… now being conducted by researchers from the University of Prince Edward Island (where UD once gave a paper about James Merrill’s poem Santorini) gives UD an excuse to update you on her own singing.

Faithful UD readers already know that UD loves to sing Henry Purcell’s songs (This year is the 350th anniversary of his birth.)  (And look what I get when I Google News him!  From an interview with British musician and novelist John Wesley Harding:

Purcell is kind of a bit of an obsession of mine, and my third novel [coming out this year] is about a composer who writes the first great English opera since “Dido and Aeneas.” … Singers like myself — folk singers or pop singers or whatever — there’s a real kinship with the baroque because it’s based on the same song structures as I use.

Er, close parenthesis somewhere.

UD also loves to sing jazz, and her latest enthusiasm there is Witchcraft by Carolyn Leigh in The Collection of Jazz Music. (Lyrics and a recording here.)

While the song doesn’t have a challenging range (only goes up to a D, a note UD can hit in her sleep), it moves sexily up the scale and has clever, naughty words. The last phrase is hokey (’cause there’s no nicer witch than you!), but the rest of the song shimmers.

… from Québec, where he
delivered a paper – in French!
– at the Hôtel du Parlement.

The Université Laval sponsored
the conference, on the subject
of constitutions.

Mr UD wore his Université
Laval tie, inherited from his father, to
whom Laval gave an honorary doctorate.

La Kid’s visiting a friend in Scotland.
She is, according to her Gchat message,
“very happy.”

My dog killed and semi-ate a baby squirrel this afternoon.

I heard the baby’s muffled shrieks quite clearly, since I was in my bedroom (reading James Agee: Selected Poems, sent to me by its editor, Andrew Hudgins, an old friend of this blog who read of my enthusiasm for Agee here) and the dog was in his fenced-in yard just outside the bedroom’s sliding doors.

I didn’t know I was hearing my dog killing a squirrel. My house sits in the middle of a wide, long, heavily wooded lot, and from my bedroom I often hear, late at night, animals tormenting and killing other animals. My vague assumption is that I’m hearing foxes killing rabbits. Along with coyote and deer and owls and raccoons and hawks and opossums and turtles and crows and mice and mourning doves and cats and bats and rats and minks, many foxes and rabbits live on our half-acre. I assumed this was a late afternoon version of the fox/rabbit scenario.

But how could that be? I looked up from my book. In the fox/rabbit scenario, the shrieks aren’t muffled. They’re piercing.

From my bed I saw my dog leap about in an unfamiliar way. Something flapped in his mouth.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

As I dealt with this problem, I began a mental reckoning of the whole animal thing around here, a green corner of urban Bethesda, Maryland.

Around here. Just on our property.

There are the massive holes in a neat straight line down the sides of our wood house, put there by generations of woodpeckers. There are the slightly less massive holes, in no particular pattern, behind our house, above the sliding doors to the deck — the work of generations of carpenter bees.

I’m always batting away spider webs on my way out of the house.  Dead snakes make concentric circles in the street.  Beetles and potato bugs and worms swarm when you shift a particle of dirt.  Don’t get me started on mosquitoes.

When you turn on the basement light on your way to the washing machine, teams of crickets hop up your legs.

Birds are always hurling themselves against our sliding glass doors.  Sometimes they die.

Sometimes hundreds of crows come to town and caw for days.

Faithful readers will recall that last summer, returning from a week in Upstate, New York, Les UDs discovered a dead deer a few feet from their back steps.

There’s almost always something living in the attic, making housekeeping sounds.  Last time Mr UD was up there, he called down to UD.

“Know those snorkel fins?  Something ate them.”

Something very big is up there at the moment.  Gotta call animal control again.

And yes.  Every time they come they nail shut more entry points.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Sure, there’s an upside.  During the summer, on very dark nights, when you walk out back, you drift into a golden field of fireflies.  Butterflies and hummingbirds buzz the plants out front.

A few years ago, a charming toad took up such long residence beside our front door that I named her —  Elpheba.

When you sit on our green Adirondack chairs, cats appear out of nowhere and kiss your knees.

Portions of the property are well-established settlements.  The mourning doves gather to cluck and coo in a clearing a few steps up the hill behind the house.  The foxes have their dens on the other side of the fence at the top of the property, in the narrow strip of wood before the land drops down to the train tracks.  The rabbits inhabit a stand of honeysuckle halfway to the hilltop.  The deer can be found lying at leisure in groups of four or five way up the hill, in a thick copse.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

To some extent, the animals have succeeded in keeping me off my own property.  Since my dog goes apeshit when he sees deer, I have to retreat when I’m walking him out back and deer appear.  Which is often.  This afternoon, a large rabbit insisted on staying put close to us, and I had to place my body between the rabbit and the dog to keep the dog from rushing the rabbit.  The noisy carnage out there in the evenings discourages me from night walks.

My punning is a real embarrassment, isn’t it? I mean, it would be, if I were capable of being embarrassed.

It’s going to be hard to beat The George Washington University in famous-for-D.C. star power at its commencement ceremony. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will deliver the school’s keynote address on the National Mall on Sunday, May 17.

Strengths: Incredibly powerful politician and policy leader + charismatic, passionate personality = commencement speaker gold. Also, many ladies of our acquaintance insist he’s easy on the eyes. Who are we to argue?

Weaknesses: He’s always got the potential to go off script and say something provocative or even offensive, embarrassing poor grandma. But this could just as easily be listed in the “strengths” category.

… from Key West, UD‘s been spring cleaning.

Yesterday, Les UD‘s bought sphagnum moss
for their topiary bulls. (The bulls honor
Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
who lived in UD‘s house.)

This morning, while pressing the moss
into the topiary’s frames, UD prepared
various clever sallies to use when passersby
remarked, as she knew they would, on her
activity. She practiced the lines in her head
— timing, tone, facial expression, etc.

Right away, two women walking two black
labs stopped just outside UD‘s wooden fence.

“So… Look what you’re doing…”

You could tell this woman wanted to say
something clever but couldn’t.

Okay. Here goes.

“Don’t you two stuff your bulls every morning?”

UD chose this riposte because it sounded obscene.

The women, unfazed, came right back.

“No,” said one of them. “I stuff myself full of bull every morning.”

Although this riposte was as meaningless as UD‘s sally, UD liked it. She found it, speed-of-ripostewise, impressive.

… cynical recruitment strategies for its men’s basketball team produce all kinds of problems — including, most recently, loss of a scholarship. Having “fail[ed] to meet the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate cut score,” it is now “the highest-profile of three area programs to suffer penalties in the annual evaluation.”

… at a State Department memorial ceremony today can be found here.

Adkins, a George Washington University graduate, was killed on his first diplomatic mission for the Foreign Service.

La Kid as…

… Batgirl.

UD thanks her sister for forwarding the photo.

… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older.  Why is there something?  What is nothing?  A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”

For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art.  My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.

Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.”  I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s.  They might have been more intense than other people’s.  After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.

Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.

*********************************

Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:

What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.

Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.

********************************

Update, correction:

A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.

… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.

… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.

… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.

Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.

On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.

After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.

UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.

… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.

An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.

While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.

This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)

Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.

“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”

I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)

Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique.  He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.

***********************

End of first half.  Must walk dog.  It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get.  Ne quittez pas.

… are female freshman roommates at George Washington University.

La Kid is not one of them.

… at the height of spring, and as you know if you read UD with care, her town is an old, well-tended arboretum.

As the cab from the airport drove down Argyle Hill, the driver AND UD, who has had decades to get used to Garrett Park in the spring, both gasped.

It was the whiteness of the dogwoods pouring down the hill to Wells Park that got to UD and the cabbie.  Massed, moving with the car and the wind, bright against the afternoon’s dreariness, the trees glittered like ocean foam.

Underneath them, white hosta flowers and white azaleas churned.  Above, the ancient town evergreens ruled the waves.

More than enough compensation for my loss of the tropical sun.

… a tribute to Mother Earth.

Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, that is, and the song my ‘thesdan playmate played for me in the year of Earth Day’s founding.

I’ve never stopped listening to it and singing it.

*********************

Earth Day Fun Fact!

UD went to Kensington Junior High School with Happy Nelson, son of Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin), who started Earth Day.

********************

One more thing. If UD does have an Earth Day post, I guess it’d be this one, from earlier this year, at Rehoboth Beach.

In a Crimson article with suggestions for reducing the university’s budget, the writer includes this:

Harvard should cut its wasteful internal public relations division. The Harvard Gazette and the other fluff put out by the Harvard Office of Communications ought to be axed on both financial and environmental grounds. The publications and their staffs cost a few million dollars each year. Externally, they do nothing to strengthen Harvard’s brand. Internally, they are regarded as propaganda.

Certainly UD has complained for years on this blog about too much Harvard propaganda in her mailbox. But why not let some of this stuff go online?

After all, UD has a soft spot for the Gazette.

… of the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, “one of our most visible and prestigious means of recognizing [teaching] excellence.”