music clip of the day

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, just how great somebody could be.

B.B. King, “How Blue Can You Get?”
Live, Sing Sing Prison (Ossining, New York), 1972

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lagniappe

last night

W. S. Merwin, who just finished a term as U.S. Poet Laureate, gave a reading at Chicago’s downtown library, where he talked about this and that:

The English language is a great dump. Everything that has come into it has stayed there.

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Poetry begins . . . with listening.

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I wanted to be open . . . to anything that sounded like poetry.

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To animals the meaning is the sound—and that’s pretty close to poetry.

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Time is one of the great human fictions.

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Many of the most important things we do are not calculated. They take us by surprise.

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What the arts are made of is nothing but pure attention.

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radio

Happy (100th) Birthday, Papa Jo! WCKR-FM’s Centennial Festival, mentioned Monday, continues until noon tomorrow.