Tag: Todd Walton Under the Table Books

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Time Capsule Tidbits #2

Having had encouraging responses to my previous post featuring excerpts from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature published in 1939, a volume I love for being a delightful British-centric time-capsule full of fascinating factoids, here is another batch of goodies from that tome.

Auto-da-fé, a Portuguese expression meaning act of faith, popularly applied to the burning alive of heretics.

Bohemian, frequently used in the sense of a gipsy of society, especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, and despises conventionalities. This meaning was introduced into English by Thackeray.

Brummel, George Bryan (1778-1840), called BEAU BRUMMEL, a friend of the prince regent (George IV) and leader of fashion in London. He died in poverty at Caen.

Caligula, GAIUS CAESAR, son of Germanicus, so called from his wearing, when a boy, caligae or soldiers’ boots, was Roman emperor A.D. 37-41. The cruelties and vices that marked his reign were perhaps due to his madness. He was finally murdered.

Chiasmus, a figure of speech by which the order of the words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second, e.g. He saved others; himself he cannot save.

Cook, Eliza (1818-89). Her complete collected poems were published in 1870. The most popular of these was The Old Arm Chair, which had appeared in 1837.

Darien Scheme, THE, a scheme proposed by William Paterson (1658-1719), the projector of the Bank of England, for a Scottish settlement on the isthmus of Panama; the scheme was abandoned in 1700. Practically the whole circulating capital of the Scottish people was invested in the scheme; and so, at the Union (1707), a sum of money was paid by England in compensation for the losses sustained by Scotland.

Derrick, a noted hangman at Tyburn, c. 1600, the origin of the word derrick, a crane.

Deus ex machina, God from the machine, an unexpected event or intervention in a play or novel, which resolves a difficult situation. When a god was introduced in the ancient Greek drama, he was brought on the stage by some mechanical device.

Dolly Dialogues, The, by Anthony Hope (Hawkins) (1894) They are amusing and witty conversations hung on a slight thread of story, in which figure Samuel Travers Carter, a middle-aged bachelor, and the attractive Dolly Foster.

D’Urfey, Thomas (1653-1723), familiarly known as Tom Durfey, wrote a large number of songs, tales, satires, melodramas, and farces. He was a scurrilous fellow, but the familiar friend of everyone, including Charles II and James II.

Elliot, Jane (1727-1805), author of the most popular version of the old lament for Flodden, The Flowers of the Forest, beginning with I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking.

Field, Michael, the pseudonym adopted by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). They wrote several novels and some good poetry.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) born at Frieberg in Moravia, of a Jewish family, is known as the inventor of psychoanalysis. His studies led him to important conclusions as the to the influence of a subconscious element in the mind and also as to the importance of the sexual motive in human behavior. He was expelled from Austria in 1938.

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Mystery Music Box, piano and bass, from Todd’s album Mystery Inventions.

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Time Capsule Tidbits

One of the few material possessions I inherited from my grandmother Goody is a book entitled The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, first published in 1939 and reprinted in 1942.

I love this book for many reasons, among them: the perspective of the editors is extremely British-centric, much of the information is so antiquated as to verge on fiction, the writing of the entries is delightfully snobby, and the totality is a time-capsule of the English literary landscape eighty years ago, a landscape so unlike the literary landscape of today this book might be about life on another planet where they also happen to have Shakespeare, Dickens, and Jane Austen.

Here, for your enjoyment, are a handful of entries I especially enjoyed during my latest perusal of the goodly tome.

Southcott, Joanna (1750-1814), a religious fanatic. In 1792 she began to write doggerel prophecies and to claim supernatural gifts, and in time attracted a very large number of followers. She died of brain disease, leaving a sealed box with directions that it should be opened at a time of national crisis. It was opened in 1927 and was found to contain nothing of interest.

Macaulay, Rose, contemporary author among whose chief works are: Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told By an Idiot (1923) Orphan Island (1924), all novels; also two volumes of verse. She is notable for a deft and epigrammatic style and for her wide reading.

Burnell the Ass, the hero of the Speculum Stultorum of Wireker, Burnell, an ass who wishes to acquire a larger tail, goes to Salerno and to Paris to study, meets with various adventures, and finally loses his tail altogether.

Genius, in classical pagan belief, the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his character; also the spirit similarly connected with a place.

Hesperia, the western land for the Greek poets was Italy. The Roman poets similarly gave the name to Spain.

Lover, Samuel (1797-1868), Irish novelist and song-writer, is remembered for his ballad, and the novel developed out of it, Rory O’More (1836), which deals with the tragic events in Ireland in 1798 and also for his novel Handy Andy in which he developed the whimsical aspects of Irish character.

Wilcox, MRS. ELLA WHEELER (née Wheeler) (1855-1919), American poet and journalist, described as the most popular poet of either sex and of any age, read by thousands who never open Shakespeare. She began to publish poems at the age of seven, and her last volume Poems of Affection was published posthumously in 1920. Her Collected Poems were published in 1921.

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The Way Things Go from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven

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Extremely Local News

I grew sunflowers this year for the first time in several years and I’m so glad I did. Van Gogh bouquets for the table, gifts of bouquets for friends, a cheerful presence in the garden on the gloomiest of days.

We had a visit from my niece Lena and her daughter Della who is ten-months-old and rather cute, don’t you think?

Lena and Della and I went to the Mendocino Farmers Market together and Lena bought shishitos to go with our tamales.

Now Marcia and I are in love with shishitos. So easy to cook and so delicious.

The giant two-headed monster log that was way out near the mouth of Big River got moved inland on a big tide. Every time I go to the beach the behemoth is somewhere new. What a beauty!

Work moves apace on my book The Dog Who Wanted A Person with illustrations by Miruna Constantin, local wunderkind prodigy with a pencil. With good fortune we hope to publish the book ere long.

Marcia just posted a fun instructional video on YouTube teaching you how to play a 2:3 poly-rhythm with shakers. Not to be missed if you’ve ever longed to play such a thing. Such fun!

Thanks for visiting!

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Tides of Change

So here we are and things are happening in the greater world and in our own personal worlds, and more and more lately I’m finding it difficult to separate the two.

In truth it is impossible to separate the wildfires in Canada and California and in Europe from our personal world. We may not be in the fires, or in Gaza, or in the parking lot in Los Angeles where the ICE agents are grabbing people and hauling them away to horrid prisons, but those things are happening in the same world we live in, the same world where we grow lettuce, and buy groceries, and feel tired and anxious, and we aren’t sure why we feel that way, but we do.

A Buddhist teacher was asked, “How can we empty our minds of thought when there is so much suffering in the world, so much cruelty? How can we stop thinking about the suffering in order to calm our minds and meditate?”

The teacher replied, “Meditate on suffering. Do not try to block those thoughts. Allow them to arise and fade away and arise again and fade away again. This is the practice. When images and thoughts of suffering arise in your mind, label them. Suffering. They will fade away because they are thoughts, and thoughts have no substance. They will return. Watch them without attaching to them. Allow them to fade away. Yes. Life is full of suffering, and life is full of joy. One does not replace the other. They exist simultaneously. This is the challenge of being alive. Coming to terms with this ever-present duality by realizing suffering and happiness are not separate from each other, just as you are not separate from anything.”

What is happening in the greater world is happening in our personal world. Open your heart to this truth.

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Light Song from Lounge Act In Heaven on YouTube and Spotify

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Gaza Dream

I’m at the Mendocino Farmers Market with my basket as I am every Friday. I’m about to buy some tamales when I look to the west and see a big military helicopter hovering in the air over what I thought was the Mendocino Hotel.

“What’s going on down there?” I ask my friend Christine, the market manager.

She hesitates to reply and then says quietly, “Gaza.”

I set my basket down and walk toward the helicopter, and as I get closer I can see where Mendocino abruptly ends and Gaza begins.

I stand a few feet from the edge of Gaza and watch in horror as people run toward a pile of sacks of grain and bullets rain down from the helicopter killing many of the people.

Now two children, a boy and a girl, walk by close to the line between Mendocino and Gaza, and I reach out to them and they take my hands and I pull them across the line into Mendocino and we walk back to the farmers market.

The boy is so weak from hunger, he collapses. So I pick him up and the girl clutches my pants leg and we continue on our way to the market.

I buy two tamales from the Mexican woman I always buy tamales from.When I try to pay her, she shakes her head.

I carry the boy into the park adjacent to the market with the girl still clinging to my pants leg and we sit on the ground. I unwrap the tamales and give one to the girl while I feed the boy the other. The girl eats her tamale quickly and goes back to the Mexican woman who gives her another tamale.

The boy eats slowly. When he has swallowed a few mouthfuls he falls asleep. The girl eats her second tamale and curls up on the ground beside me and falls asleep, too.

Christine brings me my basket and says, “Now what are you going to do?”

And I wake up.

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Gaza prayer song by Todd on YouTube and Apple.

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Living In Fog

Twenty years ago while hunting for a house to rent in Mendocino, I had lunch with a local who gave me some valuable information about life here, including where here is. Mendocino is the name of a town, true, but when a local says he or she lives in Mendocino, he or she means they live somewhere between Westport in the north and Elk in the south, and somewhere on the coast to ten miles inland.

This local also forewarned me about the dense summer fog that can blanket the coast for weeks and even months at a stretch permitting no sun to shine upon the land. She said many people here succumb to fog-induced depression that can only be cured by going inland a few miles where the sun is shining brightly.

How right she was. We are currently in week two of Life In Fog, and though I’m accustomed to these stretches of gray timelessness, the body mind spirit consortium is really put to the test by this lack of sun. By that I mean, one doesn’t have to succumb to the gloom, but if one is already feeling a bit blue about something, the blues may easily grab one.

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Speaking of the blues, for most of my life I felt mighty blue about the unwillingness of humans to forsake violence and greed to work for the greater good of humanity and to work for the good of our mother earth who is hurting so badly from humanity’s misuse of her.

Now I’m no longer blue about that because I came to realize with the ascendancy of Trump and how his adherents and many others behaved during the Pandemic, and watching how things are unfolding now, that humans are behaving as humans have behaved since we evolved into modern humans a few hundred thousand years ago.

As with all other species of life on earth, our priorities are: having sufficient food and water, not being too hot or too cold, procreating, and protecting our offspring until they are able to survive on their own. If we have the time and the means to do things to give ourselves pleasure we’ll do that, too. And most importantly, we don’t care about other species except to try to eat them or use them to fulfill our priorities.

Yes, a tiny minority of humans deviate from this self-serving behavior, and some pre-industrial societies developed collective behavior practices designed to not overuse resources so future generations would have enough to eat, but by and large humans do what all species do: we take care of ourselves in the short term. And we think anyone who suggests we do otherwise is crazy.

For instance, air travel has been proven through many meticulous studies to be the cause of at least 25% of all greenhouse gases and the attendant global warming, and that number is probably closer to 50%. Yet millions of people who claim to care about the environment and the future of the earth continue to fly in jets multiple times a year. This seeming hypocrisy used to give me the blues. Now I understand these people are simply being human and giving themselves pleasure in the short term. They don’t really care about anything else. That’s how humans are.

And that, I feel, is why we the people elected Trump. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is: a self-serving human being just like the rest of us.

Or maybe I just feel this way because I haven’t seen the sun in a week.

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Troo Romanz piano/drum duet on YouTube and Spotify.

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Good Things

Headlands Fleurs

There is a boggy place on the headlands just to the south of Main Street in Mendocino where the flowers this year are more lush and spectacular than I’ve ever seen them, and the bumblebees are in ecstasy visiting the myriad blooms.

Farmers Market

Every Friday from noon to 2:30 until October is the Mendocino Farmers Market. Such fun. I go every week and buy sunflower-seed sprouts and tamales, and this week I got a jar of ambrosial apricot jam, a jar of Laytonville honey, a jar of cannabis healing salve that really works, and a spectacular bunch of radishes.

The Bear Came

This morning I went out to cut a zucchini from my one zucchini plant growing in my orchard tub and found a bear had knocked over one our garden refuse cans to root around in the kitchen compost.

We call any bear who knocks over cans in our neighborhood the bear, though we’ve never actually seen the bear in the thirteen years we’ve lived in this house. He or she visits us during the night. We know the bear is different bears, but for some reason we like calling them the bear.

And though cleaning up the bear mess is a gucky chore, I’m always happy when the bear visits us so long as he or she doesn’t try to get through or over our deer fence. I like the idea of him or her out there sniffing around.

Sugar Snap Peas and Carrots

In my orchard tubs protected by the aforementioned deer fence, we have had the most successful crops of sugar-snap peas and carrots we’ve ever had. The lettuce crop has been good, the scallions marvelous, the sunflowers still stalks and no flowers, arugula plentiful, radishes ample, parsley galore, and the snap peas and carrots magnifico.

Lemons

Our lemon trees are also having a fabulous time this summer. I’m staying on top of feeding them and watering them, and we’ve had bumblebees and hummingbirds doing a great job pollinating them in the absence of honeybees. How lucky we are to have such a profusion of those tasty yellow orbs.

Reviews of The Farm at the East Cove Hotel

I’ve had several emails and letters and even some phone calls from people telling me how much they enjoyed my latest book The Farm at the East Cove Hotel, but until recently no one had posted a review of the book on Amazon, and finally someone has posted a nice encouraging five-star review there to go along with two good ones at Goodreads. Hurray!

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Todd’s happy song Wake Up Thinking About You from his album Dream of You

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Robin Hood

In the myth I liked to enact as a kid, Robin Hood was a witty swashbuckler who didn’t have to help poor people and could have enjoyed the patronage of the evil king and his even more evil henchman the Sheriff of Nottingham, but Robin felt it was shamefully wrong that so few people should own almost everything while everybody else was starving to death.

The final straw for my Robin Hood came when the king and his amoral cohorts raised taxes even higher on people already literally dying under debt. Robin Hood said, “Enough already,” and started waylaying rich people traveling through Sherwood Forest and taking their money and jewels to buy food to give to the poor. But Robin didn’t just take their money. He brought them to a feast in the forest where he was taking care of a bunch of hungry people, and he introduced the rich people to the poor people so the rich people would learn that poor people were exactly the same as rich people except for one thing: they weren’t the children of rich people.

When I would enact my Robin Hood dramas with my friends, I usually played the part of Robin Hood, and my friends would play the parts of Friar Tuck, Little John, and Will Scarlett, and they would all best me at combat. Even so, they liked having me lead them in our skirmishes with the Sheriff of Nottingham because I knew how the story went and they weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next.

We even had little leather pouches full of rocks (money) we took from the rich, usually invisible but we knew they were there, and gave to the poor, also usually invisible but easily imagined from seeing the Errol Flynn movie version of Robin Hood several times.

These enactments always made us happy. And I think that was because we knew instinctively that sharing was the way to go. Indeed, I think it was in our bones, our genes, in the evolution of our species to share in order to survive. Nobody should be rich at the expense of other people, especially when there’s plenty of food and money for everybody.

Little did we know we were socialists and the king and his lords were capitalists, but that’s the story we were playing out, creating a world of sharing and equity.

Now the actual ruler of America and his greedy henchmen have raised taxes on the already desperately poor, taken away medical care for tens of millions of people, and are creating a society resembling the England of Robin Hood’s time.

This time, however, the rulers have made sure guys with bows and arrows won’t stand a chance against vast numbers of soldiers armed with powerful weapons. There is no fun way to bring about a just and equitable society because, quite frankly, we waited too long to do anything about these greedy guys taking over all the branches of our government.

So what do we do? Elect people who want to take from the rich and give to the poor, assuming the rich ever let us have a fair election again.

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Everybody Has To Breathe from Todd’s CD Hip Salon

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Parallel Worlds

Most of us live in many parallel worlds simultaneously. I don’t mean parallel dimensions, I mean in this dimension we operate in several realities or mental states in the course of a day, an hour, a minute.

I, for instance, ache with sorrow about the genocide in Gaza and the annihilation of the rain forests and the ascendancy of thugs to positions of ultimate power in our authoritarian government, and I also have a dandy of a toothache and hope I make it to next Thursday when my dentist will save me.

I’m writing a new novel that is gushing out faster than I can write the words down. The story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Gaza, but of course it is all about people trying to overcome terrible wounds that have left them vulnerable and afraid and unsure of themselves. And I just chopped some firewood for tonight’s fire and read an email about a friend surviving heart surgery and the plants in my garden are calling to me, “Water! Water! We need water!”

All these things are going on simultaneously and may not seem connected to each other, but right below the surface I discover they are not only connected, they are one. My garden is part of the plant kingdom struggling to survive climate change as is the Amazonian Rain Forest trying to survive climate change and human overpopulation. My heart aching for the innocent people being tortured and killed in Gaza is such a huge ache it has reached my tooth. Everything we experience is part of the same unfathomably complex matrix of realities adding up to this one seeming reality.

Buddha said the way not to succumb to sorrow or anger or hopelessness is to calm the chattering brain by focusing on our breathing and bringing our thoughts to a standstill to experience this moment. Now. Remembering this, having this understanding in mind, we proceed with kindness and thoughtfulness and love. Now.

We may never succeed in changing the overarching narrative of the greater world from violence and cruelty and greed, to non-violence, kindness, and generosity. Striving for such change is a noble calling, every bit as noble as practicing loving kindness.

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Todd’s musical prayer for Gaza on Youtube and Spotify

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Imagine No Dishonesty

I was trying to think of good ideas for signs to take to rallies in support of democracy and the rule of law in America. I came up with Imagine No Dishonesty in the manner of John Lennon’s Imagine lyrics, and I thought the idea was pretty good until I fell to pondering the subjective nature of honesty and dishonesty.

So I decided a less confusing sign would be Imagine No Intentional Dishonesty. But then I realized intentional dishonesty is simply lying, which brought me to Imagine No Lying.

I tried to imagine a political system in which no one lies, and that tickled me for a few minutes until I came back around to the subjective nature of truth. We have a President who, from my point of view, lies constantly. Yet I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think he’s lying. I think he thinks everything he says is the truth. And what about the millions of people who believe everything he says? From their point of view he is incapable of lying.

Recently the President said, “America won World War II. If America hadn’t won World War II you would all be speaking German now, or Japanese.” When I heard him say this I realized that was exactly what I’d been taught in school and through popular culture when I was growing up: that until the United States entered the war on the side of the allies, the Germans and Japanese were winning the war. I was also taught that America won the war by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing hundreds of thousands of people instantly.

Then I went to college, and though I only stayed in college for two years, I had some fascinating eye-opening courses, one of which everyone in my class of 1967 at Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz was required to take. The course was entitled Stability and Change in the USSR from 1917 to the Present, taught by a brilliant professor from Hungary.

One of the many things I liked about this professor was that he urged us to thoroughly research anything he told us in his lectures that we had a hard time believing. And one of the things he told us that I had trouble believing (regarding whether America was the reason the allies won World War II) was that for every division the German army had on the western front fighting America, Great Britain, and France, they had five divisions on the eastern front fighting the Russians.

Now if what my professor told us was true, then for every million soldiers Germany had fighting America, Great Britain, and France, they had five million troops fighting Russia. And it was Germany exhausting five times as much of their resources and military might against Russia that was a primary contributor to the collapse of the German War machine. I spent hours and days in the university library researching this hard-to-believe thing my professor told us, and found his assertion to be true.

Yet prior to learning this truth, I was absolutely certain that what I previously believed to be the truth was the truth.

So I abandoned my Imagine No Dishonesty sign idea and came up with Imagine Government Founded On Kindness and Generosity. This, of course, is rife with words and ideas every bit as subjective as truth, but I like imagining my notions of kindness and generosity as the foundations for everything our next government does.

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