Just noticed this the other day since the Blind School has been in the news.
Return of the Mamba
We're moving out of Iraq. That's good news.Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. While serving in the United States Army during World War II, he parachuted into France to work with the resistance and went on to join the partisans in Italy. Returning to the United States with a Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre, he resumed his study of the classics.Knox wrote first on Sophocles and then ranged across other writers from classical Greece and Rome.
The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as well as to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.A tip of the pint to a great scholar.
This was recognized by Simone Weil in an essay written long before she left her native France for wartime London, where she filled her brilliant notebooks with reflections on Greek literature and philosophy in the short time left to her to live. This classic (and prophetic) statement - L'Iliade ou le Poeme de la Force - presented her vision of Homer's poem as an image of the modern world.The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force as man's instrument, force as man's master, force before which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.She goes on to define what she means by force: "force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing." She wrote these words in 1939: the article was scheduled for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, but before it could be printed Paris was in the hand of the Nazis and her compatriots, like all Europe, were subjected to force and turned into things - corpses or slaves.
(If this isn't beery enough, go read about dwarf hops and changing relations between brewers and growers over at Beervana. Jeff took a hopyard tour with a bunch of commercial brewers and the Oregon Hop Commission, and his notes are very interesting! Image: Near Independence, circa 1935, Oregon State University.)
It's time to revisit Lils Pils, one of the Seven Brides brews.
Let's talk about the label instead! 
We don't know exactly where this is - but we're gonna see if we can find out! Any readers know?
You might recall this detail map from our note about Falls City and the 4th. It's similar to the one on the label.
Over at Eat Salem, Salem Man has us scratching our heads. He writes about a beer so dull it couldn't even measure up to PBR and yet says that "it will be very popular in Salem."
In any event, it's interesting that so much energy should be devoted to an opportunity for shopping and buying. Consumption and the brands with which we associate ourselves, the way our shopping choices and displays act to define our identities, strikes us as a poor index of civic pride.
This is nuts. But it's also really cool. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. announced a partnership with the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux to create the only authentic Trappist-style Abbey ales in America....In 2011, Sierra Nevada and the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux are working to bring this centuries-old tradition to America with Ovila—the nation’s only authentic Trappist-style Abbey Ale.There will be a Dubbel, Saison, and Quadrupel. The beer proceeds will benefit a new Xanadu!...
an architectural marvel—a 12th century, early-gothic Cistercian chapter house—on their grounds in Vina, California a few miles north of Sierra Nevada’s home in Chico. The medieval chapterhouse—Santa Maria de Ovila—was begun in 1190, near the village of Trillo, Spain.
Cistercian monks lived, prayed, and worked there for nearly 800 years. In 1931, California newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst purchased the abbey and shipped it to Northern California. Hearst’s plans were never realized, and the stones fell into disrepair. In 1994, the Trappist-Cistercian monks of the Abbey of New Clairvaux, gained possession of the ruins, and began the painstaking stone-by-stone reconstruction of the historic abbey.
Homer Davenport is Silverton's beloved son. He drew cartoons for the Oregonian, for newspapers in San Francisco, and finally worked for William Randolph Hearst and the New York Evening Journal. At his most popular, he might have been America's most famous and influential political cartoonist. (Walt Curtis on Davenport is also worth reading.)Silverton was a queer place socially; while the townspeople were all of one set and there was little of any class hatred, the rich seldom ever lined up against the poor. Still if a very beautiful girl came to town all of us boys sort of took it for granted that she would turn us down if we did attempt to take her any place, so no one ever gave her the opportunity. We admired her and talked of her at the swimming holes and in fact everywhere we met, but no one ever had the nerve to approach her with a proposal of a "Let's go to the dance, or the party or the entertainment."....
One day a beauty came to town to live with some relatives of hers and she pined some time before she was taken out. I had been out with a threshing crew and we moved on Saturday to a field near Silverton. The grain wasn't quite ripe enough, so we laid off until Monday, —an awful thing to do in that country, giving us all a chance to go into town and get shaved up and a clean shirt.
When I got to town there was a lot of talk on the streets of a dance to be given that night at Egan's Hop House out in the Waldo Hills. After my shave and hair cut it seemed a shame to waste it; that I'd better go to the dance. My financial condition wasn't what you'd call very steady. It rose and fell so that I couldn't hardly count on one girl regularly. But I started in where the most affection lay and met a rather sad refusal. She said she would rather have gone with me, but I hadn't asked her since early spring, so she was engaged to go with Harvey Allen, the leader of the Trombone Band. I went down the line and got eleven "mittens," as we called them. Then I even asked one young girl that had never been to a dance alone, and her mother refused, although the girl was willing, so I called it off and went up home and helped around the barn.
I waved my hat to the girls I had asked as they drove by in livery rigs with other fellows, and after they had all gotten out of town I went down to the post-office to get the Silverton Appeal, when who should I meet but the belle of the village, as we all called her among ourselves. She smiled and I smiled, and she asked why I wasn't at the dance. "What dance?" said I. "At Egan's Hop H o u s e," she replied. "Everybody in town has gone but us." When she said the word "us" I saw a new world....
Father had compelled me some weeks before to clip my game chickens' wings so they couldn't roost on the back of the buggy seat. In my joy at leaving the barn I had forgotten that my chickens did roost on the hind axle of the buggy, and as we drove out we took the hen roost also, so that naturally when we went over a rock or rough place with the hind wheel, we dislodged all or most of the chickens and they would catch by their necks and flutter back on the axle; thus they frightened the horse that never even shied before at anything; so when I said to the handsomest girl in Silverton, "It's chickens roosting on the hind axle," she exclaimed, "No wonder; I never saw you before to-night without a chicken, and there they are really here with us now." I thought we had lost some, as there were some missing. I didn't know what to do as the dance would soon be over. We couldn't leave them beside the road for fear of skunks or minks. She thought we ought to leave the chickens, but I didn't, as one of our best old hens was in the party and it seemed a crime to expose them to next to certain death.
If it had been daylight and I could have seen the beautiful girl perhaps I would have done differently, but we turned around and started back home slowly, as the tired hens breathed heavily on the back axle. We were still sitting as far apart as the buggy seat would let us; had no outward signs of getting closer, in fact we were getting farther apart. She thought young men shouldn't think so much of chickens, while I thought they were next to human. We planned another ride without chickens, but it was the passing of my short reign and I didn't know it until it was too late. That opportunity that the late John J. Ingalls wrote of was there, but not to wait; and when it went it came no more. We got home, but I had hurt her feelings for chickens, and we parted without much friction. I stayed up until the other folks got home from the dance. They were all more or less happy, especially those on the back seats. I told them I had been riding around all night with the belle of Silverton, but all they did was to laugh and especially the girls that had given me the mitten.
