Monday

Well, here we are – a previous post is up about the weekend’s internet-fueled outrage. Let’s do a digest.

Listen: On Friday, son #5 and I went to the Alabama Symphony performance of The Rite of Spring and Carmina Burana, which was just excellent – can’t go wrong with the symphony and combined five choirs. So listening for the last few days has continued in that vein, with special attention to (not surprisingly) the O Fortuna section and (a little more surprisingly) The Swan. The latter is a humorous moment between a countertenor singing the travails of a swan on the spit, getting roasted and then served – and the chorus.

It was very impressive all around – our Alabama Symphony is really very good.

Watch: Watched the Bloody Coyote Moon or whatever it was last night – wow, it really was red!

Right before that, we had watched Cool Hand Luke. Afterwards, I took a deep breathe and said the the 14-year old, “Now, some people talk about religious imagery in this movie – that Luke is a sort of a Christ figure – do you see that at all?” I was sort of expecting a reaction of “He was a criminal…how?” but instead what I got was an immediate, “Oh sure!” with a pretty comprehensive list of images and themes: “Well, he’s spread out on the table at that one point like Jesus on the cross. He gives the other prisoners hope – that night in the church – it was sort of like Jesus in Gethsemane – and then after he dies, it ends with the prisoners sharing stories about Luke and still finding hope in him….”

Okay. I guess this homeschooling high school thing might work after all. Maybe we’ll make it a film-centered curriculum?

Hmmmm. 

Writing: Am almost finished with the Thing due next week. Got hit with some revision requests for the book coming out, I believe, this summer. Was so mad at myself for those errors (and they were errors), I got the corrections done right away – so that was Friday morning, before and after the school Mass at which my son played piano. Wrote this post on the Covington stuff. Probably guilty of the same time-wasting I take on in the piece, so that’s just great. 

Reading: Not a thing on real pages. Internet, I hate you, and I hate myself for not hating you enough!

Cooking: Made meatballs for future use. (FYI, I bake them – do not fry meatballs. Either cook them in the sauce or bake them.) And, as predicted, that was it. Son #5 and I did try a new restaurant in town Saturday night after Mass – it’s called Mile End Deli – there’s one in Brooklyn, one in Nashville, and so naturally, Birmingham was next. It’s a Montreal-style Jewish deli (Mile End is a Montreal neighborhood) – and it was very good. (Montreal – hence, the Labbatt Blue.) Son had a prime rib sandwich, I had matzoh ball soup & a spicy tuna sandwich, and we shared an order of poutine. It was all really good, and I’m looking forward to returning. Need to try the bagels, most of all.

 

It’s, of course the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Birmingham has an important connection to Dr. King – read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail – written to religious leaders who preached hesitation and moderation and “not yet.”

If you are ever near Birmingham, do visit our Civil Rights Institute museum. I’ve been to many of the Civil Rights museums in the southeast, and I do think this is the best. Included, of course, is Dr. King’s jail cell.

Bessemer is a nearby town where Dr. King was held for a night before he was transferred to Birmingham. There’s a small, quirky, but fun museum in Bessemer which features the door from Dr. King’s jail cell there. We visited last homeschooling round.