minutes. She made sure I got all the jokes and laughed at all the appropriate places: The agony! When we were finished I was jittery, jacked up on diet coke and consumed by a crush on one of the characters. Totally, TOTALLY out of control.

 I tried desperately to think of an anecdote to my madness. By now it was 2am and could call no one to talk me down. I needed something to counteract the forces possessing my brain. Netflix, maybe? I found a possible remedy to my condition: The Bicycle Thief. It was just what I needed: a wonderfully well-laid out plot; fully dimensional characters, fine acting, a wide range of real human emotions; beautiful black and white cinematography in post war Italy; and subtitles. Having watched that, Chuck and my sister’s grips were weakening. I wasn’t entirely myself yet so I watched The Battleship Potemkin. Silent simplicity: Mutiny!; Cinematic massacre on the steps in Odessa!; fear, panic, mayhem, rotting beef with real-live maggots, and natural beauty captured in the faces of the beleaguered Ukrainians.

 I was finally able to go to bed, feeling balance in my universe. My yin had nicely nestled back in with my yang. The sun was rising on a glorious new day as I fell asleep, to dream no dreams, to rest the rest of the truly weary.

I wrote my first review of an album! My friend, Linda Bianchi, released a Christmas album last year. The review is on CDBaby and also on Amazon. It was daunting to write about the cd. I love it and have listened to it often. But I was intimidated by the other reviews that sounded like they were from people who’d written a lot of reviews. Ultimately I am happy with the results. The album is called Christmas in New York.

It is a wolf moon rising at dusk. I took this on the way home from work. That amazing ball of light, right on the horizon, is the moon. I copied this article from Robert Roy Britt that was posted on aol.com. Thanks Robert!

Robert Roy Britt

Space.com

(Jan. 29) – Tonight’s full moon will be the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. It offers anyone with clear skies an opportunity to identify easy-to-see features on the moon.

This being the first full moon of 2010, it is also known as the wolf moon, a moniker dating back to Native American culture and the notion that hungry wolves howled at the full moon on cold winter nights. Each month brings another full moon name.

But why will this moon be bigger than others? Here’s how the moon works:

The moon is, on average, 238,855 miles from Earth. The moon’s orbit around Earth – which causes it to go through all its phases once every 29.5 days – is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. One side of the orbit is 31,070 miles closer than the other.

So in each orbit, the moon reaches this closest point to us, called perigee. Once or twice a year, perigee coincides with a full moon, as it will tonight, making the moon bigger and brighter than any other full moons during the year.

Tonight it will be about 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons of the year, according to Spaceweather.com.

As a bonus, Mars will be just to the left of the moon tonight. Look for the reddish, starlike object.

________________

I hope you got a chance to see it tonight. It was a true delight.