A Sense of Doubt blog post #2207 - Merrick Garland finally makes it to the senate; Bad news! Republicans are there!

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2207 - Merrick Garland finally makes it to the senate; Bad news! Republicans are there!

Still behind.

Still catching up.

Love the WONKETTE.

GIVE THEM MONEY! $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I do. Often.

Word.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

I am so behind as I type this (2103.07). So I am just going with simple posts or already finished shares or school stuff until I get not just caught up but pull ahead.

Good News! Merrick Garland Finally Makes It To The Senate. Bad News! Republicans Are There.

Stephen Robinson

February 23, 2021 09:06 AM

 

It's taken five years but Judge Merrick Garland is finally receiving a Senate confirmation hearing. It's not for the Supreme Court seat Mitch McConnell stole in broad daylight. No, this time Garland is up for attorney general. Democrats now control the Senate, and barring any Joe Manchin-related acts of God, he should be confirmed in time to put the smack down on all those white supremacists who received aid and comfort from President Klan Robe's administration.

Garland released a polite, inspiring statement Saturday night. It was a soothing bedtime story for minority and immigrant children who only remember Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr.

If I am confirmed, serving as Attorney General will be the culmination of a career I have dedicated to ensuring that the laws of our country are fairly and faithfully enforced, and that the rights of all Americans are protected.

You hear that, bigots! Garland said "all Americans" not just those who define their “religious freedom" as denying the freedom of LGBTQ Americans.

Garland promised to live up to the ideal of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who said a “citizen's safety lies in a prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes ..." Jackson also kicked Nazi ass during the Nuremberg trials and famously said, "Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect, in no uncertain terms, to make no statement to the police under any circumstances." That's a solid role model.

He's also coming after President Klan Robe's MAGA Mob, whom he straight up calls “white supremacists."

If confirmed, I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on January 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy.

Jeff Sessions would've just taken them all out for ice cream and a screening of Birth of a Nation. Garland acknowledged the white domestic terrorism that targeted newly freed Black people during reconstruction. It wasn't just violent thuggery but a state-sanctioned effort to roll back racial progress. In the shadow of January 6, that all seems eerily familiar, and I'm pleased to see our next attorney general connecting the dots.

Chuck Grassley opened the hearing Monday with what former Senator Al Franken noted was a flat-out lie. Grassley claimed he only did Garland dirty in 2016 because he was nominated to the Supreme Court too darn close to a presidential election. Barack Obama picked Garland almost eight months before the end of everything good and decent. Grassley voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett a week before the 2020 election. It might've felt like Election Day took more than eight months to finally end but that's not the case. Grassley should've said, "I always liked you, kid. It was only business" like an honest gangster.

When Senator Cory Booker asked Garland to share his motivations for wanting to serve as attorney general, Garland got all weepy. I don't normally approve of public displays of emotion, but this is one of my five annual exceptions.

GARLAND: I come from a family where my grandparents fled anti-semitism and persecution. The country took us in ... and protected us. And I feel an obligation to the country to pay back. This is the highest best use of my own set of skills to pay back. I want very much to be the kind of attorney general that you're saying I could become. And I'll do my best to be that kind of attorney general.

Garland was confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1997 with a 76–23 vote. The majority of GOP senators backed his nomination. This ain't 1997, and we should expect most Republicans to show their asses. They'll also showboat and grandstand before voting against him.

Texas Senator John Cornyn grilled Garland about the Steele Dossier (dun-dun-dun) because that is a pressing and vital issue right now. He also brought up James Comey (!) and his 2016 press conference about Hillary Clinton's unconventional email storage ... zzzz .... zzzz ....

Cornyn's dumber, more obnoxious colleague, Ted Cruz, was tanned and rested and ready to bore us. He dusted off the “Fast and Furious" scandal. Look, I can't explain why they keep making those movies. People must like them. Oh, wait, Cruz was referring to when then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for invoking executive privilege. That's even less relevant. It's also adorable how Cruz ignored a more damning example of a sitting president abusing executive privilege for the express purpose of blocking investigations into his own wrongdoing.

Republicans generally preferred to pretend that the last so-called president didn't exist. They can't even reasonably claim “out of sight, out of mind," considering they just let him walk on charges of inciting an insurrection against the US government.

The presiding Senate idiot John Kennedy from Louisiana subjected Garland to a stream-of-conscious transphobic tirade that is not worth repeating.

Tom Cotton thought he had a “gotcha" on Garland when he asked him if he opposed discrimination. Garland responded, “Duh, yeah, I'm not a common slavery apologist from Arkansas like some people." He didn't say that last part.

COTTON: Are you aware President Biden has signed an executive order stating his administration will affirmatively advance racial equity, not racial equality but racial equity?

Oh noes! Not racial equity with all those conservative bogeyman quotas that deprive entitled white men of opportunities in favor of shiftless minorities!

Garland explained to Senator Penis Head that Biden's executive order defines racial equity as the “fair and impartial treatment of every person without regard to their status and including individuals who have been in underserved communities where they were not accorded that before." Because racism is a thing, you moron.

Garland reassured Republicans that he and President Biden aren't going to defund the police. He also explained to the dummies why storming the US Capitol in an effort to block certification of a democratic election is a more serious crime than random thugs vandalizing a federal building in Portland, Oregon. He also anticipated a new moratorium on federal executions, because this is supposed to be a civilized country.

Our boy started strong, and we look forward to his confirmation unless he tweeted something mean about McConnell in 2016.

[CNN]

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.04 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2071 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2206 - Borges on the Divided Self

https://www.picassomio.com/beti-alonso/92435.html

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2206 -  - Borges on the Divided Self

From DEEP in the archive. Originally for some time in 2018.

Still working to get current.

Wednesdays are meant to be writing-related post days.

I am a HUGE Borges fan. I photocopied a whole book of his back in the 1980s after borrowing it from the library, back when you couldn't just buy used books on the Internet,

It was The Book of Sand.

Here are two Borges posts from the brilliant BRAIN PICKINGS blog.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/chess-and-the-infinite-in-borges

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/06/borges-and-i/

The Private Person and the Public Persona: Borges on the Divided Self

A timeless parable of the self-defeating quest for integration.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” And yet, inseparable as the parts may be from the whole, we each contain multitudes — not only psychologically, but even biologically — nowhere more so than when it comes to the bifurcation between our inner and outer selves. “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator,”Hannah Arendt observed in her insightful inquiry into being vs. appearing and our impulse for self-display. For each of us, there is a public persona encasing the private person, an aspirational self radiating from the real self.

However integrated our layered identity may be, our twined nature stands like a stereogram — two separate and noticeably different views, composed into a single three-dimensional image of personhood only through the special focal mechanism of our own consciousness.

No one has addressed this existential sundering more elegantly than Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) in “Borges and I” — his classic parable of selfhood, exploring the divide between private person and public persona that each of us must live with and live into. It appears in Labyrinths (public library) — a collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, originally published in 1962.

Borges writes:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

“Borges and I” went on to inspire some of the greatest writers of the past century to reflect on the divided self in hand-drawn self-portraits. Complement it with philosopher Amelie Rorty on the seven layers of personhood in literature and life and Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of change, then revisit Borges on writing, public opinion, and our private participation in collective joy and collective tragedy.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/19/a-new-refutation-of-time-borges/

A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.

Wedged between Bachelard and Arendt was Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986), that muscular wrangler of paradox and grand poet-laureate of time, who addressed this perplexity in his 1946 essay “A New Refutation of Time,” which remains the most elegant, erudite, and pleasurable meditation on the subject yet. It was later included in Labyrinths (public library) — the 1962 collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, which gave us his terrific and timeless parable of the divided self.

Borges begins by noting the deliberate paradox of his title, a contrast to his central thesis that the continuity of time is an illusion, that time exists without succession and each moment contains all eternity, which negates the very notion of “new.” The “slight mockery” of the title, he notes, is his way of illustrating that “our language is so saturated and animated by time.” With his characteristic self-effacing warmth, Borges cautions that his essay might be “the anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentine lost in the maze of metaphysics” — and then he proceeds to deliver a masterwork of rhetoric and reason, carried on the wings of uncommon poetic beauty.

Writing in the mid-1940s — a quarter century after Einstein defeated Bergson in their landmark debate, in which science (“the clarity of metaphysics,” per Borges) finally won the contested territory of time from the dictatorship of metaphysics, and just a few years after Bergson himself made his exit into eternity — Borges reflects on his lifelong tussle with time, which he considers the basis for all of his books:

In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) to metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, in which I myself do not believe, but which regularly visits me at night and in the weary twilight with the illusory force of an axiom.

Time, Borges notes, is the foundation of our experience of personal identity — something philosophers took up most notably in the 17th century, poets picked up in the 19th, scientists set down in the 20th, and psychologists picked back up in the 21st.

Borges compares the ideas of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley, chief champion of idealist metaphysics, and his Scottish peer and contemporary, David Hume. The two diverged on the existence of personal identity — Berkeley endorsed it as the “thinking active principle that perceives” at the center of each self, while Hume negated it, arguing that each person is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” — but they both affirmed the existence of time.

Making his way through the maze of philosophy, Borges maps what he calls “this unstable world of the mind” in relation to time:

A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.

Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland

Returning to Hume’s notion of the illusory self — an idea advanced by Eastern philosophy millennia earlier — Borges considers how this dismantles the very notion of time as we know it:

Behind our faces there is no secret self which governs our acts and receives our impressions; we are, solely, the series of these imaginary acts and these errant impressions.

But even the notion of a “series” of acts and impressions, Borges suggest, is misleading because time is inseparable from matter, spirit, and space:

Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment.

He illustrates this paradox of the present moment — a paradox found in every present moment — by guiding us along one particular moment familiar from literature:

During one of his nights on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn awakens; the raft, lost in partial darkness, continues downstream; it is perhaps a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water; he negligently opens his eyes; he sees a vague number of stars, an indistinct line of trees; then, he sinks back into his immemorable sleep as into the dark waters. Idealist metaphysics declares that to add a material substance (the object) and a spiritual substance (the subject) to those perceptions is venturesome and useless; I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that such perceptions are terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. To add to the river and the bank, Huck perceives the notion of another substantive river and another bank, to add another perception to that immediate network of perceptions, is, for idealism, unjustifiable; for myself, it is no less unjustifiable to add a chronological precision: the fact, for example, that the foregoing event took place on the night of the seventh of June, 1849, between ten and eleven minutes past four. In other words: I denny, with the arguments of idealism, the vast temporal series which idealism admits. Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which all things have their place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all things are linked as in a chain. The denial of coexistence is no less arduous than the denial of succession.

One of Norman Rockwell’s rare illustrations for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

This simultaneity of all events has immense implications as a sort of humanitarian manifesto for the commonness of human experience, which Borges captures beautifully:

The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.

Borges ends by returning to the beginning, to the raw material of his argument and, arguably, of his entire body of work, of his very self: paradox. He writes:

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

The essay, as everything in Labyrinths, is an exceptional read in its continuous entirety; excerpting, fragmenting, and annotating it here fails to dignify the agile integrity of Borges’s rhetoric and the sheer joy of his immersive prose. Complement it with Bertrand Russell on the nature of time, Virginia Woolf on its astonishing elasticity, and Sarah Manguso on its confounding, comforting ongoinginess.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.03 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2070 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2205 - Rachel Grimes - The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2205 - Rachel Grimes - The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Still out in the future posting backwards in time in an effort to get back to current with the blog.

Here's one from the archive but not even to deep in the archive.

A good share.

Good music, and it's not even for a Musical Monday, which is like Music Monday, not about theatrical musicals. I just think "musical" sounds better with Monday than "music."

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2020/03/11/rachel-grimes-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/

Rachel Grimes :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Who gets to decide history? Who shapes the narrative of the stories and founding myths a country is built on? Who selects the pains that will be remarked upon culturally, and which will be obscured? Last year, composer Rachel Grimes offered up something like an answer to these difficult questions: The Way Forth, a Southern folk opera blending historical fact, family memoir, and investigative fiction.

Grimes’ minimalist piano playing serves as the bedrock—fans of her chamber music group Rachel’s will recognize it quickly—but it’s only a starting point, as the journey winds through gospel, folk, and ragtime sounds, interspersing blooming string orchestrations with spoken word. Joined by guests including folk singer Joan Shelley, guitarist and Alan Lomax archivist Nathan Salsburg, harpist and Jack White collaborator Timbre Cierpke, and many more, Grimes has created a multi-layered document, at once moving, sly, funny, mournful, and gripping.

There’s no easy sentimentality or breeziness, as Grimes refuses to shy away from events and systems often downplayed in polite history—slavery, the expulsion and murder of Native Americans, the subjection of women. Instead, the author and musician gets into the heads of those trying to navigate a system not built for them, exploring the faiths, dreams, and family ties that sustain them, while also serving a vehicle for profound personal grief (her brother and Rachel’s bandmate Edward Grimes passed away in 2017) and exploring how deep her Kentucky roots are buried in the soil.

“To me, the more you look into [historical] context—both in a family sense and a country sense, the more you see how this stuff has been going on forever,” Grimes says, joining Aquarium Drunkard by the phone. “There’s a lot of evidence pointing to why we could wind up where we are. There are just generations of deception and corruption.” Grimes says that we are still learning how to live as a “pluralistic country, peacefully,” and while she isn’t unrealistic about the amount of work to do, The Way Forth nonetheless suggests that we can begin by truly addressing our collective past, by heeding the messages that challenge existing power structures and authority.

The Way Forth is accompanied by a film of the same name by director Catharine Axley. A section of it, “The End of Dominion,” is presented here, along with an interview with Grimes about the need to puncture holes in the lies that keep us from attaining true equality: “We’re in a churning place where there’s a lot of change [societally]. There’s a lot of questioning power and the power structure…It’s a charming idea to think that this country was founded on freedom and one person, one vote, but it’s a lie. It’s not true. In some ways, it’s still not true. I think we can aspire to make that actually true.” words/j woodbury

Aquarium Drunkard: It’s kind of tricky to come up with a term for describing The Way Forth —it’s a set of songs with thematic unity, but the timeline jumps back and forth, and it folds in history along with fictionalized accounts. If pressed for an “elevator pitch,” do you have one?

Rachel Grimes: I think of The Way Forth as a folk-opera. I wound up there because “song cycle” was just not cutting it. [Laughs] I think of a song cycle as a set of related material, maybe with one or two characters and the sort of programmatic music that goes along with it, but what I realized pretty early on was that there were many voices and there were a lot of different styles and a chorus here. I realized that right there makes this project theatrical or operatic. This isn’t a staged opera, in terms of people wearing costumes and moving around, but it is one work that has these many characters and there is a through line.

There is a narrative, but it’s not a linear narrative. I think of it as kind of a zig zag, so it’s zigging and zagging between a contemporary observational point of view and looking into the past through the first-person voices of people from the past, and most of the voices—characters, as I call them—are women. I think of this as a folk opera looking at the last 250 years of Kentucky history and culture and music through the ears and eyes of women and as observed by these contemporary listeners and observers. I think of it as this nonlinear investigation into not only our cultural inheritance, both through my family’s lens and through the lens of many people who I’m not related to or moments in history or looking at the bigger history in Kentucky, even through the millennia.

AD: The album incorporates personal details from your family history. At one point did that idea present itself to you, to sort of anchor this work in that familial lineage?

Rachel Grimes: That was pretty early on. I didn’t just sit down one day and say, “I’m gonna write a folk-opera with all these characters.” It kind of came about because of things going on in my personal life. I was dealing with the loss of my brother and with trying to help my parents transition into better nursing care. It’s just a process of trying to figure out what to do with their personal things and that includes, of course, a lot of memorabilia and photos and papers and letters. In both of their cases, they had things from multiple generations, so I actually was starting to think about this musically with particular objects in hand.

AD: There are a lot of sounds on the record—from ragtime to gospel, folk, classical. Did the connections you were exploring inform the musical direction as well?

Rachel Grimes: One of the last pieces that I wrote, the medley “Fontaine Ferry,” I wrote as a sort of nostalgia love letter to my brother. I lost my brother two and a half years ago. It was a very sudden and traumatic loss to me, and still is. He and I both were in a band together. He’s a wonderful singer and drummer. We have a lifelong bond together with music and memory and all the people in our family that made music. That was what was leading me through the medley. I was also able to revisit some of the musical styles that we learned from our grandmother. She learned all these ragtime songs, late 1800s popular tunes from her mother, and her mother’s mother. It’s this really clear line of musical inheritance. My dad was a great pianist. I just wanted to reference all these different styles as a way of traveling back in time. I didn’t want to stay in it too long, but I wanted it to be honest and feel the way I would’ve heard that music or played it myself.

AD: How did the fictional elements allow you to further expand the scope of what you were doing?

Rachel Grimes: I think sometimes when we hear narration or we read something from the past, we tend to have this matter of fact way of interpreting it, and when you have images or music that accompanies it, it kind of gives it this more inviting or impressionist bed to experience it in. That’s what I was also messing with: how can that support what this person’s saying, but not really illustrate it per se, just support it and allow the voice to come through? The fictional aspects of this project, where I was writing the lyrics and dancing at the internal and notional environment of this particular person’s point of view because I didn’t have any first-person words from that person, it’s really just coming from me. I’m drawing on what I could gather fact wise, and I’m imagining what it must have been like for this person based on what I know about that time and place. It’s loosely interpretive. It’s not terribly scholarly, but where there are historical facts or moments in time that are factual, I’ve definitely done my due diligence to make sure that I’m representing that person’s voice. I’ve checked with their family descendants, or I’ve checked multiple historical sources to make sure that I’m really getting the facts right because there are a lot of little details. 

AD: Directly Catharine Axley has provided a set of visuals to go along with the record via a film. How do the images, lyrics, and sounds connect? They seem to suggest more than concretely portray scenes from the record.

Rachel Grimes: There’s nothing traditional about the way we went about filming for this project. It started as this sort of notion that I had that I had all these photographs, these archival things that I wanted to represented on the screen while we were playing the music, but I didn’t really want to do a bouncing ball kind of thing like “This is the image that goes with this moment and this character.” I didn’t really want that literalism, but I did want to be able to share so many of these captivating images that had been a part of making this project. I also wanted to have moving picture and current contemporary film, and I knew that getting a lot of tracking shots traveling throughout the state symbolizing the process of thinking through these things and these character’s moments in time. I knew basically what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have a shooting schedule or script. We would just find a weekend that we had two or three days available, and I would make a list of things that I knew I wanted to shoot. We would get in my truck and just head out and talk about what kinds of things I was looking for as we were headed to the location. We’d keep our eye on the weather and try to figure out when would be the best time of day to try and grab this shot on the river or shots of creatures. Usually dusk or dawn are really good for anytime you want to get sunlight or animals. But we didn’t have this really strict way of going about it. It was very intuitive.

AD: The record concludes with an instrumental, “A New Land.” That feels like a pretty specific choice, to end this without words. It suggests to me the idea that the future is unwritten—that there are more stories yet to be told.

Rachel Grimes: That’s what I would hope that a listener would feel by the end of this journey: this sense of reorienting how we listen, what’s important to narrative, who we listen to, and questioning what we have been presented with in our past and our collective past with what is the truth. It’s very clear, especially with regard to American history and the voices that have been able to put something in writing in printed book, it’s a very small percentage of our population. What’s different about now, maybe to our detriment, is that we have more ability to have our individual voices heard and to be able to share our stories. That’s a beautiful thing. I think it’s a much more fair playing field for people to be able to use digital recording and podcasts and writing techniques, self-published books. To be able to get their stories and their creative work out in the world.

We also have the advantage of a lot better research available to so many people, as far as genetic research, DNA, genealogy. We are understanding much more everyday about who we are, what is our personal background, what is our collective backgrounds as a society. I think that for me, what that means is that the narrative I heard a lot as a kid and certainly was taught a lot during school should be questioned. It might only be a narrow band of the actual story. For sure, the story is more complicated than a lot of folks would like to have it. It’s not simple. It’s ongoingly complicated. Now more than ever, we have a bigger collective of voices to which we can listen to and learn from.

We’re glad you’re here. Dig what we do at Aquarium Drunkard? Help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page. Doing so will get you access to our secret stash—including bonus audio, exclusive podcasts, printed ephemera, and vinyl records—and help us keep an independent publication going.

Posted on March 11, 2020Rachel Grimes The AD Interview

https://stationarytravels.wordpress.com/2018/05/05/sound-impression-the-doctor-from-india-by-rachel-grimes-temporary-residence/

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.02 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2069 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2204 - The Logical Song is not Logical - MUSICAL MONDAY FOR 2103.01 - THAT ONE THING

 

https://wolc.com/watch--listen/sermon-archives/finding-god-in-the-music-the-logical-song-supertramp/

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2204 - The Logical Song is not Logical - MUSICAL MONDAY FOR 2103.01  - THAT ONE THING

Still in catch up mode.

Not ketchup mode.

Catching up mode.

Even in this cover of the Supertramp song "The Logical Song" by Pomplamoose, listening to the song invokes a WEIRD mood that I cannot describe.

There's melancholy to it, but it's not really melancholy.

There's nostalgia because it always takes me back to the late 1970s when I discovered it, and I was establishing my musical tastes.

I cannot describe the feeling but listen to the song and see if you feel it, too.

Regardless, it is one of my favorite songs of ALL TIME.

And the Pomplamoose cover is awesome.

Here's a recent post by me that features many POMPLAMOOSE songs and pictures, including this song:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2176 - Shower Mix 2021- Musical Monday for 2102.01


"Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?

I know it sounds absurd

Please tell me who I am

Who I am

Who I am..."

The Logical Song | Supertramp | Pomplamoose

837,846 views•Aug 20, 2020

Our album "Invisible People" is now available EVERYWHERE! http://www.pomplamoose.com

A cover of "The Logical Song" by Pomplamoose.

CREDITS

Lead Vocals: Nataly Dawn

Keys: Jack Conte

Synthesizer: Dave Mackay

Guitar: Brian Green 

Bass: Nick Campbell

Drums: Ben Rose

Background Vocals: Nahneen Kula

Engineer: Tim Sonnefeld 

Assistant Engineer: Branko Presley

Mixing/Mastering: Yianni AP

Producer: Brian Green

Video Director: George Sloan

DP: Ricky Chavez

Camera Operators: Merlin Showalter, Sammy Rothman, George Sloan, Ricky Chavez

Video Editor: Dominic Mercuri

"The Logical Song"

Lyrics

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful

A miracle

Oh, it was beautiful, magical

And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily

Oh joyfully, oh playfully, watching me

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible

Logical, oh responsible, practical

Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable (dependable)

Oh clinical, intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world's asleep

The questions run too deep

For such a simple man

Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?

I know it sounds absurd

Please tell me who I am

I said, Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical (a radical)

Liberal, oh fanatical, criminal

Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable

Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable, oh, oh, oh

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

Oh, oh, oh, oh, ooh, ooh

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

But at night, when all the world's asleep

The questions run too deep

For such a simple man

Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?

I know it sounds absurd

Please tell me who I am

Who I am

Who I am

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

It's logical

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

So very logical

D-d-dependable (ooh, ooh, ooh)

It's logical

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, goodbye

So very logical (ooh, ooh, ooh)

Oh, logical

It's logical

D-d-dependable

Source: Musixmatch

The Logical Song | Supertramp 

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group

The Logical Song · Supertramp

Supertramp - The Very Best Of

℗ 1979 UMG Recordings, Inc.

Released on: 1990-01-01

Producer: Supertramp

Producer, Studio  Personnel, Engineer: Peter Henderson

Studio  Personnel, Asst.  Recording  Engineer: Lenise Bent

Studio  Personnel, Engineer: Jeff Harris

Associated  Performer, Programming: Gary Mielke

Associated  Performer, Vocalist, Keyboards: Rick Davies

Associated  Performer, Vocalist, Keyboards, Guitar: Roger Hodgson

Associated  Performer, Woodwinds: John A. Helliwell

Associated  Performer, Bass  Guitar: Dougie Thomson

Associated  Performer, Drums: Bob C Benberg

Studio  Personnel, Engineer: Russel Pope

Composer  Lyricist: Roger Hodgson

Composer  Lyricist: Rick Davies

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

I am so behind as I type this (2103.06 for a post date and time stamped 2103.01 10:10). So I am just going with simple posts or already finished shares or school stuff until I get not just caught up but pull ahead.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.01 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2068 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.