Mayne, Auden, Yeats, Submissions and Spamminess

I finished re-reading Michael Mayne's Learning to Dance a couple of days ago. I said in a post before Christmas that it wasn't gelling with me as much as This Sunrise of Wonder, one of Mayne's earlier books which I've consistently enjoyed on each reading. Perhaps the Dance book just took a little longer to get into, but I've actually enjoyed re-reading it; it's full of great things.

At one point he quotes W H Auden, perhaps not totally accurately: 'the poet's task is to persuade us to rejoice. ' The line is partly a quote out of Auden's In Memory of W B Yeats. Adapting the line slightly we could equally say: the composer's task is to persuade us to rejoice. What else does music do except persuade our emotions? (Music that is purely intellectual doesn't tend to grab me much, and note that Bach, even at his most rigorously intellectual is always emotional with it.)

By the way, the stanza in the poem actually goes like this:

Follow, poet, follow
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

On another tack altogether, I've just seen a site that offers free directory submissions. There are plenty around that charge you so many cents per submission, but this one does it for zilch. The only 'catch', if you can call it that, is that you have to have a link to a companion site on your site. What I find interesting about this process is the number of search engines still functioning alongside the giants (well, the giant, and the wannabee giants). Who uses all these? What's the point when Google pretty much has it all sewn up?

The one that immediately comes to mind amongst the wannabees, is Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that's not a search engine. It has piles of information, but you can only find what they provide, not what you want to look for. Seems a bit of a back-to-front approach to me, as I wrote in another blog a month or two ago.

And talking of that blog, I was informed this morning, after not being able to access it and the other that I have on Orble for several days, that "Your account was flagged for spam. You are back up and running but try not to post "spammy" comments which may get noticed by the filter."

How do you post 'spammy' comments? And what is a 'spammy comment' when it's at home, anyway? I've asked them to give me some more info, but I don't expect to hear anything for a few days...they're not exactly speedy with their replies.