An Announcement, a Heartfelt Wish and a Poem for Our Times

First of all, it's time for Christmas vacation for everyone here at the Biscuit City Studios. We'll be taking a break until after New Year's Day. On behalf of the management and staff, I want to wish everyone the most blessed and peaceful of Christmases and a prosperous and happy New Year.

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard church bells ringing on Christmas Day of 1864. The war had been going on for over three years, and as he reflected on the bells and life at the time, he put his thoughts into a poem, "Christmas Bells." Some of the verses were later set to music. The words, thoughts and feelings still speak to our circumstances today.

Christmas Bells

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"


Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Making a Difference, and Merry Christmas

"Oh, Father, it feels just like we're in a Victorian Christmas card!" exclaimed Tiny Tim.

I think we’ve all heard of cases where one person makes a difference. The 1960 Presidential election was won by less than one vote per precinct. Occasionally there are stories in the paper about people with humble jobs who manage to give a great deal of money to charity. Then there are those charismatic figures like Dr. Paul Farmer chronicled in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains beyond Mountains who through their energy, hard work and compassion make a difference. Sometimes, though, we think that as ordinary individuals we can’t make much of a difference.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has probably contributed to more people’s image and idea of Christmas than any other work outside the Nativity story in the Gospels. Yet, in 1842, the year before the story was written, Dickens was almost a failure as a writer. He had had great success with his first five novels, but the next three books did not do as well.  His father had spent time in a debtors’ prison (the dumbest idea ever thought of) and, at age 31 with a large family to support, Dickens saw himself sliding toward the same fate.

It was A Christmas Carol that saved him.  Written in six weeks, it was not enthusiastically received by his publishers, so Dickens took it upon himself to be responsible for the book’s publication.  The publisher received a commission based on sales and Dickens bore all other costs. The financial rewards came slowly, but the book had three printings by the end of 1843.  It was immediately and immensely popular.

Christmas in Dickens’ time was a minor holiday, observed (if at all) without lights and trees and presents and parties and cards.  Something in his story struck a chord, and the observance of Christmas began to change, no doubt helped by Queen Victoria whose family was regarded as the ideal for British society. Prince Albert was from Germany, and brought many Christmas customs with him. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens combined two traditions of old Christmas observances—telling ghost stories and marvelous tales of the holiday. There’s a reference to this custom in the popular song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (perhaps best known in a version by Andy Williams who had the unfortunate habit of pitching songs out of his range). The lyrics go, “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories/ Of Christmases long long ago.” Dickens has four ghosts (Marley is a ghost, remember?) and the irrepressible high spirits of the Cratchits in his story. The transformation of Scrooge from miser to philanthropist is a heartwarming tribute to the power of the season. A recent book on A Christmas Carol is titled The Man Who Invented Christmas and while that might be an oversimplification, Dickens’ work shows what one person can do.

There is one notable coincidence about the story. In 1843, Sir John Callcott Horsley commissioned the first Christmas card with an illustration by artist Henry Cole, possibly under the influence of Dickens’ tale.  The English Victorians were crazy for sending cards with pictures (landscapes, mostly) to each other, and Cole’s role in introducing the Penny Post three years earlier might have been a factor in producing the cards. The picture showed a family with a small child all drinking wine together. (The illustration was controversial, although giving children watered wine at the time was not unusual.  At least it wasn’t gin, which was tremendously popular in that day among all classes and a real drag on the society and economy.) 2050 cards were printed and sold for a shilling each.

Obviously, the custom of sending Christmas cards has grown enormously since 1843.  The U.S. Census Department estimates that 1.9 billion cards were sent in 2005 (Who knew that the Census keeps track of matters like that?  I don’t recall being asked how many cards I sent on the last census.  I must have gotten the short form.) Valentine’s Day is next with a comparatively paltry 192 million.

The point is that one (very talented) person changed the face of the Christmas celebration. I would encourage each of us to think about what we as individuals and together as  groups can do to make this world a better place.  Somehow I think that would be the best present of all. In your observance of the holiday, whatever that may be, I hope you will take the time to read one of the versions of A Christmas Carol to recall its powerful message. It comes in short and long forms and is ideal for reading aloud. And in the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us, everyone!”

Canticle of Hope--Joseph Martin

An anthem from composer Joseph Martin, beautiful in its sound and filled with hope in its message.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z7nOVvpRlE

"Peace fall like a gentle snow..." On all of us.

Poem for a Sad Week in December

Statue of Grief, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D>C. 

At times like these, and there have been too many
Times like these
I would like for time to
Run backwards,
To return bullets to the mouths of guns,
To stream blood spilled on floors
To its rightful place
To pull fully loaded 757's back from
The Twin Towers,
To reverse all the effects
Of war, famine, pestilence,
Violence, abuse, bullying, ignorance
Racism and apathy
Through millennia
But then
But then
I am broken to remember this:
We live on this side
Of Paradise.

--Dan Verner

A Page for the Families, Friends and Neighbors of the Victims Involved in the Shooting in New Town, Connecticut Last Friday

Poem of the Week--"Windrow"

Celtic chieftain's burial barrow, located in present-day Germany

Windrow

The suburban harvest of oak and maple leaf
Has been gathered to the curb by rake and blower
And lies in great windrows on the asphalt
Of street, land and cul-de-sac
Awaiting the roaring gathering-in
By a great dragon of a truck
Which devours leafmeal
Sucking it all in,
Attended by men with rakes.
In their trail the streets shine with rain
And so we move from autumn
To winter.

--Dan Verner

Writing and Culture

It's writing, that relatively new human activity, that brought on nearly every damn thing else--the development of societies, governments, freedom, mercy, empathy outside time and across distances, the advancements of science, the whole spectrum of the arts of civilization, including elements that may destroy it all in the end. And finally the real matter of alleviating so many ills that afflict us, is the need to affect culture--more than politics. Change a culture for the better, and the politics will change for the better.

--Writer Robert Bausch

Technology Wednesday--A First World Problem

You might recognize the tangle of cables pictured above as a fairly typical cluster of power and connection cables for computers, phones, cameras and other electronic devices that we have all come to depend on. You might also think that I need to organize said cables, which I tried, but it didn't help much. So I keep the ones I use most frequently plugged into a power strip, and the ones I use less piled in a shoe box. I dumped the cables out of the shoe box onto the floor for dramatic effect.

Yes, I know this is a first world problem and I should either get organized or shut up, but it occurred to me that it would be nice if manufacturers of electronic devices could agree on some standard plug-ends for these cables. The USB (the U does mean universal, after all) comes close, but there are also mini-USB's and 1/4 inch plugs and 3.5 mm plugs and RCA plugs and plugs I don't know the name of except they're not like any other plugs.

If standards seem impossible, manufacturers did agree on standards for the LP record, the (shudder) eight-track cassette, the cassette audio tape, the VHS video tape, the CD and, I suppose, the .mp3 format. So it is possible. So what do ya say, manufacturers? You can name it anything you like or you can name it after me. I won't mind a bit. Just a plug for standardization.

The Autumn Leaves

Jacques Prevert

I seem to be writing about leaves a lot this week. Maybe that's because there are great piles of them at the curb everywhere I look when I go outside.

I was reminded of the poem "Autumn Leaves" by the great French poet Jacques Prevert, published in 1945. Johnny Mercer wrote English lyrics for the song in 1947 and it was made famous by various artists, including an instrumental version by Roger Williams.

Here's a combination French/English version by Edith Piaf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db2xBJShCvA

Autumn Leaves

Words: Prevert/Mercer 
Music: Kosma

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The autumn leaves
Of red and gold

I see your lips
The summer kisses
The sunburned hands
I used to hold

Since you went away
The days grow long
And soon I'll hear
Old winter's song

But I miss you most of all
My darling
When autumn leaves
Start to fall

Bringing in the Leaves

Leaf truck and vacuum, but not from Manassas. This does look like our corner of the world, though.

The neighborhood we live in has a number of mature 100 year-plus maples and oaks. They're one of the reasons we bought the house 25 years ago. In the spring, their leaves are a golden green; in the summer, they furnish cool shade; in the fall, a flaming display of reds and oranges and yellow. And yes, they fall to the ground and must be blown or raked to the curb to be gathered up by the great roaring leaf truck run by the City of Manassas.

I supposed the suburban homeowner could let the leaves lie, but no one does. Every lot is cleaned of its annual leaffall and the great long leafbarrows taken up by the huge vacuum hose. The streets left behind are pristine, and so we are ready for winter. It's part of a suburban cycle as sure as the harvest of rural areas. 

Poem of the Week--Floating

(I was reminded of this poem by my former student, Skye Nightingale Robertson. Thank you, Skye. I wrote it in 1990 when my brother was a pilot for Delta Airlines and I was getting up early to teach school.)

Just before the clock radio

Snaps on, I am floating in the dark

Somewhere between sleep and waking

Somehow I know

At this moment

In another time zone

My brother is landing

Suspended forty feet ahead of

Wings he cannot see

He grabs a handful of throttles

And pulls them back.

The turbines settle toward silence

Wings flex slightly upward

And the rippling fuselage sags

Toward the black-streaked runway.

For a moment, we float together,

Buoyed by air trapped beneath the wing,

In the second between flying and waking

In the moment between dreaming and landing

We float toward earth

And the dark dawn.


--Dan Verner

Writing--Undercurrent

One of several instruments that I play badly is the five-string banjo. It's difficult to play in bluegrass style, and while I can play that style very slowly, I don't seem to get any better at it. But I'm not here to talk about my musical limitations. The five-string, a uniquely American instrument, has a short top or fifth string which is usually tuned to a high "G." A banjo may be tuned in several ways, but the most common is the "G" tuning in which the strings are tuned (from the top down) G-D-G-B-D. In other words, when played "open" (no strings fretted), a G chord results.

The top G acts as a drone. It is rarely fretted and in bluegrass style, sounds almost constantly.

Other instruments also make use of a drone. The Scottish bagpipe is one example. So is the Indian sitar.

Songs also  use of drone notes. "Restless," by my man Gordon Lightfoot, begins with a B on the keyboard which is held during the entire song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G9PiSiWAwU. The Beatles used a middle-range drone in "Blackbird." There are high drones on the last verses of "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yesterday."

The connection to writing is this: the urge to write and ideas for writing form a constant undercurrent for the writers. Every waking moment, that urge and those ideas are present. One of the concerns I have as a writer is that I will wake up one day and have nothing to write about. It hasn't happened so far, and I don't think it will and I hope that it won't. In the meantime, there's this undercurrent of writing that runs through my life and the lives of other writers I know.

Technology Wednesday--An Obscure (to me) Machine

Conptometer, circa 1940

I was talking to a lady about my age last week, about various jobs she had had, and she mentioned that she was once a conptometer operator. I had never heard of such a machine, but apparently they were a kind of calculator that somehow enabled operators to figure taxes and discounts and to enter lengthy numbers (depending on how many fingers they cared to use) all at once rather than serially as we are used to doing with a calculator. These machines were in use from the 1870's through the 1990's. They were, of course, supplanted by electronic calculators and computers, but for a while anyhow, they ruled the roost. Just goes to show that there's always something that we don't know and that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Link to good Wikipedia article on conptometers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptometer

Speaking of older technology, I was at a holiday gathering this past weekend and someone had a phonograph and played actual LP's. I can't remember the last time I listened to an LP. It sounded good.

A Song of the Season

 “Over the River and Through the Woods” is an example of a Thanksgiving song that, in most of the verses, doesn’t mention Thanksgiving. “Jingle Bells!” is another example of a song associated with Christmas that doesn’t mention Christmas, but nonetheless is widely sung throughout the world, even though most of us haven’t been close enough to a one-horse sleigh to be bitten by the horse, except maybe in a museum.

One music historian observes that the title is an imperative telling or wishing for the bells on the horse’s harness to jingle, although “jingle bells” is also taken as the bells themselves.

Most of us are familiar with the first verse and chorus:

Dashing through the snow

In a one-horse open sleigh

O'er the fields we go

Laughing all the way

Bells on bobtail ring

Making spirits bright

What fun it is to laugh and sing

A sleighing song tonight

(Chorus)

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;

Oh! what fun it is to ride

In a one-horse open sleigh! (repeat)

The song celebrates the custom of young swains in New England in the first part of the nineteenth century to drive light, open sleighs with the fastest horse they could find. Having the fastest sleigh meant they could outdo their rivals and, not incidentally, impress the young ladies. In my day, young men vied to put the largest engine into the lightest car they could find, with much the same purpose, although they had more than one horsepower. (Sorry.)

The next verses specifically speak of impressing the ladies:

A day or two ago

I thought I'd take a ride

And soon, Miss Fanny Bright

Was seated by my side,

The horse was lean and lank

Misfortune seemed his lot

He got into a drifted bank

And we—we got upsot

“Upsot” is an antiquated English past tense for “upset,” although there was a fad at the time for humorous misspelling of words. (I’m just sayin’—we don’t find this as humorous these days.)

In the next verse, our young friend falls out of the sleigh and a rival laughs at him:

A day or two ago,

The story I must tell

I went out on the snow,

And on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by

In a one-horse open sleigh,

He laughed as there I sprawling lie,

But quickly drove away.

The last verse is full of advice: go sleighing while you‘re young (presumably to better tolerate crashes), take the girls, sing the sleighing song and get a fast horse (“Two forty as his speed“ refers to the horse‘s time in the mile at a trot) and drive as fast as you can.

Now the ground is white

Go it while you're young,

Take the girls tonight

And sing this sleighing song;

Just get a bobtailed bay,

Two forty as his speed

Hitch him to an open sleigh

And crack! you'll take the lead.

This most popular of Christmas song was written for a children’s Thanksgiving pageant at a church in Savannah, Georgia in 1857. It stands as a testament to the enduring interest of young men in young women and fast vehicles.

A Moment in Time

I was walking along the sidewalk in a local strip shopping center last week, on my way to the music story to buy some guitar strings. About halfway down, I came upon a young man kneeling on a prayer rug in front of his shop, facing east and bowing as he recited his prayers.

He wasn't blocking the sidewalk and I would have passed by him at a distance of about three feet, but strong within me is a sense that if you're walking and a prayer is being said, you stop until the prayer is finished. So I stood there until he finished.

He rolled up his rug, stood up and said, "Thank you, my brother."

And I said, "God bless you."

I am not recounting this vignette to emphasize my spirituality or tolerance or goodness as a person because God knows I am lacking in all three areas. Rather, I have been taught to respect other people and their beliefs and practices even though they may be different from my own. It was a telling moment, and an indication that the world has indeed come to us.

God bless us every one.

A Song of the Season

 “Over the River and Through the Woods” is an example of a Thanksgiving song that, in most of the verses, doesn’t mention Thanksgiving. “Jingle Bells!” is another example of a song associated with Christmas that doesn’t mention Christmas, but nonetheless is widely sung throughout the world, even though most of us haven’t been close enough to a one-horse sleigh to be bitten by the horse, except maybe in a museum.

One music historian observes that the title is an imperative telling or wishing for the bells on the horse’s harness to jingle, although “jingle bells” is also taken as the bells themselves.

Most of us are familiar with the first verse and chorus:

Dashing through the snow

In a one-horse open sleigh

O'er the fields we go

Laughing all the way

Bells on bobtail ring

Making spirits bright

What fun it is to laugh and sing

A sleighing song tonight

(Chorus)

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;

Oh! what fun it is to ride

In a one-horse open sleigh! (repeat)

The song celebrates the custom of young swains in New England in the first part of the nineteenth century to drive light, open sleighs with the fastest horse they could find. Having the fastest sleigh meant they could outdo their rivals and, not incidentally, impress the young ladies. In my day, young men vied to put the largest engine into the lightest car they could find, with much the same purpose, although they had more than one horsepower. (Sorry.)

The next verses specifically speak of impressing the ladies:

A day or two ago

I thought I'd take a ride

And soon, Miss Fanny Bright

Was seated by my side,

The horse was lean and lank

Misfortune seemed his lot

He got into a drifted bank

And we—we got upsot

“Upsot” is an antiquated English past tense for “upset,” although there was a fad at the time for humorous misspelling of words. (I’m just sayin’—we don’t find this as humorous these days.)

In the next verse, our young friend falls out of the sleigh and a rival laughs at him:

A day or two ago,

The story I must tell

I went out on the snow,

And on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by

In a one-horse open sleigh,

He laughed as there I sprawling lie,

But quickly drove away.

The last verse is full of advice: go sleighing while you‘re young (presumably to better tolerate crashes), take the girls, sing the sleighing song and get a fast horse (“Two forty as his speed“ refers to the horse‘s time in the mile at a trot) and drive as fast as you can.

Now the ground is white

Go it while you're young,

Take the girls tonight

And sing this sleighing song;

Just get a bobtailed bay,

Two forty as his speed

Hitch him to an open sleigh

And crack! you'll take the lead.

This most popular of Christmas song was written for a children’s Thanksgiving pageant at a church in Savannah, Georgia in 1857. It stands as a testament to the enduring interest of young men in young women and fast vehicles.