The Bard of Maplewood

I wondered what had happened to Daniel Smythe, my grandmother's poetry teacher, who was kind enough to give some of my juvenile efforts a going over. It turns out that he died 3 years before she did:

Saturday, June 2, 2007

The Bard of Maplewood

I remember standing alone in front of my house after a deep, winter snow. The world evoked Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Along came a man, walking down the middle of the street where the snow was packed. He was wearing a trench coat, and a fedora capped his head, above his ruddy face.

It was Daniel Webster Smythe, a poet.

I knew this because my parents had told me, and, like my father, Mr. Smythe worked at Bradley University. I don’t think I ever spoke a word to Mr. Smythe in my whole life, though his friendly wife Ruth, with the sound of Cape Cod still in her voice, occasionally visited my mother. She would take mom to their book crammed house, five places down from ours, looking for some thing or another. The Smythe’s had two children, a boy and a girl, who were grown by the time we came along.

So, all I really know of Daniel Smythe is what I learned reading his poems and bits of public information about him. He was a widely published poet with poems in more than 100 publications, including the New Yorker and Harper’s. He won the Annual Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1940 and many other prizes during his life.

Before his academic career, Mr. Smythe worked on a farm in New Hampshire and on a wildlife sanctuary in New York, which perhaps explains why so many of his poems have nature as their theme. He served in the armed forces during World War II, and he came to Bradley in about 1949 to teach American literature and creative writing.

Daniel Smythe was praised by many influential poets, including Robert Frost, about whom he wrote a book, Robert Frost Speaks.

The book of poems on my shelf entitled, The Best Poems of Daniel Smythe, is inscribed, “For Ed & Mary King With best wishes, Daniel Smythe Thanksgiving 1974” He died seven years later.

I didn’t know when I saw him walking down the street that I would one day take classes in creative writing—poetry no less—as a graduate student at Bradley. Poetry—it’s a word that makes a lot of people, including me, a little nervous. There’s a kind of mystery about it. I think poetry has something to do with trying to see the world with fresh eyes and translating the observations into fresh language, though this is a stale way of putting it.

Well, as the saying goes, “I know what I like.” Here is a poem from Daniel Smythe’s anthology. It’s not one of his many award winners, but I like it.

THE BEACH

Landscape,
sea-bird,
shell shape,
sea heard.

Fog snug,
beach rose,
rockweed rug
grows and grows.

The snail hut,
word-lost shore –
this is what
I am looking for.

Posted by Maria Carroll at 5:53 AM

Treasure Hunt

My mother (79) passed away suddenly at the end of September. I feel very close to her now when I sort through her junk drawers. This is what I've found so far, neatly packed into an impenetrable mass:

30 plastic coffee can lids

40 metal caps to vitamin bottles from the 70's

20 packets of powdered silica from same bottles (kept out moisture)

25 plastic coffee scoops

10 nested plastic Robitussin medicine cups

10 keys from old style of sardine tins (which were discontinued sometime in the 80's or 90's)

1 miniature replica Swiss battle-axe (God knows why!)

a sheaf of junk mail dating from 1972

my 2nd quarter 4th grade report card from Mrs. Reis ("needs to finish assignments in a timely fashion")

a Ziplock bag w' about 50 plastic bread tags in a variety of colors, all neatly collated

12 mesh onion bags

50 matchbooks

25 boxes of birthday cake candles, some put back used (washed first, but still...eww!)

her 1957 Red Cross swim instructor membership card

ancient packets of soy sauce and ketchup from restaurants that went out of business 30 years ago

and enough Howard Johnson's sugar packs to stop an army of diabetics in its tracks.


I dreamt that she baked blueberry brownies (never had any like that) and left them in the refrigerator for me. I went to bed completely exhausted, but woke up feeling better after that.

Clam Cakes

The other day I got this tasty recipe for clam cakes from a lady who grew up just south of here in Rhode Island. She now lives to the north in New Hampshire.


Hi Shelley,

I noticed your blog regarding New England Clam Chowdah. I live in NH but lived originally in RI for 30 years. I grew up on RI Clam Chowdah and Clamcakes. There used to be a Chowdah House at an old amusement park that was always full in the summer time and all they sold was Clam Cakes and Chowdah. I don't remember ever having been served Manhattan Clam Chowder (tomato broth not cream) as the New Clam Chowdah was so much better and being from Southern New England, why would we grow up with anything else?? I noticed that people in Northern New England however are not familiar with Clam Cakes, they think they are like Crab Cakes (which I don't know what they are)! In RI, Clam Cakes are huge and people would always buy them by the dozen with their chowder. They are the size of golfballs and are addicting. Being in my mid-forties, I try to stay away from deep fried anything but if you want to add something a lot tastier than cornbread as an accompaniment to your Clam Chowder, try these! In RI we also call them Quahogs.

RI Clam Cakes

½ cp clams or quahogs, chopped

½ c. clam juice

1 egg

1 ¼ cp flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

1/3 cp milk

Mix dry ingredients; add milk and egg. Fold in clams and clam juice. Heat 2 or 3 inches of oil in pan or fryolator. (Oil is hot when a drop of clam cake mix floats immediately to the top). When brown, turn cake once. Remove and dry on paper towel. Eat warm! Happy eating! (This recipe I took from a cookbook made by my elementary school close to 20 years ago). I personally would drop much bigger than teaspoons, although they do puff up. The ones I am used to eating puff up to the size of golf balls and would be dropped by rounded tablespoons.

Sincerely,

Terry Gadoury

W.B.Yeats 'Lake Isle of Innisfree'

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Solar Images Show Green And Blue Flashes

Green flash at top of solar image. (Credit: Copyright Stéphane Guisard (ESO))

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) — Cerro Paranal, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope, is certainly one of the best astronomical sites on the planet. Stunning images, obtained by ESO staff at Paranal, of the green and blue flashes, as well as of the so-called 'Gegenschein', are real cases in point.

The Earth's atmosphere is a gigantic prism that disperses sunlight. In the most ideal atmospheric conditions, such as those found regularly above Cerro Paranal, this will lead to the appearance of so-called green and blue flashes at sunset. The phenomenon is so popular on the site that it is now the tradition for the Paranal staff to gather daily on the telescope platform to observe the sunset and its possible green flash before starting their long night of observations.

The green and blue flashes are fleeting events that require an unobstructed view of the setting Sun, and a very stable atmosphere. These conditions are very often met at Paranal, a 2635m high mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, where the sky is cloudless more than 300 days a year. Paranal is home of ESO's Very Large Telescope, an ensemble of four 8.2-m telescopes and four 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes that together form the world's most advanced optical telescope.

ESO staff Stéphane Guisard has been chasing green flashes for many years and has been able to capture them on many occasions. "The most challenging is to capture the green flash while still seeing the rest of the Sun with all its colours," says Guisard.

His colleague Guillaume Blanchard was even luckier. On Christmas Eve, as he was one of the few to follow the tradition of looking at the sunset, he had the chance to immortalise a blue flash using his hobby telescope.

ESO astronomer Yuri Beletsky also likes to take photographs from Paranal, but he prefers the night views. This allows him to make use of the unique conditions above the site to make stunning images. On some of these, he has captured other extremely interesting effects related to the Sun: the so-called Zodiacal light and the 'Gegenschein'.

Both the Zodiacal light and the Gegenschein (which is German for "counter shine") are due to reflected sunlight by interplanetary dust. These are so faint that they are only visible in places free from light pollution.

Most of the interplanetary dust in the Solar System lies in the ecliptic, the plane close to which the planets are moving around the Sun, and the Zodiacal light and Gegenschein are thus seen in the region centred around the ecliptic. While the Zodiacal light is seen in the vicinity of the Sun, the Gegenschein is seen in the direction opposite to the Sun.

Each of the small particles of dust, left over from comets and asteroids, acts as a small Moon reflecting the light coming from our host star. "If you could see the individual dust particles then you would see the ones in the middle of the Gegenschein looking like very tiny full moons, while the ones hidden in the faint part of the dust band would look like tiny crescent moons," explains ESO astronomer Colin Snodgrass. "But even the VLT cannot see such tiny individual dust particles out in space. Instead we see the combined effect, in photos like these, of millions of tiny dust particles reflecting light back to us from the Sun."

Musical Math

Music Has Its Own Geometry, Researchers Find



The figure shows how geometrical music theory represents four-note chord-types -- the collections of notes form a tetrahedron, with the colors indicating the spacing between the individual notes in a sequence. In the blue spheres, the notes are clustered, in the warmer colors, they are farther apart. The red ball at the top of the pyramid is the diminished seventh chord, a popular 19th-century chord. Near it are all the most familiar chords of Western music. (Credit: Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University)

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2008) — The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries. More than 200 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

And the so-called musica universalis or "music of the spheres" emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies -- the sun, moon and planets -- could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors -- Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University -- have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called "geometrical music theory" that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into "families." They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way "x" and "y" coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, "stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content."

The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. (The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like "chord" are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form.

"The music of the spheres isn't really a metaphor -- some musical spaces really are spheres," said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. "The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn't done before."

Like what?

"You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys," he said. "You could create new kinds of visualization tools -- imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas."

"But to me," Tymoczko added, "the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries."

Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information. For instance, suppose a musician plays middle "C" on a piano, followed by the note "E" above that and the note "G" above that. Musicians have many different terms to describe this sequence of events, such as "an ascending C major arpeggio," "a C major chord," or "a major chord." The authors provide a unified mathematical framework for relating these different descriptions of the same musical event.

The trio describes five different ways of categorizing collections of notes that are similar, but not identical. They refer to these musical resemblances as the "OPTIC symmetries," with each letter of the word "OPTIC" representing a different way of ignoring musical information -- for instance, what octave the notes are in, their order, or how many times each note is repeated. The authors show that five symmetries can be combined with each other to produce a cornucopia of different musical concepts, some of which are familiar and some of which are novel.

In this way, the musicians are able to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence.

Once notes are translated into numbers and then translated again into the language of geometry the result is a rich menagerie of geometrical spaces, each inhabited by a different species of geometrical object. After all the mathematics is done, three-note chords end up on a triangular donut while chord types perch on the surface of a cone.

The broad effort follows upon earlier work by Tymoczko in which he developed geometric models for selected musical objects.

The method could help answer whether there are new scales and chords that exist but have yet to be discovered.

"Have Western composers already discovered the essential and most important musical objects?" Tymoczko asked. "If so, then Western music is more than just an arbitrary set of conventions. It may be that the basic objects of Western music are fantastically special, in which case it would be quite difficult to find alternatives to broadly traditional methods of musical organization."

The tools for analysis also offer the exciting possibility of investigating the differences between musical styles.

"Our methods are not so great at distinguishing Aerosmith from the Rolling Stones," Tymoczko said. "But they might allow you to visualize some of the differences between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And they certainly help you understand more deeply how classical music relates to rock or is different from atonal music."

Clam 'Chowdah'

History of Manhattan Clam Chowder

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Chowder/ManhattanChowder.htm

New Yorker's insist on tomatoes in their chowder and call it Manhattan clam chowder. Cookbook writer and chef James Beard (1903-1985) described Manhattan clam chowder as: ". . . that rather horrendous soup called Manhattan clam chowder. . . resembles a vegetable soup soup that accidentally had some clams dumped into it."

Tomato-based clam chowders came about with the new-found popularity of the tomato in the mid-1800s and the large population of Italians in New York and the Portuguese fishing communities of Rhode Island. By the 1930s, this tomato version had come to be called Manhattan clam chowder.

In February 1939, a bill was introduced by Assemblyman Seeder to the Maine legislature to make it a statutory and culinary offense to put tomatoes into chowder.

(recipes for a tomato based chowder are found at the above link)

...but for the Real Thang -

Recipe: The Cliff House Clam Chowder from The Cliff House in Ogunquit, Maine

http://gonewengland.about.com/od/morerecipes/r/recclfhschowder.htm

The Cliff House Clam Chowder has been on the menu since 1872. From The Cliff House in Ogunquit, Maine. Reprinted with permission.

Serves six.
INGREDIENTS:

* 1 slice hickory-smoked bacon, minced
* 1/2 teaspoon butter
* 1 cup onion, minced
* 1 medium garlic clove, minced
* 1 teaspoon The Cliff House Spice Blend (see below)
* 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
* 1 can clams (6-1/2 ounces)
* 1 cup bottled clam juice
* 1-1/2 cups Half and Half
* 1/4 teaspoon white pepper
* 2 medium potatoes, boiled, peeled and diced

PREPARATION:
To Create The Cliff House Spice Blend, blend 4 tsps oregano, 4 tsps dried parsley, 2 tsps marjoram, 2 tsps dill, 4 tsps thyme, 4 tsps basil, 1 tsp sage, 4 tsps rosemary, 2 tsps tarragon, 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, crushing in a mortar if possible. Store in a resealable plastic bag to refrigerate.

In a heavy-bottomed, 4-pint soup kettle, sauté bacon, butter, onion, garlic and The Cliff House Spice Blend over low heat. Do not allow to brown. Drain clams and set aside, reserving the juice. Slowly stir the flour and clam juices in the sauté mixture. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Add Half and Half and simmer 20 minutes. Add white pepper, potatoes and clams. Heat to serving temperature. Do not allow to boil, as this toughens the clams. Serve at once with crackers and warm cornbread.