two takes
The Caravans (feat. Cassietta George), “Walk Around Heaven All Day”
Live
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Recording, 1964
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lagniappe
reading table
Interview of Alice Munro, last month
It’s hard to imagine a male writer, having just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, being so direct, so natural, so down to earth.
only rock ’n’ roll
Superchunk, “Void” (2013)
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Cormac McCarthy, particularly in a book like Blood Meridian, is writing an English very remote from our own. It’s more like the King James Bible on acid, right?
—David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), in Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing (2013)
keep on dancing
Theo Parrish, live, London (Boiler Room), 2013
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Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694; translated from Japanese by Sam Hamill)
*****
the beat goes on
Fifteen hundred posts—and counting.
sounds of Chicago
Something quiet to begin the week.
Tobias Broström (1978-), “Twilight”; Third Coast Percussion, live
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quite remarkable
being born human . . .
autumn dusk.—Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827; translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
serendipity
Last night I was feeling glum. Then I happened upon this. Listen to this piano sing.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major; Maria João Pires (piano), Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Trevor Pinnock, cond.), live
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Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.—Louise Glück, “From the Japanese” (excerpt)
two takes
Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931), Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor (1923)
Maxim Vengerov, live
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Hilary Hahn, live
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Fragments from the December issue of Poetry:
Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.—Louise Glück, “Nocturne”
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The purpose
Life is
To find—May Swenson, “Banyan”
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Poetry knows we are as close as a feather to disaster.
—Marianne Boruch, “Melodrama”
two takes
“Don’t Start Me Talkin'” (S. Williamson)
Sonny Boy Williamson II (AKA Aleck [or Alex] “Rice” Miller), recording, 1955
*****
Bob Dylan, TV show (David Letterman), 1984
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There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
—Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick
Jimmy Witherspoon (vocals) with Art Pepper (alto saxophone), “Past Forty Blues,” live, Los Angeles, 1981
Art never fails to captivate. But it’s hard to watch this without mixed emotions. He looks, to these eyes, completely coked up. The next year, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered a fatal stroke.
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[W]hen a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.
—Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (reviewed by novelist Claire Messud in the Dec./Jan. 2014 Bookforum)
music clip of the day 