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Category: reading table

Tuesday, April 5th

sounds of New York

The 12 Houses, live, New York, 3/6/16


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lagniappe

reading table

The process is fearless.

Joe Maddon, manager, Chicago Cubs 

Sunday, April 3rd

old school

Willie Neal Johnson (1935-2001) & The Gospel Keynotes, “Show Me the Way,” live, Jackson, Miss.


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lagniappe

reading table

i remember today like it was yesterday.

—Garrett Caples, “Love Is Made of Sky”

Thursday, March 31st

Something to wash over you.

John Luther Adams (1953-), The Light Within (2007); New Music Detroit, live, Detroit, 2014


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lagniappe

reading table

spring rain—
the uneaten ducks
are quacking

—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828; translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)

Sunday, March 27th

old school

Mighty Clouds of Joy (feat. Joe Ligon, lead vocals), live (TV show), 1976


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lagniappe

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.

Thursday, March 24th

Uneasy sounds for an uneasy world.

Iancu Dumitrescu (1944-), Hyperspectres for doublebasses, cellos, and percussion, live, Paris, 2011


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lagniappe

reading table

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow / And leaden-eyed despairs

—John Keats (1795-1821), “Ode to a Nightingale”

Wednesday, March 23rd

More cello.

Marcos Balter (1974-), Memoria (2007); Katinka Kleijn, live, Brazil (Manaus), 2014


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lagniappe

reading table

. . . and the mystery itself is the gateway to perception.

—Lao Tzu (c. 5th cent. B.C.), Tao Te Chingtranslated from Chinese by Sam Hamill

Sunday, March 20th

old school

Dynamic Revelators (Wichita, Ks.), “Holding On,” live, Gurdon, Ark., c. 2011


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lagniappe

reading table

We have to live out our precise experimentation.

—John Ashbery (1927-), “Breezeway” (Breezeway, 2015)

 

Tuesday, March 15th

riveting

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Piano Sonata No. 32; Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997), live, Moscow, 1975


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lagniappe

reading table

Everyone’s journey
through this world is the same,
so I won’t complain.
Here on the plains of Nasu,
I place my trust in the dew.

—Sōgi (1421-1502), translated from Japanese by Sam Hamill

Monday, March 14th

sounds of 1926

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), Prelude No. 15 (“Raindrop”); Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948), piano, 1926


*****

Bessie Smith (1894-1937), “Young Woman’s Blues,” 1926


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lagniappe

reading table

Whatever it is,
I cannot understand it,
although gratitude
stubbornly overcomes me
until I’m reduced to tears.

—Saigyō (1118-1190), translated from Japanese by Sam Hamill

Thursday, March 10th

sound and space

John Luther Adams (1953-), Sila: The Breath of the World (2014), live, New York, 2014 (performance begins at 4:45)

 

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lagniappe

reading table

We must be careful what we say. No bird resumes its egg.

—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), letter to cousins Louise and Frances Norcross, 1872