Congratulations, Jayne.

Long life and happiness to mother and son.

What's his name?

Many congratulations Jayne (and Jim) on grand (and great grand!) parenthood! Good news, indeed!

You may be too young to be a great-grandmother, but I bet your former status was at least well-above-average-grandmother. So you shouldn't have far to go.

Congrats!

Congratulations, Jayne!

Susan

Clive, Jim, David, Annie, Mark, Julie and Susan,

Thank you all for your messages and kind thoughts. The baby is called Louis Matthew, and mother and baby are now back at home (it was ten days in hospital when I had my first child!); they're both doing well.

I look forward to the next posting of Good News! :)

Jayne

Much joy, Jayne.

(Regarding the election that was the original reason for this post: Nevermind.)

A hopeful song from the SD Master Chorale.

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Thanks Julie. You've resurrected in me a song that captured me first when I was a young boy. Now it's back full force. So thanks.

Here is another song on the same trajectory towards a better world:

https://youtu.be/6Mp0A8kKk-o

It has always defined my point of view that hope and love go hand in hand.
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I don’t think I’ve ever posted here, but the present crisis, makes one do odd things. For some time now, my wife and I have, for our own safety, shut ourselves off as much as possible from contact with the wider world – following government advice and the earnest recommendation of our doctor son. But the good news…

On 1 April we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Immodestly, we can say that, while many years ago both of us got very lucky when we suffered bouts of serious ill health, apart from that, neither of us is at all surprised we are still together. Then, shortly after our anniversary, it was my birthday. These two happy events, however, had to be marked from within the confines of our cloister – a very pleasant cloister, but a cloister still – and without the presence of our three children and eight grandchildren, which was most upsetting.

We have been closed off for nearly four weeks now. A while ago, I had the comic-horror vision of the two of us waving from behind our front window at our children and grandchildren all lined up across the lawn. They stare and stare, with various expressions of pity and alarm, at a strange couple who, because they have been confined to the house for months, have not been able to get a haircut and have come to resemble nothing so much as Ben Gunn and his wife in an alternative version of Treasure Island. I realized that what had drifted into my head was an illustration in the edition of the story I had had as a boy – Ben Gunn with shaggy overgrown locks and a long beard. He was marooned for three years, I think. I hope we are not shut away for so long.

Clive Watkins

Congratulations, Clive and Mrs. Clive!

Re Ben Gunn: If you start becoming obsessed with cheese, it's time to worry.

Clive, what a great day to have as your anniversary! It preserves the notion that a sense of humor is one of the most important things for a couple to have. Congratulations! Since John and I have been cutting each other's hair for about 45 years (and have not changed our hairstyles in that time), we need not fear that isolation will make us unrecognizable to others.

Susan

Congratulations from me, too, to Clive and his best beloved, from another similarly cloistered pair. (I do cut John Corbett's hair, so he at least is presentable. My hair is beyond help anyway.)

Thank you Clive, for that wonderful image. Stay well.
And big congrats on 50 years!

Clive,

You're one of the many Sphereans it's been my absolute pleasure to have met personally, for which I'm thankful, especially as you now live some distance away from me and we're not able to travel for the foreseeable future! (I know you're not keen to venture far from home, anyway, these days; I find I'm getting more and more that way inclined myself.)

Many congratulations to you and your wife on your Golden Wedding anniversary... and belated Happy Birthday wishes too. Keep safe and well.

Jayne

Thank you for your good wishes, Julie, Susan, Maryann, Mark and Jayne, which I return in the same cordial spirit.

I remember very well meeting you, Jayne, at The Trout just outside Oxford a few years ago – with, among others, David Mason and Rory Waterman (not a name known to many around these parts, I think). And Susan, I remember meeting you in 2003 at West Chester – with many other Spherians (or poets with Spherian associations) – among them, Alicia Stallings, Tim Murphy, Deborah Warren, Carol Taylor (who of course used to do Jayne’s job), Dick Davis, Chris Childers and (unforgettably) Anthony Hecht.

About the Ben Gunn problem, yesterday Irene and I had a conversation with a friend – in our garden and at a safe distance. He was assessing the styles he might adopt. He is my age and has thick, naturally wavy, grey hair that was probably once ginger, and a bushy grey beard. (Mine own hair is grey, straight and utterly undramatic.) He was trying to persuade himself to let the beard grow and then to divide it in a Viking “forkbeard” manner. He comes from Cumbria up on the Northwest edge of England, almost certainly has Norse blood, and is, as well, a tall well-made fellow. I could see him behind an oar or wielding a sword. He is not keen on a pigtail or a “man bun” but doesn’t care for the Full Gandalf, either. Decisions, decisions…

Best wishes to one and all…

Clive

Hooray, Aaron! That's wonderful news.

Hallelujah Chorus, anyone?

The Brits here will be very amused by the American r's, I'm sure.

We're getting better at making these virtual choir videos, but they're still a pale, pale shadow of what our full 100-member choir could do while hearing each other!

Really enjoyed that, Julie.

I enjoyed that a lot.

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Julie: We're getting better at making these virtual choir videos, but they're still a pale, pale shadow of what our full 100-member choir could do while hearing each other!

Yes, I can imagine. I've done some remote voice work in-studio and it's like having a phantom limb.
I do love voices when they are unleashed and in concert. These virtual choirs mask that energy that is lost with technical make-up. Musical cosmetology, I guess. Or perhaps they (virtual choirs) are a completely different animal. Each voice toiling in isolation. Every voice joined together in virtual reality.
You've posted Eric Whitacre's work before, which I love. The musical world (and the world in general) is moving towards virtuality like moths to a lightbulb, I'm afraid. It will not replace the energy gained and the experience of being in the moment and hearing sounds this beautiful emanating from the body.

I think your engineers do a nice job of replicating the acoustics. I close my eyes...
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Glad you enjoyed.

I have very mixed feelings. It's great to be able to do something together (or sort-of-together), and of course the composer's material is gorgeous. But the whole endeavor really makes me miss what's special and magical about the experience of creating live choral music (and live orchestral music, too--gosh, I miss the strings and brass SO MUCH in this version of the Hallelujah Chorus!).

There's an irreplaceable sense of communion with others during the shared excitement of creating something truly wonderful together. And that sense of communion is built by paying close attention to others and instantly adjusting one's own output accordingly. We all have to be fully inhabiting a particular moment in time for that to happen.

A bunch of overlapping solo performances is just not a choir to me. Frankly, there's something a bit masturbatory about each artist doing his or her own thing in isolation, without being constantly responsive to someone else--whether those someones are one's fellow singers, a conductor, or the audience. It's still a beautiful experience, but it's just not the same when you're not sharing the same sliver of eternity.

A small group of SD Master Chorale volunteers and I used to put on free "senior sing-alongs" at local nursing homes. Lately we have been doing them solo, via Skype and FaceTime. The activities staff carry an iPad connected to one of us from room to room, to residents who are pretty much in solitary confinement now. There's only time for one or two familiar songs (heavy on the Sinatra rep!) and a bit of conversation, then it's on to the next one. I know that the residents with memory issues don't remember anything five minutes later, but the sincere joy and connection of that brief interaction still matters, I think. (It's inspiring that the oldest resident for whom I've performed, 105 years young, is still as sharp as a tack, although she was older than the song I sang for her that day, which was "California, Here I Come," written in 1924.)

Anyway, the hardest thing about performing remotely is that however enthusiastically they are singing along with me, I can't respond AT ALL to what I'm hearing, because there is a double delay--they hear me a bit later, and I also hear them a bit later, so from my perspective they are always significantly behind what I'm doing. My instinct is to slow down to let them catch up, but of course catching up is impossible, due to the limitations of the technology. So I have to focus on overriding that instinct, and just keep steadily strumming my 'ukulele and singing over them. As a person who has trouble with sensory overload anyway, because it's hard for me to block things out, it's exhausting. But the staff and residents are so appreciative that I want to keep doing it. I'm really looking forward to getting back to live performances, though!

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Julie: "It's still a beautiful experience, but it's just not the same when you're not sharing the same sliver of eternity."


That's exactly it.
I'm not lamenting the demise of the communal chorus at the hands of the emergence of virtual one. I know that it is a kind of subspecies. Perhaps an all together different animal. One that was not possible until recently. Both are welcome… But yes, the labor of love, the blood sweat and tears, the toiling, is not the same. The experience is different.

Wow to your work navigating through all the hoops to bring the beauty of music to seniors in confinement. It is more than I can say, how much it must and does mean to them. I'm going to find a way to do that as soon as the time is right... Ukulele? Wow again! Amazingly, I watched a clip of Taimane Gardner this morning. Maybe you’ve heard of her?

One thing though — the end product of a well-done virtual choir or any other form of virtual musical expression is often mind-blowingly, fascinatingly beautiful, to me at least..
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I passed my Ph.D. comprehensive exams today -- basically a two-year process of reading and remembering 130 works of Renaissance poetry, prose, drama, and scholarship, culminating in a 5000-word written exam, and a two-hour oral exam, in which the four-person committee can ask me anything about anything on my list. It's the final hurdle before the dissertation, and I'm excited to finally return to my research on specific editions of poetry from the 1630s and 1640s. Despite a COVID-filled world, I'm a very happy man today!

That's Good News indeed, Shaun!

What a fantastic achievement after all your hard work. Bask in the glory... and I'll celebrate over here with a glass of something... :D

Cheers, my friend.
Jayne

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Great!! But the time frame suggests that I can’t ask you questions about my big favorite, Andrew Marvell. Just kidding. Congratulations!

Congratulations. Keep your world alive within this broken one and ride triumphant on it out to the other side.

Thanks, all!

And Allen, I do love Marvell (I somehow had the entirety of his 1681 Poems on my list), but I'll have to settle for a chapter on his friend, Milton, instead.

Shaun, his “To His Coy Mistress” is all very nice, and justly famous among mistresses and misters I suppose, but for some great little images I think it’s hard to beat The Mower to the Glo-Worms . C. Day Lewis stole a march on me by titling a book “Country Comets.” Did Marvell ever actually marry? His housekeeper claimed they had a secret wedding. We will never know, I guess, but my thought is that he did not, really. Just a hunch.

Congratulations, Shaun!

The bad news is that the ocean off San Diego is pretty stinky.

The good news is that the ocean off San Diego is pretty, stinky.

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"The good news is that the ocean off San Diego pretty, stinky."


All that stands between good and bad is the comma : )

I had heard about this but not seen (or smelled). Wow. The ocean is chameleon. Oddly, it's red tide, right?
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Well, in the daytime, it's sort of a murky reddish brown.

It's probably been many years since I have visited Eratosphere, since I lost the custom of doing so over some difficult years, but I just mentioned Eratosphere as my alma mater for learning to write in meter, in a memoir written in rhyming heroic couplets up on my blog. The Chapter, which is an hour long, was the hardest to write, because it deals with OCD and related afflictions, but I think it qualifies as good news in the sense that I am glad to have finally been able to get the story off my chest in a way that I hope will be engaging and possibly helpful to others with similar or different afflictions...

https://snapshotcouplets.wordpress.c...7/thorn-crown/

Mario

Hey, Mario! Very good to see you!

Congratulations on making it through so much, and for finding a way to share your story, which I have no doubt will help a lot of people. I particularly like your witty juxtapositions of text and photos.

Mario, you have written a remarkable poem, and a courageous one as well. An achievement you can be proud of.

A doubled thank you to each of you, Julie and Roger, one for your comments, and another because I remember and I am still grateful for help with my writing that both of you gave me here at Eratosphere more than a decade ago!!

Mario

Mario, I have just finished reading it, and come back to this thread, to see Roger has used the two words that came to me -- 'remarkable' and 'courageous'. This is a remarkable project. And the courage it shows comes trailing so much love and warmth. For all the darkness, there is such warmth and openness in the telling.

Thank you, Mario! Thank you.

Cally