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Performed by Mad King Sweeney.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Curious that the one I do the most singing on comes out days after I get my jaw wired shut. I fractured my jaw and my arm in the same dumb bicycle accident. Typing with one hand is not my thing, so don’t expect a long esoteric piece of writing this time around.

I should have enough of a backlog of tapes in the archive (read: box of tapes in the basement) to maintain the every-two-weeks pace until I can return to recording new material. Don’t be alarmed if some of them come out without announcements. It’s just because I can’t talk. Maybe I should try spitting through the wire.

SEE ALSO: New music from friends of the show Two Modern Blokes and Sickles.

(Original image by j3net)

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Performed by Two Modern Blokes

I intended to write a blurb about the eerie bioluminescent fish that live deep in the sea beyond the reach of sunlight. The idea was to spook you with tales of hauntingly beautiful anglerfish hunting in the deep and otherworldly jellyfish floating in ways we can barely understand. 

But it’s Mother’s Day. And it’s spring. There are flowers blooming and kids playing in the street. The sun is shining. I’m just not in the mood. 

Creepy deep sea fish have mothers, don’t they?

(photo original here)

[Re-up cuz I’m dumb. -C]

A Sylvan Idyll

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Performed by Mad King Sweeney.

“It is a philosophy that periodically reappears, for in every generation many men weary of the struggle, cruelty, complexity and speed of city life, and write with more idealism than knowledge about the joys of rustic routine. One must have a long urban background in order to write rural poetry.” (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage)[1]

The Wikipedia page for “Dying god” lists Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis, Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, Krishna, Ra, Osiris, Jesus, Zalmoxis, and Odin as examples of ancient Near Eastern and Greek male deities  that belong in the category. The category being “gods that have the part in their story when they die and then come back to life”. The supposition is that this has to do with the cycle of the seasons, with the land dying in the autumn and coming back to life in the spring. Somehow rituals are supposed to entice your god to come back every spring to keep things going for another year. 

I purposefully, for dramatic effect, left out one of the names from Jimmy Wales’ list: Bacchus, a.k.a. Dionysus, a.k.a. Acratophorus,  a.k.a. Enorches, a.k.a. Big Baby Jesus. He’s the Roman god of wine and, it seems, general partying down. Like the rest of them, he winds up dead at a critical juncture in the story. So what’s the ritual to get him back to life? Prayer? Nah. Sacrifice? Uh-uh. Try this: drinking, singing, and dancing.

“Following the torches as they dipped and swayed in the darkness, they climbed mountain paths with head thrown back and eyes glazed, dancing to the beat of the drum which stirred their blood’ [or ‘staggered drunkenly with what was known as the Dionysus gait’]. ‘In this state of ekstasis or enthusiasmos, they abandoned themselves, dancing wildly and shouting ‘Euoi!’ [the god’s name] and at that moment of intense rapture became identified with the god himself. They became filled with his spirit and acquired divine powers.” [2]

Sounds like fun! Drunken revelry as spiritual observance. Getting in touch with that hard-to-define feeling of connectedness with something larger and more powerful than yourself by having a delightful time. No wonder they banned the bacchanalia.

(photo adapted from: Noel Feans)

[1] Durant, Will (1935) Our Oriental Heritage. New York: Simon and Schuster.

[2] Hoyle, Peter (1967) Delphi, London : Cassell.

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performed by Two Modern Blokes

“Who wants this garlic and cheese baguette?” James shouted on a sidewalk standing between Ingersoll public housing and the site of the new upscale grocery. “Why, right now it’s easier to find a gun than a baguette around here.”

(photo adapted from this)

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Performed by Mad King Sweeney

 The Standard of Ur was found in a grave in the Royal Cemetery in the ruins of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. Hence the name. It’s a wooden box inlaid with a mosaic of shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli. Having been underground for ~4500 years, the wood is gone. So is the king who’s grave it’s in. Ever heard of Ur-Pabilsag? Me neither!

On one side it shows the bloody conquest of some neighboring kingdom and the capture of prisoners who were to become slaves. On the other side is a depiction of a sweet party, presumably to celebrate the victory. Ur-Pabilsag probably thought he was something quite special to have such a beautiful and triumphant box buried with him.

Then he was forgotten. Not just him. His whole city. His whole civilization. The Sumerians aren’t in the Bible. No one in classical Greece or Egypt or China or India mention Sumer*. No one anywhere until cuneiform writing was deciphered in the 19th century and people were able to read surviving tablets. A whole civilization erased from history for thousands of years. It’s something quite special that we found anything at all, but I doubt that’s what Ur-Pabilsag had in mind.

*Or so I’ve heard. I don’t do a ton of research for these blurbs.

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Performed by Mad King Sweeney.

This past fall’s daylight savings, the maintenance man at my work set the break room clock back five extra minutes from the rest of the clocks in the building. Intentional or not, this allows us the option of adopting the convenient fiction that it’s five minutes earlier than it really is, which in turn allows for five extra minutes of break time. I think it’s a common delusion (one to which I am not immune) to think that the present is more like the recent past than it is in reality and/or/also that the future would be better if it were more like the past. If we could only turn the clock back a little bit then everything would be OK. This is duh of course obviously never going to happen but there’s no real harm in wasting a little time dreaming about bee-loud glades and getting back to the garden and what have you. So let’s do that for a few, OK?

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Performed by Mad King Sweeney.

“I am it.”

Like a lot a kids, I was fascinated by space travel. I had pictures of astronauts and celestial bodies on my wall. I remember thinking that if you ever got to go to space that it would change you forever in some profound way. The blackness, the weightlessness, the silence all seemed so absolute and unknowable that it would just bowl you over forever. Not being blessed with any faith in religion or the supernatural, space appeared to be my best hope to experience the sublime. I wanted to feel that feeling and be able to carry it inside me forever.

I wanted to be an astronaut, of course. If I could travel away from Earth I could know that ill-defined feeling of beauty or happiness or peace that would be impossible to obtain terrestrially. 

But is that feeling real or just the product of a child’s imagination?

Michael Collins waited in the command module of the Apollo 11 while Neil and Buzz went down to the lunar surface. He orbited the moon alone, and while he was on the dark side he was out of radio contact. 

Mission Control at the time said, “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during this 47 minutes of each lunar revolution when he’s behind the Moon with no one to talk to except his tape recorder.”

Collins later wrote, “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life, I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully-not as fear or loneliness-but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars-and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void, the moon’s presence is defined solely by the absence of stars.” [1]

[1] Collins, Michael; Charles Lindbergh (1974). Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[Programming Note: iTunes feed will be up shortly. Until the link above works, if you use the iTunes for your podcast feeds go to “Advanced” in the menu bar then “Subscribe to Podcast…” to put in the RSS feed address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheQuinceCurculio) and get this stuff piped directly into your life without having to think about it. -C]