music clip of the day

sounds of Chicago

Mixon Singers, live, Chicago, 2013

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lagniappe

art beat

Walter Unbehaun (a 74-year-old client sentenced this week, in Chicago, to 42 months for bank robbery), African Preacher (Kankakee County Jail, 2014)

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reading table

God’s Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.