music clip of the day

sounds of New York

Robert Dick (flutes, composition) with Resonant Refractions, Concerto for Flute, Bass Flute, Strings and Percussion, live, New York, 4/2/22

**********

lagniappe

reading table

I have just had a long early-morning visit from Faustina who is still carrying on selling her “ticketys” (lottery tickets) bravely and walking miles every day with them, at the age of eighty-two. First she has to have a small drink of cognac, then she advises me about what number to buy this week—it’s 2—then she tells me lots of gossip, except that I can’t understand much of it; she speaks a sort of elementary gibberish of her own, part Spanish, part English. She is carrying all her tickets and money these days in a cardboard suit-case, brown wood-grained, with a red cross on one side, and “The Little Doctor” in large print. She was also carrying a large mirror, very tarnished, in a silver frame, that someone had given her. She is going to take out the mirror and use the frame for a photograph of, first—she said—her daughter, second thought, an improvement, the “Virgin Maria . . .”

—Elizabeth Bishop (Key West, Florida), letter to Robert Lowell, November 18, 1947 (Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell)