The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): May 2015

May 30, 2015

Escape Officially Denied

Not Far Enough From Santa Cruz Harbor, CA, 2015

May 15, 2015

B.B. King, Sept. 16, 1925-May14, 2015

I remember in my callow youth how very old I reckoned B.B. King to be, some lingering relic of a long-past era, when I saw him play Winterland in December of 1967. "Caldonia, Caldonia," he sang, "what makes you big head so hard?" Little did I know at the time that this was the first song ever described as "rock 'n roll" in print when recorded by Erskine Hawkins back in the 1940's, and that B. B. King had been a disc jockey back then, and probably played the record on the air, since it was a pretty big hit, and probably knew it had been called "rock 'n roll" at the time, too. And there he was in front of a crowd of the white student/hippie sort that Winterland attracted, reading the origins of rock 'n roll back to us before getting on with the regular order of business of the blues.

May 11, 2015

Untrimmed ex-Tree off Hwy 1

Between Pescadero and Davenport

May 07, 2015

A Tree With Complications

Coastal Oak at Home, Arana Gulch, Santa Cruz, CA

For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

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