There's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
   And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing:~ 'Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
   And your English summer's done.'
   You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,
   And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
   You have heard the song~how long?  how long?
   Pull out on the trail again!
Ha' done with the Tents of Shem, dear lass,
We've seen the seasons through,
And it's time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail~the trail that is always new!

~Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) The Long Trail

"Teach us delight in simple things,
And mirth that has no bitter springs;
Forgiveness free of evil done,
And love to all men 'neath the sun!" ~ Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)

You Know You're in Cayuga When. . .

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet wrote to her brother prior to secretly marrying Robert Browning, begging for understanding and asking her brother to explain to their father her love for the man she was about to marry.*

"...Mr. Browning has been attached to me for nearly two years ~ at first and for long I could not believe that he (who is what you know a little) could care for such as I, except in an illusion and a dream...With a protest, he submitted, and months passed on so.  Still he came continually & wrote & made me feel with every breath I drew in his presence, that he loved me with no ordinary affection...

"I never believed that a man whom I could love (I hated having a need to look up high in order to love)...could be satisfied with loving me.  And yet he did~does.  Then we have one mind on all subjects~ & the solemner they are, the nearer we seem to approach.  If poets, we are together, still more we are Christians.  For these nearly two years we have known each other's opinions & thoughts & feelings, weakness & strength, as few persons in the position have had equal opportunities of doing."

*Elizabeth's father never spoke to her again.

~ The 50 GREATEST LOVE LETTERS of All Time, edited by D. H. Lowenherz, Crown Publishers, 2002.

Love you seek for, presupposes

   Summer heat and sunny glow,

Tell me, do you find moss-roses

   Budding, blooming in the snow?

Snow might kill the rose-tree's root~

Shake it quickly from your foot,
   Lest it harm you as you go.

From the ivy where it dapples

   A grey ruin, stone by stone,
Do you look for grapes or apples,

   Or for sad green leaves alone?

Pluck the leaves off, two or three~

Keep them for morality

   When you shall be safe and gone.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets From the Portuguese and Other Love Poems.

"If you make positive associations with nature early, then you can draw from that well, wherever you are.  You can summon that scene and calm yourself down.  And because you spent so much time there you can vividly evoke it, right down to the scent of the trees and the sound of the wind.

"It's not a bad thing to have at your disposal.  No matter how old you are."

~ Bruce Grierson, contributing editor to explore magazine.  July/August 2009.

Mumford & Sons Gentlemen of the Road Stopover 2013

 





"Music alone with sudden charms can bind
The wand'ring sense, and calm the troubled mind."

~ William Congreve (167- - 1729)  Elizabethan dramatist, playwright, poet.

Gates Open Simcoe Gentlemen of the Road Stopover

"Last year's Stopovers were a dream come true for us.  We collaborated with small, quirky towns around the world to put on a stone-cold wonderful day of music (excuse the immodesty).

"Every town has something unique to share."  ~ Mumford & Sons

~ Simcoe, August 24 & 25, 2013

Mumford & Sons' Gentlemen of the Road Stopover Simcoe

"We encourage everyone to explore.  Soak it up.  Enjoy the town.  There will be events happening into the night (and in the mornings for early risers).  If it's a town you've never been to, you've got no excuses; if it's the town you are from, thank you for having us.  We cannot wait."

~ Mumford & Sons

Gentlemen of the Road ~

The buried man ~ FESTIVAL GROUNDS SIMCOE The Mumford & Sons' Gentlemen of the Road Stopover, August 24 & 25, 2013.

The Heart of Simcoe, Norfolk ~ Downtown

Gentlemen of The Road

"EACH GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD STOPOVER celebrates the local food, culture, and music of an interesting small city or town.  We've handpicked these unique communities and have collaborated with our local partners to build a fun and intimate live music experience from the ground up..." ~ Mumford & Sons

Congratulations, Simcoe, Norfolk, on a job well done.  Shuttle buses carried visitors from off-site parking and camping to the heart of Simcoe ~ downtown.   Street fairs and business promotions attracted residents as well as people from British Columbia, New Brunswick, the U.S. and Europe to mention a few.

Main streets were closed to vehicles to accommodate the flow of an estimated thirty-five thousand visitors.

www.mumfordandsons.com
www.simcoetowncentre.com

Thought for Today ~

"No great man lives in vain.  The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies."

"There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed." vol. iv. Sir Walter Scott


"What is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?" On History

~ Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) Scottish philosopher, writer, teacher.  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Third Edition.

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."

~ G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962)  English Social History, 1942.

Elmore Leonard dead at 87 (Oct. 11, 1925 - Aug. 20, 2013)  American author, screen writer, known for his dark humour, gritty realism, strong dialogue.
"The old neighborhood has changed.  Hurley Brothers Funeral Home is now called Death 'n' Things."*

Well-known for his Ten Rules of Writing, Leonard said that "if it sounds like writing, I rewrite."  "I try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

*The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said by Robert Byrne, 1986, Simon & Schuster.

Photo:  Wikipedia

On Novels ~

"Lady Peabury was in the morning room reading a novel; early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit."

~ Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) Arthur Ewelyn St. John Waugh, novelist, journalist ~ Work Suspended (1942), An Englishman's Home (1939)

Brad Smith with avid fan, June Bell of Cayuga

WATCH FOR FUTURE DATE of Brad Smith's visit to The Neat Little Bookshop.  SHOOT THE DOG, is the third in the popular Virgil Cain mystery series.  Fast, witty, beautifully crafted.   Folks in the country relate to Smith's characters ~ feels like home to us!  Congratulations, Brad, on what may just be your best book yet!

Brad Smith Signed Books for Avid Fans on the Weekend at Flyers Cafe.

"Down where the lilies blow..."

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS, American poet, satirist, editor (1862 - 1922). Worked for Life, Harpers & Puck.  Inspired by Carroll's Alice, he wrote Rollo in Emblemland.

To our readers:  We feel it necessary to explain that as Blogspot/Google offers more services, it seems that we have more problems.  If you notice incidental typos, spelling errors (ie. Lewis Carroll - we have now corrected.), it is because we are having to constantly trick Blogspot ~ going 'round 'n 'round in order to enter text or edit.  To enter text, we have to upload a photograph, remove, then type!  Once exited, good luck ~ cannot re-enter.  Our appeals to "Blogspot Help"  are less and less businesslike as the frustration grows.

THE LITTLE ELF

I MET a little Elf-man, once,
Down where the lilies blow.
I asked him why he was so small,
And why he didn't grow.

He slightly frowned, and with his eye
He looked me through and through.
"I'm quite as big for me," said he,
"As you are big for you!"

~ John Kendrick Bangs

Cayuga's Beautiful Old Houses

Welcome John's Interiors

Quotations on Poetry are from FAMOUS LASTING WORDS, John Robert Colombo's Great Canadian Quotations, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 2000.

"Poetry is the shortest possible way of saying the sort of things I want to say."
~ Earle Birney, poet, quoted by Bruce Ward in The Toronto Star, 21 May 1978.

"How beautifully useless, / how deliciously defiant / a poem is!"
~ lines from Raymond Souster's poem "Cutting It Short."  Asking for More (1988)

"We're living in too materialistic a society.  I'd rather have a few more poets and fewer plumbers." ~ Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister, addressing young Liberals at the University of Toronto, 23 March 1977, quoted in  The Toronto Star the following day.



Total Abandonment



On Poetry ~

"I move in a mythical world all the time, but then myth and reality aren't separate things ~ it's a way of seeing for me.  The mundane is magical, but so is the astronaut going to the moon." 
~ Gwendolyn MacEwen, poet, quoted by Ken Adachi in The Toronto Star, 19 Nov. 1978.

"If I were named czar tomorrow, the first thing I'd do is fire all the English teachers.  They do enormous damage.  They take apart poems as if they were crosswords puzzles or riddles.  They destroy people's innate love of poetry."
~ Greg Gatenby,  poet, founder of the Harbourfront Reading Series, quoted by Rod Currie in The St. Catharines Standard, 11 Sept. 1993.

"I write poetry only to reveal my civilization, my sensitivities, my craftsmanship."
~ A.M. Klein, poet, offering his credo to A.J.M. Smith for The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943).

"For as long as man is still capable of emotion, be it love or hate or fear or great joy or sorrow, poems will cry out to be written, and somewhere and somehow poets will spring up to write the down."
~ Raymond Souster, poet, "Getting On with it,"  Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (1991) 



Caught the phantom tree specialist in the act ~ Thank you, Peter Kammerman for pruning the tree.



Welcome John's Interiors

"I can learn a lot about poetry by listening to birds, for example, or by listening to trees.  They speak ancient languages.  and if I can't exactly transcribe them word for word, at least I can make some kind of counterpart in my own language."

~ Robert Bringhurst, poet, quoted in "In Person," The Globe and Mail, 24 June, 1995.

Hannelore Headley Old & Fine Books

71 Quuen Street, St. Catharines, Ontario

Hannelore Heinemann Headley and her family were in Nazi Germany on the night known in history as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," November 8, 1938.  The following year they fled to Shanghai, China, to escape the Nazi and the Holocaust.

After fourteen years of "challenge laced with joys and sadness," Hannelore's family were once again forced to flee, this time ~ the Communist takeover.  "It seemed that once again, the inmates had taken over the asylum," she writes in her book Blond China Doll, A Shanghai Interlude 1939 - 1953.

Bibliomaniacs have made the pilgrimage to Hannelore Headley's Old & Fine Books in St. Catharines for over forty years.  Hannelore passed away on June 15, 2013 spelling the end of an era.  Her bookshop business has been sold.  Cathy, Hannelore's employee of fifteen years, is still there sitting behind the familiar desk.  There are perhaps a few less papers congesting the area but the book-stuffed rooms remain the same.  Make the pilgrimage to Queen Street ~ support the little bookshop with the legendary story.

Hannelore Heinemann Headley 1936 ~ 2012

Triple H Publishing St. Catharines, Ontario

"The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart."  ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

"Remember that if the opportunities for great needs should never come, the opportunity for good deeds is renewed day by day.  The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory."  ~ Frederick Wm. Faber

"The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth or courage." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"This I resolved on ~ to run, when I can, to go, when I cannot run; and to creep, when I cannot go."  ~ John Bunyan

~ COURAGE, A Little Book of Brave Thoughts, Edited by Harold Whaley, Peter Pauper Press, 1971.

Third Thursdays in the Bookshop

POETRY & POETS ~ Thursday, August 15, 1:00 p.m.  Enjoy a casual afternoon with local poets.  Do you have a favourite poem or poet?  If you missed last month's reading with Dr. Alan Bishop, there will be an opportunity on Thursday to ask Alan to share once more some of his work.  John Passfield will be here. There will be light refreshments and of course, "The coffee pot's always on..."  With the construction of our new bridge, plan to park on Cayuga Street.  See photos below.

Intersection Cayuga Street at Talbot (Hwy #3)

Bookshop-by-the-Bridge

THE BUTTERFLY'S DAY.

FROM cocoon forth a butterfly

     As lady from her door

Emerged ~ a summer afternoon ~

Repairing everywhere,

Without design, that I could trace,

Except to stray abroad

On miscellaneous enterprise

Photo: lbw

The clovers understood.

Her pretty parasol was seen

Contracting in a field

Where men made hay, then struggling hard

With an opposing cloud,

Where parties, phantom as herself,

To Nowhere seemed to go

In purposeless circumference,

As 't were a tropic show.

And notwithstanding bee that worked,

And flower that zealous blew,

This audience of idleness

Disdained them, from the sky,

Till sundown crept, a steady tide,

And men that made the hay,

And afternoon, and butterfly,

Extinguished in its sea.

~ Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, Chatham River Press, 1986.

REMINDER FRIENDS:  August Third Thursday, 15th at 1:00 p.m., Poems & Poets, a round-table sharing favourite poems.  Everyone welcome.  Every third Thursday of the month an informal reading of poetry or prose ~ or sometimes a Fascinating Personality of literature or other.

Yesterday we witnessed a motorcycle roar past the bookshop door on the sidewalk ~ we can only guess ~ to escape the traffic.  The construction of the new bridge, the restriction to 30 Km. speed limit, the narrow lanes and the improvements in progress along the highway, all trying drivers' patience.

Last week a friend's vehicle was t-boned and rolled at the intersection beside Foodland.  Unimaginable in a small village where traffic normally moves slowly and  orderly.  Our friend hung upside down dangling in her seatbelt for forty minutes while a passerby kept pressure on her arm where she had an injured artery.  She had to be cut from her vehicle.



   

Jeff Ronhaar of Jeff's Lawn Care/Mackenzie & Tim Mitchell Planting the 250,000th Tree.  Congratulations Mackenzie!

Haldimand Stewardship & Woodlot Owners Association

HALDIMAND STEWARDSHIP COUNCIL planted their 250,000th tree this summer.  The youngest tree-planter at the annual canoe festival was two-and-a-half year old Thomas Widdis of Kitchener.  Assisting were his grandmother, Colleen Armstrong of Brantford and his mom, Melissa Widdis. Great photos courtesy of Stewardship member Art Lyall.  Thank you, Art.

QUICK REMINDER ~ THIRD THURSDAY READINGS.  AUGUST 15, 1:00 p.m.  POETRY & POETS ~ Your favourite poem.  Everyone Welcome.

We apologize for any inconvenience

St. Williams Forestry Norfolk Today

"The phough is seldom put into the land before the third or fourth year, nor is it required; the general plan of cropping the first fallow with wheat or oats, and sowing grass-seeds with the grain to make pastures, renders the plough unnecessary till such time as the grass-lands require to be broken up.  This method is pursued by most settlers while they are clearing bush-lands; always chopping and burning enough to keep a regular succession of wheat and spring crops, while the former clearings are allowed to remain in grass." ~ Catharine Parr Traill (1802, 1899)

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/moodie-traill/027013-3000-e.html

"For myself, though I can easily enter into the feelings of the poet and the enthusiastic lover of the wild and the wonderful of historic lore, I can yet make myself very happy and contented in this country.  If its volume of history is yet a blank, that of Nature is open, and eloquently marked by the finger of God; and from its pages I can extract a thousand sources of amusement and interest when ever I take my walks in the forest or by the borders of the lakes."

~ The Backwoods of Canada Catharine Parr Traill Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, McClelland & Stewart, Limited, 1929.

Smile for Today ~

"Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight:  always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary."

~ Sir James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937) Scottish author, creator of Peter Pan.

(Note: As it is with computers, if one way fails, try another.  Sign-in by googling "blogspot" instead of "The Neat Little Bookshop" and we can enter text ~ for now!)

 

Andy Warhol August 6, 1986 Birthday

"All day people just whispered Happy Birthday, they didn't say it out loud.  Paige was getting together an advertising dinner for that night, which I was afraid was just going to be a birthday dinner disguised, so I told her she'd better have at least four advertisers there or there'd be trouble.
"...Got to Caffe Roma at 8:00...And there was a Polaroid guy there, and I finally told him that if Polaroid didn't advertise at this point, I was never going to use their name again in my life, and he said, 'Oh don't say that, don't let it mean we can't be friends.'  And he gave me something he said was very meaningful to him (laughs) ~ it was a Polaroid.  Of a sunset."

~ The ANDY WARHOL DIARIES edited by Pat Hackett, Warner Books, Copyright 1989 Estate of Andy Warhol.

(Note:  There is a webcam of Andy Warhol's gravesite today.)



Aug.6/28 - Feb.22/87

(Portrait by J. Mitchell, Source Wikipedia)

Poison Ivy n. a N. American climbing plant, Rhus radicans, secreting an irritant oil from its leaves.

Harvest

To our Readers:  Blogspot allows photos today but not text.  Abandon The Neat L'l Bookshop Blog?  First we will get outside help!  Apologies. 



Take to the Country