June that breathes out life for butterflies

Do you know anything about Amy Winehouse? I was only vaguely aware of her existence until some lyrics she wrote turned up on a web page devoted to John Keats. Turns out she's won umteen awards and gets enormous press coverage for her troubled life as much as her musical achievements. She also has a striking appearance with trademark beehive hairdo. She's a Londoner to the core, and not posh West End.* The web page is good: Amy Winehouse.

The Keats site on which her name appeared is Keatsian News. I began tracking it after reading a book of Keats' letters, a short biography on him, and re-reading the poems. I recommend the letters; despite the too-frequent horrors of his brief life, he was a prolific and wholly engaging correspondent. The web site quotes from one of these letters:

I heard that Mr L Said a thing I am not at all contented with - Says he 'O, he is quite the little Poet' now this is abominable - you might as well say Buonaparte is quite the little Soldier - You see what it is to be under six foot and not a lord - ' (John Keats in a letter to his brother George, February 1819).

The web site entry for June 1 gives a quote for the day from his poem, To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned: 'June that breathes out life for butterflies', which evokes the month well does it not?

The Keats news site led me to Winehouse when its author got snide about an article in which a student was quoted as saying: 'Poetry doesn’t have to mean Keats and Byron.' Of this he says, 'Indeed, it does not. On that note, let's all wallow in some crappy modern stuff.' He goes on to say: 'And kudos to the English prof who compared the Bee Gees to King Lear. Way to encapsulate the sad decline of your discipline with one smudgy quote.' It was in following up on the Bee Gees comparison that I wandered into Winehouse-land.

The student was quoted in an article in The Times (UK of course): Amy Winehouse gets into Cambridge, by Nicola Woolcock. A blog on digitaljournal.com covers the same story:

Cambridge Exam has Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Raleigh and Amy Winehouse?

Cambridge University students were surprised when they had to compare Amy Winehouse lyrics with Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth for their exams.
The final-year English literature students at Cambridge University were surprised to find Amy Winehouse in their practical criticism exams.

The students received the following lyrics from the song “Love is a Losing Game” from her album “Back to Black”.

Though I'm rather blind
Love is a fate resigned
Memories mar my mind
Love is a fate resigned,
Over futile odds
And laughed at by the gods
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game.

The students were then asked to compare these lyrics from Winehouse with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton and Wordsworth for literary analysis.

There were mixed reactions from the students; some were surprised, some were irritated and the others praised the teachers who prepared this exam.

One student told AFP:

"It was really bizarre…I sat there looking at the paper in shock. I wouldn't consider a controversial pop singer a literary figure."

The exam asked students to compare a Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “As You Came from The Holy Land” from 1592 with the song lyrics from Amy Winehouse, “Fine and Mellow” by Billie Holiday and “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan.

Winehouse's "Love is a Losing Game" won a British Ivor Novello (music) award for Best Musical and Lyrical Song, last week.

One student told AFP:

"I think it's cool…Poetry doesn't have to mean Keats and Byron. That said, there were a lot of surprised people."

Winehouse, best known for her song Rehab, was arrested after being secretly filmed at her home in East London, apparently taking drugs. Police decided not to press charges, for lack of evidence. Her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is in jail awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Amy and Will


OK, so what about the Bee Gees and King Lear? A site called beegees-world.com explains:

BEE GEES and KING LEAR

In July 2001 undergraduate students at Cambridge University were asked to write about Bee Gee lyrics in their final exam.

The question, one of 27 on a three-hour English finals exam, asked students to discuss: "Tragedy, when you lose control and you got no soul, it's tragedy," with reference to characters and plots from Biblical and Greek stories. They were also told to make use of the writings of Nietzche, Dostoevsky and Racine.

John Kerrigan, the chairman of the English finals examination board, said that the question was intended to examine the forms tragedy takes in the modern world.

He said: "We wanted to see how far tragedy survives into modernity; whether it has died in the face of science and rationalism. Tragedy is essentially an archaic form. We wanted to see if it had metamorphosed into different forms.

"There are elements to the Bee Gees songs that could have directed you to the great central canonical texts. The line in the Bee Gees song where he sings 'the feeling's gone and you can't go on' is a fair summary of the end of King Lear," he added.

A spokesman for the Bee Gees said the brothers would be proud at being compared to great literary figures. "They have been compared with songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Burt Bacharach, but never Ibsen and Shakespeare."
(The Telegraph)

Here's the whole of Winehouse's lyric plus Raliegh's for comparison:

Amy Winehouse

For you I was a flame
Love is a losing game
Five storey fire as you came
Love is a losing game
Why do I wish I never played
Oh, what a mess we made
And now the final frame
Love is a losing game
Played out by the band love is a losing hand . . .
Taken from
Love is a Losing Game

Sir Walter Raleigh

As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one,
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath a form so divine In the earth or the air . . .
Taken from
As You Came from the Holy Land

Here are two Youtube videos of Amy singing the song:

---

Notes
_______________________
*From wikipedia: "Amy Winehouse was born in the Southgate area of Enfield, London to a Jewish family who shared her love of jazz music. She was raised in a family of four: her father Mitchell (a taxi driver), her mother Janis (a pharmacist), and her older brother Alex. She attended Southgate School before leaving to go to Ashmole School.[citation needed] At age ten, Winehouse founded a short-lived rap group called Sweet 'n' Sour with childhood friend Juliette Ashby. She was trained initially at The Susi Earnshaw Theatre School from the age of eight years old. She stayed for four years before seeking full time training at Sylvia Young Theatre School, but was allegedly expelled at fourteen for "not applying herself" and for piercing her nose. With other children from the Sylvia Young School, she appeared in an episode of The Fast Show in 1997. She later attended the BRIT School in Selhurst, Croydon."

________________________
**
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth
More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?
Haply a halo round the moon--a glee
Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;
And haply you will say the dewy birth
Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly
Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea--
But these comparisons are nothing worth.
Then there is nothing in the world so fair?
The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?
No none of these can from my favorite bear
Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay
Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

___________
My images are from The Times, digitaljournal.com, and the Keats news site.

getting ahead

A member of my family recently graduated from college. She got herself an excellent liberal arts education, achieving a GPA high enough to qualify for Cum Laude and getting Honors in her major as well. She made the right choice of school and right choice about balancing academic work with the rest of her life. In both cases she succeeded -- to her credit and for her benefit -- in avoiding an environment of hotly-competitive over-achievement.

The commencement program lists all the honors and awards which the seniors attained. Although my daughter has lots of friends in disciplines outside her major, there are a few in her class whom she never got to know even well enough to pick out in a crowd. One or two of these are the students with double majors, receiving honors in one or both, graduating summa cum laude with an award or two. She suggests she didn't know them because -- studious as they were -- they were invisible.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has a nice piece today on the inevitable hyper-attention that's given this time of year to the rising high school juniors and seniors and their quest to get accepted at top-tier colleges and universities. She says the pressure-cooker lives that these stories depict exists in fact, but the children that suffer so much to shine in the eyes of admittance committees are actually a pretty small group out of the population at large. Nobody, not Applebaum even, says they are an elite, but that's what they are.

She does relate this frenzy to the competition among families in places like the UK and Korea where a single exam determines the fate of those who seek high academic prestige. This makes me think of soul-destroying competition in the top French lycées which we hear about from time to time.

You have to wonder what this intense focus on a single goal does to kids and their parents. Applebaum links to a front-page article in the New York Times about one small indicator: how many high school students skip lunch because, as one says, “I would never put lunch before work.”

This quoted young person, it turns out, attends the high school from which I graduated close to 50 years ago. In my day we thought we knew what mix of subjects, taken at Advanced-Placement level, with what level of success, and what combination of sports and extracurricular activities would give us the most acceptances in the colleges and universities to which we applied. I don't recall much if any parental pressure in my own home or those of my friends (one excepted). And, I don't recall that (a) we actually agonized over getting the highest grades in the most difficult subjects, or (b) made sure we had some exactly ideal mix of other credentials (though we did do lots of miscellaneous stuff). We certainly never sacrificed a lunch hour to any kind of work unless we were late with required assignments and totally frantic. Of course my memory about these things could be wrong. From the occasional reunion weekend I know that my high school classmates have quite different memories of the short period of life we shared together.

I do also recall thinking of myself as landing at "the bottom of the top" which is to say I found myself at the low end of an imaginary scale that showed the attainments of gifted kids in my own environment and (so it seemed from my scores on nation-wide aptitude and achievement tests) across the country. In all the turmoil of that period of my life (hormonal, emotional, social, above all simply transitional) I think that actually felt a pretty comfortable place to be.

Having said all that, I wonder why the New York Times (et al) do annual scare stories about over-stressed high school students and not college undergraduates. Why focus so much on the scramble for the small number of places in classes at the best of the best schools of higher education? Maybe it's because of the parents. They can and often do have pretty much total control over the lives of kids at home. (And this means, where I live now, that many compete for their kids' admission to schools at all levels, right down to kindergarten and even pre-school.) Parents have traditionally been less intensely involved in the undergraduate lives of their children.

There's been a change in the amount of this involvement in my lifetime I think. I recall next to none myself and believe it's been growing over the years since I attended college. But I expect the media focus on high schools is probably parent driven because I expect it's as much their ambitions which the children are supposed to fulfill as it is the kids' own and because they have the ability to act on their mania for vicarious success while the kids are still living at home full time.

I suspect this is not good for parents or kids, not at the time it occurs and not in the long run. Applebaum suggests there's a conflict between the societal quest for immediate gratification and the work discipline for an anticipated gratification in later life: two opposing ways of attempting to enact the American-dream "pursuit of happiness." I think there might be too much of both in our lives: too much focus on living happy and not enough on a good life lived well.

Here's a link to the Applebaum column with a brief extract:

The Busiest Generation, by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Thus our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working -- though perhaps this makes sense. America is, after all, the industrialized country with the fewest paid vacations, as well as the only nation, as far as I know, that considers the "pursuit of happiness" a fundamental right. We invented both the assembly line and the modern notion of "leisure." So welcome back to work today, if you even bothered to take yesterday off: Spring is here, the beaches beckon -- and you've got only a few weeks left to find an impressive summer job for your high school junior.

And here's a link to the NYT article, also with brief extract:

Busy Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch, by Winnie Hu, New York Times, May 24, 2008

At Briarcliff High School in Westchester County, many students eat in class. Others, citing heavy workloads, don’t eat at all.

High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.

But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.

David Millar races Italy

David Millar, a world-class professional cyclist from Scotland, writes an interesting blog for his current team, Slipstream. Today's post is particularly good: The good and bad breaks of cycling. He writes about his experience in stage five of the Giro d'Italia in which he's poised to make a winning move when his chain breaks.

Millar's career has had its ups and downs. He's had a great deal of success and, like many of the guys who made it to the winners' podiums in top races, he was caught using a performance-enhancing drug, EPO. He confessed and was banned from competition for two full years. Now he's riding for the cleanest team in the sport -- one that proves its athletes are drug-free by constant testing of its own in coordination with the official testing of cycling authorities.

This year's Giro is one of the toughest ever run and all the more interesting because the number of potential winners is unusually large.

Cyclingnews provides a good review of the race so far. Notice that one of the top favorites is now racing with a fractured elbow. Here's the link: Giro enters second week with demanding time trial.

Pez Cycling News also provides good coverage. Today it features an interview with the guy who's (temporarily) in second place overall: Giro PEZ-Clusive: Matthias Russ Interview!

Here's are some photos of stage five from CyclingNews:

Riccardo Riccò (Saunier Duval-Scott) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Stage four winner Mark Cavendish (High Road) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Paolo Bettini (Quick Step) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
David Millar waits for the team car Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Pavel Brutt launches his winning move. Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Riders enjoyed stunning views. Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Liquigas has matching pink and magenta jerseys Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg takes a "sip". Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg Tinkov had his own champagne Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Paolo Bettini (Quick Step) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Oleg Tinkov was overjoyed Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Daniele Bennati (Liquigas) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Simoni and Giovanni Savio Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Emanuele Sella (CSF Group) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Davide Rebellin (Gerolsteiner) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pellizott tucks his hair in Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Franco Pellizotti (Liquigas) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Gibo Simoni signs autographs Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pavel Brutt Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Best young rider Morris Possoni Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	British champ David Millar (Slipstream) Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Fröhlinger has a dig Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Fun! Photo ©: Roberto Bettini	Gilberto Simoni is relaxed Photo ©: Roberto Bettini
Pavel Brutt (Tinkoff) Photo ©: AFP	Brutt in major oxygen debt Photo ©: AFP	The break of five approaches Contursi Photo ©: AFP

streetstyle bike culture

This bike site is doing a series of posts on cycling in Paris in general and Vélib' in particular. The blog's authors, man and wife, celebrate the high level of bike use in cities such as Copenhagen and advocate style over speed. For them "urban cycling is something to be done in your normal clothes and on normal bikes." To make their point they focus particularly on the huge numbers of women who have adopted cycling as as their normal way of getting about some of Europe's largest cities. Here's a link to today's post: Joie de Vivre Avec Vélo Libre. And here, the logo:


There, you can find this graphic showing the density of Vélib' stations in the city:


And a bunch of good photos. Here're a couple. In the first, notice that it's a rainy day.

topsy-turvy economics

This is brilliant. An editorial in the AARP Bulletin tells how much our economic well-being has deteriorated in the last 12 months: One Year Later, a New World.

The piece says the world is complex, fully interconnected, and volatile, enhancing the need for individuals to do what they can to ensure their own financial security. Here's the main graphic and excerpts:

In just 12 months, unemployment has risen from 4.5 percent with a growing workforce to 5.1 percent and a shrinking workforce as millions stopped seeking jobs. The average price of a gallon of gas has jumped 53 cents to $3.44, and crude oil has nearly doubled from $64 a barrel to

$115. Inflation is growing; medical costs are growing faster. Stock prices have dropped nearly 15 percent, and housing prices have plummeted more than 10 percent, part of a spiral of delayed payments, defaulted mortgages and home foreclosures. Banks and lenders around the world are in full retreat.

The U.S. trade deficit and the federal budget deficit continue to mushroom, and the national debt is $9.4 trillion—up 10 percent in a year. And the value of the dollar has fallen another 15 percent, driving the cost of imports ever higher and shaking the confidence of foreign investors.

If there is turmoil in the markets, there is chagrin and anxiety at home. Amid all the statistics, it is workers, home-owners, spouses, children and grandparents who feel the impact of this wrenching sequence of events—in lost jobs, postponed retirement, reduced wealth, delayed medication, lower confidence.

Vélib' update

It's been a while since I've given an update on Vélib', the wildly successful bike-sharing scheme in Paris. Heavily used last summer, I expected a severe fall-off in usage over the winter months, but that does not appear to have been the case. What follows is an update from Paul DeMaio's bike-sharing blog:

Updated Velib' Stats



The latest Velib' survey results are available and posted on the Velib' Website. Just in case you don't parlez Français, here's a summary:

* Trips to date: 20 million
* Average trips/day: 70,000
* Average trip time: 18 minutes
* 190,000 annual pass holders
* 42% of users are female, 58% are male
* 1/3 of users come from outside the central city
* 17% of users are 46+ years old
* 94% of users like the service

These results are highly impressive. The stats that amazed me the most are the number of trips to date and the percentage of female users. As Velib' is not yet one year old, there are still about two months of trips still to be made which could equate to another 5 million trips, or a total of 25 million trips, before the anniversary of it's launch date of July 15.

Having nearly the same percentage of female and male customers shows how mainstream bike-sharing has become in Paris. In cities where lesser bike cultures exist, such as those in North America, males tend to dominate bike usage by 3 to 1. Women are less likely to ride a bike when concerned about their safety compared to men. Men also tend to be generally more risk-taking and will ride in less safe street conditions. While not 50/50, this male/female customer demographic shows that women are using Velib' confidently, so Paris has done a good job in creating safe bike facilities before the launch of the program.

Fantastique!

image credit: Velib'
Posted by Paul DeMaio

Here are some women-on-Vélib' shots from a Google image search:





(Not a Vélib' bike, but I couldn't resist it.)

nice guys finishing first

Last year, a retired American pro cyclist formed a new team based on a clean-living/no cheating philosophy and now that newbie US team has taken the first stage of Italy's premier stage race, the Giro d'Italia. The event is of a type which is one of the most prestigious within the national tour frame: a team time trial, where each team competes against the clock and the winner is determined on the fifth rider to cross the line. It's an extremely difficult event and the team's success is a major achievement.

The American ex-pro is Jonathan Vaughters and the team is Slipstream.

Here are links to accounts on the team blog:
- Having fun chasing excellence
- Argyle Armada wins TTT! Christian in pink!

The blog is written by members of the team and its support people, not promotional flacks. Notice that one of the commenters points to a contrast with the US Postal team where all the riders were slaves to Armstrong rather than working together as a team for the team's success. Another makes an obvious point: nice guys do sometimes finish first. Another comment comes from Andy Hampsten, a pioneer American race winner in Europe and former winner of the Giro when leading 7-Eleven, the first successful US team. To his cost, he refused to take performance-enhancing drugs during his career in the sport. He says: "Respect -- Let me join in thanking you boys for showing respect in all you do, and how you race. Its been 20 lousy years since we got any respect in Pink and now the other families can all see how it should be done. With honor. And in the Old Country too. Don’t forget to eat well while you’re there too."

The Wikipedia article explains the team's drug-free orientation in brief: Slipstream Chipotle.

Cyclingnews.com explains just how extra-thorough is the team's testing program: Independent testing to continue alongside UCI's 'biological passports'.

And here's a more detailed account of The Slipstream Experiment.

The team has a photostream on flickr: Slipstream Sports/Chipotle's photostream

This one shows the team's discplined paceline:


The first guy across the line gets to wear the pink jersey of race leader. It's Christian Vande Velde


This shows good time trial form. It's Tom Peterson (photo credit: Velonews):


Here's Andy in 7-Eleven gear in a photo by Graham Watson: