This Sunday, 21 March, is the 325th Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. If that seems like a long time ago, it was. Long enough, in fact, to take a very lively and real person and turn his work into a kind of holy writ and the man himself into a deity. But this personality who can speak to us through so many centuries was, like so many legends, even more than his myth – he is an example. His birthday is as good a time as any to understand the simple gifts he keeps giving us.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
St. Patrick’s Day
This piece is a repeat from two years ago – I don’t have anything to add. The re-run gives me more time to enjoy the day. Sláinte!
Good people go to Heaven, but the Celts went everywhere. There isn’t a corner of the globe where you can’t find us if you look hard enough. Nations as far flung as Canada and Australia are largely Celtic in origin, and the majority of those Celts came from Ireland.
Our people have wandered the earth like almost no other, and for one day we all return home with the help of a hyphen. Many of us become Irish-Americans or Irish-Canadians on Saint Patrick’s day when any other day American or Canadian would be enough. We drink up well in pubs, cheer on the bagpipers, and think back to what our ancestors must have gone through to get us where we are.
Smell of Spring
Spring has come to Saint Paul – or so we’d like to think. One day above 60F doesn’t make a Spring, but it certainly has the snow melting, the water flowing, and the potential for a serious Mississippi flood rising. It’s awfully early to call it for real, given the lack of a vivid green budding smell in the air, but a nose full of memories knows what is on the way. Damp and slightly rotten has a smell of life all its own to those who let the stories flow.
March Madness
March is the big month for Downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s certainly not because of the dreary, drippy weather that gets everyone a bit down after a while. It’s our month because it’s Tournament Time, the giddy sidewalks packed with people in town to see, in turn, the Boys High School Wrestling Tournament, the Boys Hockey Tournament, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) Tournament, and sandwiched in there somewhere the bacchanal of Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s a good time to see what works for our city because, after all, the place is bubbling with life and energy and a lot of cash being spent.
Quotations
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
The use of quotations from famous people long gone is an easy way to dress up a blog or other writing. It can be done as an epigram that frames the piece, as I did here, or something that inspires a work and sneaks in gradually. More often than not it’s an appeal to authority, a claim on the mind of someone long gone who is revered one way or the other. When it’s done well it crystallizes the point being made into an image that is memorable and mythical. That’s what makes quotations useful.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 