Egregious Reader

The latest This American Life is called Three Miles and covers the class divide through two high schools in the Bronx. One is a poor public school and the other is $43k per year. It was really well done, Chana Joffe-Walt does a great job and I am glad she took up this story and worked so hard on it (tracking down Melanie). http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/three-miles The other thing that I am really enjoying is the first listen preview to an artist totally new to me: Laura Marling: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/15/391924095/first-listen-laura-marling-short-movie

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

I have been watching the Wire, the HBO series about drugs, police and Baltimore. On one hand, I think its incredible, seriously good writing, amazing character list that keeps expanding, complex world. But I also hesitate to recommend it because it is rough in every way possible. The second season is at the docks and deals with the plight of blue collar workers. The center of that world is Frank Sabotka who is the head of the union for the long-shoremen. He has watched the decline of the port and regularly can't get work for his son (Zig) or nephew (Nick). So here is the interesting part and the part that got me thinking. Frank is a working man. He shows no flash in cloths or vehicle. I haven't seen his house, but I doubt its much. But all around people are busting trying to survive ... its perhaps not abject poverty, but its on the borderline and might easily tumble downhill. The other character is The Greek. He is into money and power and is running drugs and prostitutes...

The painting is called The Family by Samuel Bak. Samuel Bak is a Holocaust survivor. It is haunting. Some faces are covered, some eyes are covered, some eyes are dead, some eyes are closed, few are open and looking ... some faces are bandaged, some figures are disfigured, some are rich, some are poor, some are busts, some are real. An old man, Da Vinci maybe, has put on his sunglasses so we can't see his red eyes or maybe so he can't see the world anymore so weary he is from his many years. Beside him to his right is what seems to be him again, but reflected from a mirror ... another bearded and weary traveler or perhaps us who are looking on, reflected. Then to the right is a faded painting of someone, maybe an italian from the Renaissance. His/her eyes are open, but mouth is hidden. Below are two war wounded men, seemed to be surrounded by brass horns. And beside him is one who is dead, and dressed in a military uniform. Then behind the dead is one alive, but we ca...

Alan Lomax (the principal recorder of what would have been lost music ... blues, bluegrass, etc.) worked for the library of congress. Toward the end of his life he said: "When the whole world is bored with automated, mass, distributed, video music, our descendants will despise us for having thrown away the best of our culture."  Once you lose your past you lose yourself.

"They climbed through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood." This kind of unbelievable combination of words and ability to engage and describe is endless in this book. Maybe sometimes it almost seems to rich ... almost, but not quite, sappy. Here is another line just in the next paragraph: "It was raining again and they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy half cured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land." The great literary critic Harold Bloom says this is the greatest american novel by a living novelist, but he also admits that it took him three tr...

"If [a composer] has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" ( CI: A Life With Music 143) Ives made is money selling insurance. "God must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and in His all-embracing wisdom could certainly embrace a dissonance -- might even enjoy one now and again." " Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently,—possibly almost invariably,—analytical and impersonal tests will show, we believe, that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep. A narcotic is not always unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of progress ,—that is, wholesome evolution in any creative exp...

I finished my first reading of Collected Poems 1957-1982 this morning. I was given this book seven years ago by a friend who still a regular part of my life. It was at my 30th birthday party. In the inside cover I wrote down all the names of the people who came to my party. I can still look over this list and remember how much I enjoyed that part. However, there is also some sadness, as the great majority of those who attended I have lost all contact with. There are circumstances that explain this happening to some extent, but it is decidedly foreign to the world that Berry commends to us in these poems. There are many poems in this collection that are important to me. I will touch on two: This is from At a Country Funeral: But our memory of ourselves, hard earned, is one of the land's seeds, as a seed is the memory of the life of its kind in its place, to pass on into life the knowledge of what has died. What we owe the future is not a new start, for we ca...

I have been on a little run of re-reading Chaim Potok in hopes of continuing on to finish all his novels this year. In college we were required to read The Chosen and I found a very deep connection to this book. So deep in fact, that my teacher, who was moving to Mongolia to teach English, gave me her copy of The Promise (the sequel). So late last year I re-read the Chosen for probably the third time and again deeply connected with the story of Ruevan and Danny and their fathers and their faith and their questions. I went on to my second reading of The Promise and found I felt as deep personal connection with the characters in this book. Last week I finished my second reading of My Name is Asher Lev. I think because I have begun to venture more and more into the realm of creative writing I felt the questions Asher was forced to face about the conflict between art and his family/community directly. The book is about a gifted boy, gifted at drawing, but more it is his sight tha...

The ultimate put-down of AM radio (and tv talks shows): A fool takes no pleasure in     understanding, but only in expressing personal     opinion. Proverbs 18:2 NRSV The second ultimate put-down of AM radio: In the wee, wee hours your mind get hazy Radio relay towers lead me to my baby The radio's jammed up with talk show stations It's just talk, talk, talk, talk, till you lose your patience Mister state trooper, please don't stop me Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer Hiho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere  Bruce Springsteen - State Trooper

"Put your hands into the mire. They will learn the kinship of the shaped and unshapen, the living and the dead." Wendell Berry Put your hands into the mire, reach into the bright spirit and bloody tissues inside your ribs, feel the diving spirit and grasp at the bright blood, the wise blood and the cold head, the knowing brain and the stony heart and when you have found your kinship with the red clay and the stony loam, then find a place to wait. Get up and run like hell. Lie down and die. Go out find the biggest giant and remove his head. Hold all those close dear and hold all those dear close. Let them go when they turn away and let them return when they turn toward. Leap and lie. Bound and bounden. The Mad Farmer also tells us: "Don't worry and fret about the crops. After you have done all you can for them, let them stand in the weather on their own. If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed. But the real...

I am nearing the end of my journey with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Quixote spends days and days, going without sleeping and eating for long stretches of time, reading the books of chivalry. And it drives him mad, he decides to revive the old, lost idea of knights errand and go about seeking damsels to save, the poor to succor and giants to slay. The book is tremendously funny, but it is also tragic, especially as he becomes famous and people began to deceive and exploit him for their own amusement. The danger of reading is the madness it can create where you are willing to charge upon a flock of sheep, lancing them right and left thinking you are fighting a vast army. Or more famously, you are to attack giants only to find them windmills. The greatness of it is that you take on and try and live out powerful ideals. Sometimes Quixote will give explanation that he is living his highest moral values as knight errand. Heschel writes:  "Books are neither an asylum for the ...

Listen. I am not sure how many readers I have in this category, but if you are single guy and need a good scare about your bad habits ... ok your sins and the beast they make of you. If you need to hear an incredible song that threatens the unreality that is Halo 2 (behind the times I am sure ... even though the album came out late 2008). If you want to listen to popular culture rip a piece out of popular culture ... actually you can't really refer to the Drones as pop culture just because they play in a rock band, they are too "depressing" in very non-typical ways for that. So I ruined my plot line a little, but go on i-tunes and buy the song The Minotaur by the Drones. Listen to it two or three times. Then look up the lyrics. Then find out what the Latin at the end means and refers to. And then repent and pray for all your brothers. Actually, if you are a man you probably need to lay your $0.99 on the barrel head and check your heart before you turn into a bull-headed b...

I am supposed to read something tomorrow night at our 5X15 night (15 artists sharing something for 5 minutes each). I feel pretty close to choosing a handful of my poetry and reading it (3 or 4 short pieces that I had previously strung together) ... I am just very aware at how stark and angry it sounds. I wonder how it will come across and what is more, most of my writing is like this. I don't know if it has to do with maturing or dispossession, but I find it incredibly hard to write about light and beauty and joy ... most of my writing is about sadness and loneliness and the unending (though often unnoticed) troubles in our country. I take comfort only in coming across some great writers who seem to give credence to my way of writing and the topics I am always tackling with pen and lyric. I am thinking of Walker Percy and his belief in the novelist as diagnostic for the soul. And Flannery O'Connor and her grotesque and violent short stories that are able to push us to the edge...

"It used to be that I could think of art as a refuge from such troubles. From the imperfections of life, one could take refuge in the perfections of art. On could read a good poem--or better, write one. Art was what was truly permanent, therefore what truly mattered. I know longer think that way. That is because I now live in my subject. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place." ---- Wendell Berry Damage This is some of what I was trying to get at in my last post. I want to live in my subject and be writing about what I am living. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. Abraham Heschel said that right living is like a work of art, the product of a vision and the wrestling of concrete situations. That is also some of what I am getting at.

There is a great danger in art ... it is the same dehumanizing danger in science and an unusual connection between art and science. It is a danger that some artists, like Wendell Berry, are much aware of and others, like Nick Cave whom I reference, are not. I developed a dislike for the transient, yet permanency, of love poetry when I listened to Nick Cave's spoken word essay called the Secret Life of a Love Song. It is really good, he makes the bold statement that a love song is trying to through a sheet over the invisible God so we can see him for a moment. However, the part I didn't like is when he talked about the transience of the relationship and the permanence of a love song. He said that women come and go, but the love song endures. When he said that it turns something in my stomach toward love songs and all writers in a sense. It made me bound and determined (though I regularly fail) to only write what I was living and to never think that something I write is more impo...