Especially when I find such treasures as this…
and this…
My ears are simply tingling with ecstasy listening to these old vinyls. This kind of music can really set one on Firebird… er… fire anyway.
-Melanie
Add comment | August 14th, 2010
Here are better pictures for those interested. And yes, I did at long last (and with three days to spare) enter the contest. Wish me well!
Front
Back
Spinning!
They do get bigger if you click on them.
-Melanie
2 comments | June 14th, 2010
Here’s another Declamation. This is one of my very first declamations. The assignment was to praise or blame some kind of media. To promote or demote, I guess we could say. I chose to promote the Uncle Remus books by Joel Chandler Harris. This is a very “freshman” essay, so please take it with a grain of salt. I know the style is bad. Now, try to imagine me reading this aloud to you, giving the quoted parts my best negro accent. I had so much fun with this!
“Ev’ybody hez a lafin’ place!” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. And a good one happens to be in the Uncle Remus collections by Joel Chandler Harris. One sentence will make you go crosseyed with all the Southern Negro dialect in written form. But by the end of one story you should be falling off your chair, laughing. Some of Brer Rabbit’s escapades are positively ridiculous, but he always outsmarts Brer Fox and Brer Bear in the end. The stories are comfortingly practical and traditional in style. Brer Fox tries to capture and roast Brer Rabbit who outsmarts Brer Fox every time. However, the settings of the tales and the language used to tell them make them unique in the literary world.
The Southern Negro colloquialisms look atrocious on paper, but when spoken are almost relaxing to hear. The Uncle Remus books are best enjoyed when read aloud. This way one can better hear and imagine Brer Rabbit saying to the Tar Baby, “I’m gwine to larn you how ter talk ter ‘spectubble flolks ef hit’s de las’ ack! Ef you don’t take off dat hat en tell me howdy, I’m gwine ter bus’ you wide open!” When you pick up one of Harris’s Uncle Remus books you are picking up a piece of our American history. Through Harris’s Uncle Remus collections much of the language, customs and attitudes of Southern negro slaves have been preserved.
I got a good grade on this one too.
~Josie
Add comment | June 8th, 2010
Since no one else is posting anything and since I’m back from college for the summer I thought maybe y’all might like to know what I was up to all that time.
Every Friday the Freshman Rhetoric students were required to present a 250 word essay on an assigned topic or a topic of their choice in an assigned category. These are called “declamations.” There were 36 of us and it took 2 hours for us to present and the teacher to review all of the declamations. It was great fun! For the declamation I am about to present the assignment was to describe something using one of the particular sentence styles we had read about that week. I chose to describe my visit to the castle Neuschwanstein in a segregated sentence style. Yes, I got a good grade on it. 
No, I will never be satisfied with it. Here you go and there you have it.
We, myself and the other tourists, followed our guide into the throne room. A beautiful sight greets us. The room is spacious. A few small windows look out on the mountain side. The drop from castle to valley is nearly vertical. The room itself is very colorful. The floor is a large mosaic. It pictures the earth with various plants and animals. The walls are painted with pictures of holy saints. On one wall stand the Twelve Apostles. On another wall are six holy kings. All face the dias. Christ sits above the dias. But the dias itself is empty. A tourist asks why. “The throne,” says the guide, “exists only as a blueprint. The king died before they could begin work on it.” The ceiling looks like the night sky. A giant star fills it to the very edge. Hanging from the ceiling is a huge chandlier. It takes the shape of a Byzantine emporor’s crown. It towers above our heads. It looks as if it was made of gold. It is encrusted with jewels. Our mouths drop open in wonder at this glorious piece of furniture. While we are gaping the guide says in a slightly bored, slightly bemused tone of voice, “The gilt brass chandelier above your heads is 4 metres high including the chain and weighs 1 metric ton.”
~Josie
1 comment | May 31st, 2010
“Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori [argument]. His “how much more” is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them.” ~G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“[Jesus] was the greatest genius that ever lived. You know what genius is, brethren–beauty and perfection in the mind. For perfection in the bodily frame distinguishes a man among other men his fellows: so may the mind be distinguished for its beauty above other minds and that is genius. Then when this genius is duly taught and trained, that is wisdom; for without training genius is imperfect and again wisdom is imperfect without genius. But Christ, we read, advanced in wisdom and in favour with God and men: now this wisdom, in which he excelled all men, had to be founded on an unrivalled genius. Christ then was the greatest genius that ever lived.” ~Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christ Our Hero
“Can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be in all other respects and not be the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived?
That is exactly how his earliest apprentices in kingdom living thought of him. He was not regarded as, perhaps, a magician, who only knew “the right words” to get results without understanding or who could effectively manipulate appearances. Rather, he was accepted as the ultimate scientist, craftsman, and artist.
At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine. That knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people. He could create matter from the energy he knew how to access from “the heavens,” right where he was.
It cannot be surprising that the feeding of the thousands led the crowds to try to force him to be there king. Surely one who could play on the energy/matter equation like that could do anything. Turn gravel into gold and pay off the national debt! Do you think he could get elected president or prime minister today?
He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word. Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today.
All these things show Jesus’ cognitive and practical mastery of every phase of reality: physical, moral, and spiritual. He is Master only because he is Maestro. “Jesus is Lord” can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, “Jesus is smart.”
He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.” ~Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
Posted by: Melanie Hall
Add comment | May 17th, 2010
Due to popular request I am putting up pictures of Josie and myself (and a few others) from the SRO dance which occurred last Friday evening. As many of you are aware I have been a busy seamstress the last few weeks in making the dress I wore to the event. The reason for making it: the Joann Fabric Stores Own Your Look Prom Dress Contest. The reason for attending the dance: the rules stipulate that the owner of the dress must attend a formal dance to be eligible to enter (plus I needed to show it off somewhere). It is not technically finished, a few details still need to be added and a proper hem, but if I may say so without being too intolerably vain, it did turn out quite lovely.
(My apologies for the poor quality. It’s always just a little too dark on those dance floors.)
Josie and Yours Truly
Josie, Catherine, and Yours Truly
The weird one (somehow I managed to get away without learning the names of the two young ladies who joined us for this one.)
Posted by: Melanie Hall
4 comments | May 3rd, 2010
Bliss.
Posted by: Melanie
2 comments | February 17th, 2010
Chesterton quotes from his book ‘Orthodoxy’ in no particular order. If you’ve never read Chesterton I highly suggest you do so.
“Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.”
“Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.”
“Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do – because they are Christian. And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful.”
“A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might – one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.”
“Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.”
“The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle – the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.”
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
“In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man ‘damned’: but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.”
“Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.”
“How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.”
“All living Christians are dead pagans walking about.”
“Every man is womanized merely by being born.”
“Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”
Posted by: Melanie
2 comments | February 2nd, 2010
“There met in Jesus Christ all things that can make man lovely and loveable. In his body he was most beautiful. This is known first by the tradition in the Church that it was so and by holy writers agreeing to suit those words to him. ‘Thou art beautiful in mould above the sons of men.’ ”
“Another proof of his beauty may be drawn from the words proficiebat spientia et aetate et gratia apud Deum et homines (Luc. ii 52). ‘He went forward in wisdom and bodliy frame and favour with God and men’; that is, he pleased both God and men daily more and more by his growth of mind and body. But he could not have pleased by growth of body unless the body was strong, healthy, and beautiful that grew. But the best proof of all is this, that his body was the special work of the Holy Ghost. He was not born in nature’s course, no man was his father; had he been born as others are he must have inherited some defect of figure or of constitution, from which no man born as fallen men are born is wholly free unless God interfere to keep him so. But his body was framed directly from heaven by the power of the Holy Ghost, of whom it would be unworthy to leave any the least botch or failing in his work. So the first Adam was moulded by God himself and Eve built up by God too out of Adam’s rib and they could not but be pieces, both, of faultless workmanship: the same then and much more must Christ have been.”
“…for myself I make no secret I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light.”
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
(From “Christ Our Hero,” preached Sunday evening, November 23, 1879. Text: Luke 2:33)
Posted by: Melanie
2 comments | January 27th, 2010
I figured after a dull book review y’all might like something that was actually good. This is another song our church choir performed several times throughout the Christmas season, one of my favorites and I forgot to post it. So, here ya’ go!
-Melanie
Add comment | January 6th, 2010
