back to church
“Give Me Jesus,” Langrum Branch Baptist Church, York, S.C., 2000
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lagniappe
reading table
The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.
—Simone Weil (1909-1943), Gravity and Grace (translated from French by Emma Crawford)
*****
random sights
this morning, Oak Park, Ill.
tonight in Chicago
These guys, from Australia, are playing at Constellation.
The Necks, live, London, 2016
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lagniappe
reading table
The Imaginary Iceberg
by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.
basement jukebox
Howlin’ Wolf (vocals, harmonica; 1910-1976), “How Many More Years,” “Moanin’ at Midnight,” 1951
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We drew from the models, and you cannot imagine how fantastically boring it can be to look hour after hour at a beautiful body. But an ugly body can be fascinating.
—photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983), quoted in Colm Toibin, “That Little Minx” (reviewing Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer and Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov), London Review of Books, 3/2/17
back to church
Choir Rehearsal, “Walk Through the Streets,” White Hill AME Zion Church, Rock Hill, S.C., 2007
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lagniappe
reading table
Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.
—Zadie Smith, Swing Time
If I knew I had a week to live, this is one of the recordings I would want to hear.
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), 24 Preludes
Alfred Cortot (1877-1962), piano, 1933/34
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dizzying, adj. making you feel dizzy. E.g., reading a John Ashbery poem.
Listen to it the way everybody
here was naughty today,
of how broad it is.Foreign man with an affluent cigar,
he used to live on top of this bed
on the local rails he was so proud of
among the recyclables, this morning,
spouting words that I thought were other.
Yes, and they became addictive. Oh,make me a boy again! Do something!
But the little candle just stood there,
reflected in its lozenge-shaped mirror.
Maybe that was “something,”
a lithe sentence.He’s only going to do it for the first time.
It’s snowing hard.Hand me the orange.
—John Ashbery (1927-), “Just So You’ll Know,” New Yorker, 2/13 & 20/17
not the same old stuff
Maja S. K. Ratkje, live (performance begins at 1:30), Norway (Kristiansand), 2013
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Happy (106th) Birthday, Elizabeth
From the few states I have seen I should now immediately select Florida as my favorite. I don’t know whether you have been here or not—it is so wild, and what there is of cultivation seems rather dilapidated and about to become wild again. On the way down we took a very slow train from Jacksonville here. All day long it went through swamps and turpentine camps and palm forests and in a beautiful pink evening it began stopping at several little stations. The stations were all off at a tangent from the main track and it necessitated first going by, then stopping, backing up, stopping, starting again—with many puffs of white smoke, blowing of the whistle, advice from the loiterers around the station—all to throw off one limp bag of mail.
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), letter to Marianne Moore, January 5, 1937
more
Wet Ink Ensemble, Pendulum V (Alex Mincek), live, New York, 2009
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langiappe
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in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty
—Phil Ochs (1940-1976), Pleasures of the Harbor (1967), liner notes
Something small, quiet, mysterious for this most unimaginable day.
Erik Satie (1866-1925), Gnossienne 1 (c. 1890); Alessio Nanni, piano
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The only choice we get is what to worship.
—David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), This Is Water
joy of serendipity
Empirical, live, London, 2016
***
More.
“Card Clash,” live, Southhampton, England, 2015
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hole in the wall
pretty
my year’s first sky—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue
