Notes From All Over -- The "Siberia Weather" Edition -- June 28, 2020

Global warming: This past week, The Bismarck Tribune was played. They had a huge article (and a tweet) that the temperature in Siberia this past week hit an unprecedented 100°F. In fact, that temperature was previously recorded in 1915.

Worth a thousand words:

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The Literature Page

Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly, c. 1938; second printing, 1948; new foreword, 2008.

I absolutely cannot recommend this book to a general audience. One has to be an Anglophile through-and-through, and a "Brit lit' fanatic to maybe even come close to enjoying this book. I'm neither -- neither an Anglophile through-and-through or a "Bit lit" fanatic, but enough of each to really enjoy the book.

I enjoy the book for any number of reasons, but really unable to explain why.

Much of it has to do with my years in Yorkshire, northern England, where I started my very, very aggressive reading program back in 2002, I believe it was.

Perhaps, mostly, I like it because of the idioms and phrases, from a book which goes all the way back to 1938, from a writer who was in elementary school during WWI and a literary critic during WWII. 

The book is divided into three sections. The first two sections have to do with literary analysis. I skipped to the third section and am reading it first. The third section is the author's memoirs.

Cyril Connolly was about ten or eleven years old when he was sent away to his first 24/7 boarding school, St Wulfric's on the coast, the southeastern coast of England, south of London. From there he would "transfer" to Eton.

He says he was sent away to St Wulfric's when the war broke out -- if accurate, that was July, 2014, and he would have been eleven years old, or thereabout. St Wulfric's is for boys aged 4 to 14. 

I was blown away when I read that his two best friends were Cecil Beaton and George Orwell. Of course, I had not heard of the former, but everyone has heard of the latter. It turns out that Orwell and Connolly competed with writing poetry, and finding favor with the headmaster and headmistress by the list of books they checked out from the school's library.

But George Orwell. Wow. I never thought of George Orwell being ten years old. LOL. In fact, on page 163, Cyril Connolly writes this about Orwell: ".... he was one of those boys who seem born old."

I remember my summer at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, take a humanities course in Romanticism. It was there that I first met some of the boys that seemed born old. Wow, I was out of my element, but I survived -- one of the best experiences I ever had. It's too bad; due to Covid-19 a lot of those summer experiences are going to be missed by a lot of "kids." It makes me very, very sad when I think about it, and think about our oldest granddaughter. She is one of those that seems mature beyond her years and would benefit greatly from a "St Olaf" experience.

This is her, at the helm, last summer, on the Aegean Sea, sailing among the Greek islands.

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Old Love

Old Love, Twelve Bar Blues Band
Live at the BluesMoose Café, the Netherlands.

You can almost hear some riffs / some phrasing from some old Beatles songs.

And this is why, link here.

For You Blue, George Harrison, the Beatles