In my house, we refer to my weekly online church stuff as “the broadcast.” Since I am doing live music for it the house has to be as quiet as possible. So far this has worked pretty well. I played banjo and guitar this morning and it seem to go well. Today is Pete Seeger’s birthday. According to Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, Seeger’s parents were professional classical musicians and he rejected that heritage and wanted to be a painter. Then he heard the banjo and fell in love with the sound. I must say I can understand that because I have a fondness for the sound myself and so do the people at my church..
I have been thinking a lot about the precedents for Dante’s Commedia. In Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseys visits Hell and speaks with some dead people he knew included Achilles. In Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VI), Aeneas does likewise. Dante did not read Homer but he did know Virgil’s works.
“Dante, Homer, and Virgil in Raphael’s Parnassus, 1510-11”
Kent State and the War That Never Ended | The New Yorker
2 Killed in Jackson, 4 Killed in Kent, 6 Killed in Augusta in 1970, The anniversary is upon us and Jill Lepore intelligently expands and fills in the notions about the difference between only seeing the white anti-war demonstrators and missing the real picture. She is my kind of historian. Excellent read.
Presence of guns escalates protests across country
“Systemically, blackness is treated like a more dangerous weapon than a white man’s gun ever will, while whiteness is the greatest shield of safety,” said Brittany Packnett, a prominent national activist who protested in Ferguson.
The Michigan demonstrators, she added, “are what happens when people of racial privilege confuse oppression with inconvenience. No one is treading on their rights. We’re all just trying to live.”
These two links are related, eh?