Beethoven's Sixth Symphony "The Pastoral"

Little compares to Ludwig van Beethoven. One of the strangest opinions I've ever heard of Beethoven is that his music is malevolent. He certainly can convey darker themes with his compositions. The Fifth Symphony, with its "Fate knocking at the door" is far from lighthearted. Indeed, Beethoven can be seen as the first Heavy Metal artist, with the booming epic style of his symphonies. Considered a member of the Classical school along with Mozart and Haydn we can hear echoes of Shubert and a foretaste of the Romantics that is absent mostly, say, in Mozart. To make a grossly inadequate analogy for the student of pop music, Beethoven's dramatic range is like Led Zepellin to Mozart's saccharine early Beatles.

Beethoven's place in Western culture is unparalleled. Consider Stanley Kubrick's dystopian masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange. The anti-hero Alexander De Large could hardly have been portrayed as a Tschaikovsky fanatic. When the Berlin Wall fell, they did not hold a Mahler or a Wagner concert to celebrate. One of the greatest of all human accomplishments is Beethoven's nine symphonies. Especially the last seven, from the "Eroica" (3rd) from which he ripped the dedication to Napoleon when Bonaparte betrayed the Republic and crowned himself Emperor, to the Ninth, the wildly popular "Choral Symphony" based on Schiller's romantic poem, the Ode to Joy.

One of my favorite of all classical pieces is Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, "The Pastoral." Composed, rehearsed and debuted along with the more ominous Fifth, The Sixth, with its buoyant mood, provides a perfect complement. The Pastoral Symphony, which is intentionally meant to evoke "recollections of country life" has been famously adapted to two iconic movies of the Twentieth Century. The first is Walt Disney's animated masterpiece Fantasia. The full five movements, performed by Leopold Stokowski directing the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, are illustrated with scenes of Greek and European mythology that comprise one of my earliest and most joyful childhood memories.

The second iconic film usage is in 1973's sci-fi noir, Soylent Green. The fatherly police archivist Sol Roth, (Edward G. Robinson in his last role,) has watched America decay from greatness to mindless rioting and self-delusion. Choosing to die, he patronizes a state-run euthansia clinic. With all the world's wildlife dead, Roth watches images of the countryside and listens to Beethoven's Pastoral as the fatal cocktail takes effect. Of course its use in Soylent Green is darkly ironic. The piece itself conjures no malevolent images, at least nothing worse than a soon-passed summer thunderstorm.

Click here to see part one of the Pastoral in Disney's Fantasia. Click here for Sol's departure in Soylent Green. And here is Herbert von Karajan, renowned for his beethoven Interpretations, directing the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of the complete symphony:

Google Mars

You are probably familiar with Google Earth, the satellite image website that lets you zoom in from space on any site on the planet. If you aren't familiar with the site, you should check it out immediately. No Roman emperor or god on Mount Olympus could command such wonders as the poorest of citizens with an airport connection or a card to his local library. But even if you have seen Google Earth, have you checked out Google Mars? Through NASA and the Hubble Telescope we can see wonders so grand that mere words cannot describe a millionth of their splendor; the surface of distant stars, the creation of new suns, millions of galaxies billions of years distant.



Google Mars lets us zoom in on the Red Planet as if it were in our living rooms, and not a barely visible red speck in the night sky some 100 million miles away. You can look at Mars photographed in visible light or infrared or you can enjoy the false-color relief map which doesn't show any canals, but which does show plain signs of crater impacts, flowing water, and mountains over ten miles high.

Right Click on the NASA images of Mars above to see them full-sized. Click here for Google Earth, download required, but worth the effort. Click here for Google Mars, no download necessary.

Little Red Riding Hood Redux

There once was a young person named Little Red Riding Hood who lived on the edge of a large forest full of endangered owls and rare plants that would probably provide a cure for cancer if only someone took the time to study them.

Red Riding Hood lived with a nurture giver whom she sometimes referred to as “Mother,” although she didn’t mean to imply by this term that she would have thought less of that person if a close biological link did not in fact exist. Nor did she intend to denigrate the equal value of nontraditional households, and she was sorry if this was the impression conveyed.

One day her mother asked her to take a basket of organically grown fruit and mineral water to her grandmother’s house.

“But mother, won’t this be stealing work from the unionized people who have struggled for years to earn the right to carry all packages between various people in the woods?”

Red Riding Hood’s mother assured her that she had called the union boss and gotten a special compassionate mission exemption form.

“But mother, aren’t you oppressing me by ordering me to do this?”

Red Riding Hood’s mother pointed out that it was impossible for women to oppress each other, since all women were equally oppressed until all women were free.

“But mother, then shouldn’t you have my brother carry the basket, since he’s an oppressor, and should learn what it’s like to be oppressed?”

Red Riding Hood’s mother explained that her brother was attending a special rally for animal rights, and besides, this wasn’t stereotypical women’s work, but an empowering deed that would help engender a feeling of community.

“But won’t I be oppressing Grandma, by implying that she’s sick and hence unable to independently further her own selfhood?”

But Red Riding Hood’s mother explained that her grandmother wasn’t actually sick or incapacitated or mentally handicapped in any way, although that was not to imply that any of these conditions were inferior to what some people called “health.” Thus Red Riding Hood felt that she could get behind the idea of delivering the basket to her grandmother, and so she set off.

Many people believed that the forest was a foreboding and dangerous place, but Red Riding Hood knew that this was an irrational fear based on cultural paradigms instilled by a patriarchal society that regarded the natural world as an exploitable resource, and hence believed that natural predators were in fact intolerable competitors.

Other people avoided the woods for fear of thieves and deviants, but Red Riding Hood felt that in a truly classless society all marginalized peoples would be able to “come out” of the woods and be accepted as valid lifestyle role models.



On her way to Grandma’s house, Red Riding Hood passed a woodchopper, and wandered off the path, in order to examine some flowers. She was startled to find herself standing before a Wolf, who asked her what was in her basket. Red Riding Hood’s teacher had warned her never to talk to strangers, but she was confident in taking control of her own budding sexuality, and chose to dialogue with the Wolf.

She replied, “I am taking my Grandmother some healthful snacks in a gesture of solidarity.”

The Wolf said, “You know, my dear, it isn’t safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone.”

Red Riding Hood said, “I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop an alternative and yet entirely valid world view. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I would prefer to be on my way.”

Red Riding Hood returned to the main path, and proceeded towards her Grandmother’s house. But because his status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought, the Wolf knew of a quicker route to Grandma’s house.

He burst into the house and ate Grandma, a course of action affirmative of his nature as a predator. Then, unhampered by rigid, traditionalist gender role notions, he put on Grandma’s nightclothes, crawled under the bedclothes, and awaited developments.

Red Riding Hood entered the cottage and said, “Grandma, I have brought you some cruelty-free snacks to salute you in your role of wise and nurturing matriarch.”

The Wolf said softly, “Come closer, child, so that I might see you.”

Red Riding Hood said, “Goddess[es]! Grandma, what big eyes you have!”

“You forget that I am optically challenged.”

“And Grandma, what an enormous, what a fine nose you have.”

“Naturally, I could have had it fixed to help my acting career, but I didn’t give in to such societal pressures, my child.”

“And Grandma, what very big, sharp teeth you have!”

The Wolf could not take any more of these speciesist slurs, and, in a reaction appropriate for his accustomed milieu, he leaped out of bed, grabbed Little Red Riding Hood, and opened his jaws so wide that she could see her poor Grandmother cowering in his belly.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Red Riding Hood bravely shouted. “You must request my permission before proceeding to a new level of intimacy!”

The Wolf was so startled by this statement that he loosened his grasp on her. At the same time, the woodchopper burst into the cottage, brandishing an axe.

“Hands off!” cried the woodchopper.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” cried Little Red Riding Hood. “If I let you help me now, I would be expressing a lack of confidence in my own abilities, which would lead to poor self-esteem and lower achievement scores on college entrance exams.”

“Last chance, sister! Get your hands off that endangered species! This is an FBI sting!” screamed the woodchopper, and when Little Red Riding Hood nonetheless made a sudden motion, he swung the axe and sliced off her head.

“Thank goodness you got here in time,” said the Wolf. “The brat and her grandmother lured me in here. I thought I was a goner.”

“No, I think I’m the real victim, here,” said the woodchopper. “I’ve been dealing with my anger ever since I saw her picking those protected flowers earlier. And now I’m going to have such a trauma. Do you have any aspirin?”

“Sure,” said the Wolf.

“Thanks.”

“I feel your pain,” said the Wolf, and he patted the woodchopper on his firm, well padded back, gave a little belch, and said “Do you have any Maalox?”

My thanks to Hilton (HWH) for passing this on. I am unaware of the originator. The Illustrations are by Gustave Doré.

Carl Orff "Carmina Burana"

Discovered in 1803 in the Benediktbeuern abbey by the German scholar Johann Andreas Schmeller, the Codex Burana is a collection of 228 poems written in Latin, Middle German and Old Provençal. They were recorded by students and clergy about the year 1230 in southern Bavaria. Meant to be set to music they include love songs, drinking songs and scandalous chucrh parodies. The songs provide a fascinating uncensored view into the cultural life of the high middle ages.

Schmeller published the codex and named it the Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuern) in 1847. In 1935 and '36 the German composer Carl Orff set 24 of the songs to new music, producing a work meant for orchestra, soloists and choir. Subtitled cantiones profanae, the styles range from plaintive and pastoral to comical to demonic to ecstatic. The composition was highly successful, long outliving the Nazi regime which at first found the work too controversial for public performance.

It premiered at the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, in 1937. The opening movement, O Fortuna, is one of the most well known pieces of classical music, familiar to many as the theme to the film The Omen. Covered by performers from the Doors' Ray Manzarek to Enya and by every classical venue on the planet, performances of this work are a guaranteed to sell out.

The Carmina Burana is meant to be performed operatically, and in 1975, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle produced a West German film version which faithfully produces scenes from mediaeval festivals and morality plays with an effect that seems to cross Easter with Halloween.

The text of Orff's Carmina Burana is available at Teach Yourself Latin. It includes the Latin, French and German lyrics with a loose English translation. The 1975 film by Ponnelle, with a fine musical recording is available in full, starting here with O Fortuna, at YouTube:

John Collier "The Essence of Femininity"

John Collier 1850-1934 was a famed portrait painter and figurative artist of the Pre-Raphaelite school known for its attention to detail and complex composition. He is noted for his use of light and color. A humanist, skeptic and friend of the Huxley family, (he married two of Thomas Huxley's daughters,) Collier was known in his day as a fashionable portrait painter and is mostly remembered today for his mythological works, including Lady Godiva below, Tannhäser above, and Lilith here.

Ayn Rand, famous for her depiction of strong heroines, held that hero worship is the essence of femininity. But Collier's portraits of women tend rather to make them the object of adoration. I am not presenting here a criticism of Rand's theory but upon first seeing Tannhäuser, with the knight-poet kneeling before Venus, I spontaneously uttered "the essence of femininity."

"The Religion of the Ancient Celts" J.MacCulloch

Originally published in 1911, and now available in Dover paperback, "Religion of the Ancient Celts," is a well written and engaging scholarly work.

Well worth its price, the work is suitable to the general public, while still valuable to those interested in the Celts from an historic, linguistic, mythological or ethnological standpoint. MacCulloch covers his subject matter clearly and thoroughly (referencing such things as parallels with Greek mythology and Sumerian religion) and writes in a style that will satisfy the expert without mystifying or losing the attention of the amateur.

The main text is 390 pp, is fully referenced in footnotes, and is fully indexed. Chapter titles include: Gods of Gaul - The Irish Cycle - Tuatha De Danaan - Gods of the Brythons - Cuchulainn Cycle - Fionn Saga - Gods and Men - Cult of the Dead - Nature Worship - River and Well Worship - Tree and Plant Worship - Animal Worship - Cosmogony - Sacrifice, Prayer & Divination - Taboo - Festivals - The Druids - Magic - Etc...

Although the book may be "dated", it is not "outdated". Given the scholarly standards of its time, this may be more of a virtue than a drawback. More recent results in the area are naturally not addressed. But the work is consistent with comparative methods, and considers the consensus without neglecting competing accounts. There is neither neo-Druidic nonsense nor needless pedantry. While the study is generally limited to the culture of the British Isles, as opposed to that of the Continent, this is due to the lack of Continental oral tradition rather than to lack of attention on the author's part.

MacCulloch is judicious. Yet he addresses issues such as the pre-Indo-European origins of the Mother-Goddess cult of Brigid, as the legends of the faerie-folk known as the "Side,"* (as in banshee) and as the stories of "Isles to the West" now sunk below the sea.

Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien will find this work enthralling and familiar, as it shows some of the sources for his magnificent "Middle-Earth." Avid youngsters, Celtophiles, students of Irish poet W.B. Yeats, followers of Marija Gimbutas (Civilization of the Goddess) and admirers of Robert Graves (The White Goddess) will likewise be pleased.

I can recommend this work, here at Amazon, unreservedly for readers of all persuasions. The text is also available free on line here at Sacred Texts.

* "Side" shows curious parallels to the word "seidhr" - magic learned by the patriarchal Norse Aesir god Odin from the pre-Aryan matriarchal Vanir goddesses, and to "Sedna" - the Eskimo/Aleut "Mistress of Animals" who lives at the bottom of the ocean.

Calvert Watkins "Dictionary of Indo-European Roots"

Throughout history civilized peoples have wondered at the source of their language, looking often to the tongue of a prestigious cultural predecessor as its imagined source. In the Aeneid, Vergil traces the imagined source of Rome to Troy, and the Romans thought it obvious that their tongue was a debased form of Greek. More recent theories, based on a naive notion of Biblical history, trace all the worlds languages to Hebrew. It wasn't until widespread European familiarity with Sanskrit, the ancient liturgical language of India, that the notion became widespread that Greek and Latin, as well as the ancestral dialects of the Celts, Slavs, Germans and others might share some common origin with Sanskrit and other ancient tongues in some source which no longer exists. We now know that what are called the Indo-European languages are the descendants dialects of an ancient language of bronze-age wagon-riding horse and dog domersticating nomads who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Known as the Kurgan culture as identified by Marija Gimbutas, this people infiltrated Europe and Central Asia, displacing speakers of tongues such as Etruscan and the ancient relatives of Basque, and interacting with their neighbors who spoke tongues from such separate families as Semitic and Finno-Ugric as well as many more exotic families.




Any who would understand the origins of English, with its own native Germanic word stock, as well as a vocaubulary well supplimented by such languagGes as Latin and Greek would do weel to familiarize themselves with the Indo-European roots of our Language. Calvert Watkins' American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots does that quite admirably. His beautiful and scholarly tome has more facts per inch in its 149pp than in almost any other work in my library. The second paperback edition is easily worth three times its cover price, and except for one flaw, this work is as near perfection as one could ask in a work of linguistic reference.

First, in praise:

To the scholar (or layman) studying the Indo-European roots of the English lexicon, there is no other work (in the English language) of comparable value to this book.

(View the index pages available above to see the English words referenced in the work.)

Each word is derived from its putative IE root, and each root is exemplified by its various reflexes in English, whether native or borrowed. For example, if we look up "deal" in the index, it gives two roots, *dail- (from which we get the meaning "portion out") and *tel- meaning plank or flat stone:

"*tel- Ground, floor, board. 1) DEAL from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch dele, "plank," from Germanic *thil-jo. 2)Suffixed form *tel-n-, TELLURIAN ...[also tile, title].... From Latin tellus "earth, the earth.....[Pokorny 2. *tel- 1061.]"

Hence, Watkins gives us the modern English exemplars of the root, whether they come through Germanic directly or indirectly, or through another PIE sister language such as Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc.,. For each root Watkins refers to the proto-form as it is given and numbered (i.e., here 1061) in Pokorny's authoritative "Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch" or notes its absence therein.

Watkins also inserts a "language and culture note" on about every other page, giving philological/ethnological insight into the implications of the existence of certain forms and their connotations in the IE proto-language.

Regarding the PIE nominal root *Rtko-s "bear," which is absent as an inherited form in English, Watkins explains that the root (which is found in the Hittite "Hartaggas," Latin "ursus" Greek "arktos" and so forth) is replaced by "taboo" avoiding forms meaning "the brown one: "bruin" or "the honey-eater" as in Slavonic "medv-ed." The significance of such avoidance for hunter-gatherers such as the putative PIE speakers is obvious to anyone who knows the meaning of the word "jinx."

Yet, in criticism:

The book as it is currently titled (second edition, paperback) implies a completeness that the work lacks. When we find that certain English words such as "basket, boy, dwarf, dog" and "girl" are not listed in the lexicon, what are we to assume?

Are they neologisms, as are perhaps "boy, dog" & "girl?"

Are they Germanicisms such as "dwarf" (although it apparently has a canonical PIE root structure)?

Or are they just inexplicable - as it would seem is "basket" which looks an awful lot like a cognate of the Latin "fasces"?

Also, PIE roots not native to or not borrowed into English are ignored, as are most non-PIE-derived yet acceptably 'English' words such as "alcohol."

Nevertheless, even Tolkien had his criticisms of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and that work was some 1000 times the length of Watkins' achievement. Anyone who finds these caveats discouraging will know where to seek for further enlightenment.

This work is worth well more than its dime a page asking price, and a must have for any who take their language seriously.

Frank Herbert "The White Plague"

In the near future, a mild-mannered geneticist sees his family murdered by religious terrorists in cold blood. Deciding to take revenge on the parties involved, he begins working in a basement. But his weapon has unintended consequences... Hard science, strong characterization, poetic language, this is one of my top 10 books. Many people only know Herbert from his Dune books, and if you've only seen the movies, he's been very poorly adapted. All of Herbert's books are brilliant, he has the most multi-layered backstory and widest range of real-world knowledge of any Hard SF writer I know. The White Plague has Yeatsian lyricism and antiseptic Orwellian style. The plot line should give you nightmares, because it could already be under way in Lebanon, in London, in Pakistan, in Iraq, in Albuquerque. The picture is from www.arrakis.co.uk Here is the Amazon listing. The book had been long out of print, which, given its timeliness, speaks volumes about the publishing industry. It has been re-released in an oversized paperback edition. You can find it at your local used book store, or for cheaper than bottled water at abebooks.com.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

In explaining the influences for his recent painting, Venus, artist
Michael Newberry
lists among them the 1879 painting Birth of Venus by
William-Adolphe Bouguereau. One of the last and best loved of the figurative painters of the 19th Century, Bougereau's work came to languish in the popular consciousness as Impressionism and then Abstract Impressionism came to the fore.

According to Wikipedia:

Bouguereau’s works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who considered him the most important French artist of that time. But after 1920, Bouguereau fell into disrepute, due in part to changing tastes and partly to his staunch opposition to the Impressionists who were finally gaining acceptance. For decades following, his name was not even mentioned in encyclopedias.

But now, with his return to favor, at least with the public, and with such wonderful resources as Wikipedia itself, we can come to know this great artist with an ease of which neither the Victorians nor the Caesars could have dreamt, at our laptops, in our basements. To view images of his entire oeuvre, visit Wikipedia here. And this is one of my favorites, A Young Girl defending Herself Against Eros: