Birdwood

Professor Larry Sabato's Center for Politics is looking to renovate and move into Birdwood, an 1819 Albemarle County historic home near the Boar's Head Inn. Here's a Daily Progress article on the proposed $10 million dollar renovation. Here is a link to some pictures of Birdwood. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (scroll down).

Author Runs for Senate

I am delighted to see that a highly regarded writer is running for the Senate in Virginia. This is not a phony campaign biography. I will read James Webb's study of my ancestors, the Scots-Irish, and report back shortly. Meanwhile, here is the first chapter of the book courtesy of Amazon.

Down In Virginia

The day dawns early and lasts so long,
Down in Virginia,
The fertile fields resound with happy song,
Down in Virginia.
Rich lands like these we long have sought,
And mourned because we found them not.
But now our dream is o'er all else forgot
In fertile Old Virginia.

The crops are nowhere on earth so sure
As in Virginia.
The water from her gushing springs so pure
Down in Virginia.
The peanuts nowhere grow so sweet,
And nowhere can early vegetables be beat,
The summer and spring so closely meet,
Down in Virginia.

Nowhere on earth is woman's smile so sweet
As in Virginia,
So bright to fair so hard to beat,
As in Virginia.
The mountain breezes give her cheeks a hue,
Her natural ways add grace to hearts so true,
And often think as a bachelor I'll sue
For a wife down in Virginia.

From a postcard of Roanoke postmarked May 1937-- the poem is printed over a picture of the Jefferson and Walnut Avenue bridges. I could not find any mention of the (not so good) poem on Google.

Paris: 100 years ago and now

Eugene Atget is considered to have been one of the greatest photographers who ever lived. His pictures of Paris, taken before and after the turn of the 20th century, are well known. In the late 90s another photographer named Rauschenberg retraced Atget's steps and took the same photos. This site lines up the new ones and the old ones, side by side. This is one of the best photo collections I have ever seen on the web.

Blind Willie McTell

One of my favorite Dylan songs is Blind Willie McTell. Dylan recorded the song in 1981 for "Infidels" but decided not to put it on the album, thus depriving himself of the opportunity to make his best record since "Blood on the Tracks." ("Blind Willie McTell" was finally released in the early 90s on the first "Bootleg Series" record.)

The other day I posted about 'St James Infirmary," and linked to Arlo's version of the New Orleans standard. After having the song stuck in my head all week, I just figured out that Dylan took the melody of "St. James Infirmary" for "Blind Willie McTell." It turns out, at least according to this and this, that I was right.

The lyrics to "Blind Willie McTell are some of the best Dylan ever wrote. Here is a link to a superb cover of the song by the post-Robbie Robertson Band.

Trading Freedom for "Security"

This is a good op-ed piece from Leonard Pits of the Miami Herald that addresses a recent episode in the Montgomery County (MD) library in which a couple of overly zealous county department of Homeland Secuity officers began a confrontation with internet users in a public library. Here is the Washington Post article that described the library incident. It is good to see such absurdity brought to light; at the same time one wonders how much of this sort of thing goes on unreported.

Welcome to the Post-Literate Society

Here's a brief Wired article on the havoc email and the internet are inflicting on writing. Here's a Slashdot thread on the article. The article contains a link to another headline I wanted to link to this week, citing the fact that a reader of an email has only a 50% chance of correctly ascertaining the tone of said email.

Edit: The "another headline" link -- the one about the tone of an email-- was fixed.

St. James Infirmary

This is a blog about one song-- "St. James Infirmary." It started after the writer received an overwhelming response to this excellent essay, which traces the famous New Orleans song, allegedly written in the 1920s, all the way back to its roots in Ireland. There are 104 versions of the song on the iTunes music store. Here is an itunes link to Arlo Guthrie doing the key lyrics.

I found the blog on Alex Ross's excellent site.

Abingdon: American Dream Town

I'm a big fan of Abingdon; as a Lexington native I feel most at ease there; along with Fincastle, Charlottesville (around the University) and Old Town Alexandria. Abingdon has been chosen the 2006 American Dream Town.

The Cartoons

I've been on a fairly long stretch of Virginia only postings; when I started this blog last July I figured I would blog about arts and culture and Virginiana but I managed to get on a long tear of Virginiana-first posting with occasional lapses into arts and culture with Virginia angles. Anyway, today I read a piece of writing that caused me to abandon my Virginia-centrism. It is an article about the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons that is brilliant. Read it before you read the rest of this post. A friend emailed it to me and I read it and this was my reply (expanded here for clarity):

A brilliant piece. 100% spot on. The author's stance as someone sympathetic to calls for diversity and tolerance who suddenly regrets it, in the face of violent idiocy, reminds me of the plight anti-McCarthy liberals who had to regret defending Hiss when it turned out that Hiss really wa a spy. Sometimes life teaches you that what you want to believe really isn't true-- to be a real grown up you have to learn that not everything is going to comport with your world views. If this thoughtful Englishman represents English thought, perhaps England will avoid taking the European "thank you sir may I have another" route of spineless, needless and fearful apology.

Finally, here is a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that points out that the prohibition of depictions of Mohammed has never been very strenuously observed, even by Muslims.

Ota Benga of Lynchburg

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a piece on Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Belgian Congo who was purchased by an agent for the St. Louis World's Fair in 1903. After the fair, he was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo. In 1910, he moved to Lynchburg and lived at the Virginia Seminary. He worked in a tobacco factory for a period of time before he killed himself in 1916. Here's his Wikipedia entry.

Appalachian School of Law and Guns

I was in Grundy today and I had a few spare moments; I walked over and took a look at the very nice facility of the Appalachian School of Law. The school has several memorials to the victims of the shootings there in 2002; the victims were Dean Anthony Sutin, Professor Tom Blackwell, and student Angela Dales.

The ASL shooting has become something of a flashpoint in the gun rights movement. Here is a representative article laying out the pro-gun side of the story, which was later picked up by anti-liberal media crusader Bernard Goldberg and pro-gun writer John R. Lorr Jr. (link). I had not seen the story rebutted until I read this letter in today's Roanoke Times.

Intelligent Design at NVCC

This is a very good Washington Post article about evolution/Darwinism v. Intelligent Design in academia. I mention it here because it begins at Northern Virginia Community College, and because it is very well and fairly written. The author is going to have a live online discussion about the article on February 6. The Post does a terrific job with online discussions, and I will post a link to the discussion here after it takes place.

The New World continued

The New World (reviewed below) which is sinking fast at the box office, is a work of art that does great honor to Virginia and which needs to be seen on the big screen. Here is the excellent Wikipedia entry on the New World . If you still had any doubt that the Oscars are a joke, the omission of Q'Orianka Kilcher from the Best Actress category should remove any such reservation. (Note, however, that The New World was nominated for cimematography.)

Virginia Political Blogs

Here is a great piece on Virginia Political Blogs in the American Journalism Review by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post. I have regularly read every single one of the blogs mentioned in this piece since last summer, except for this one, which happens to actually be written by someone I have met. And (of course), it turns out that Marc Fisher, author of the article, has a blog of his own that often addresses Virginia topics.