Zagajewski's inheritance

The contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (above) has inherited the full eyebrows of Czeslaw Milosz, the late elderstatesman of Polish bards; he also carries on Milosz's crowning poetic achievement: the noble struggle to voice an authentic faith in a "post-religious world." Cynthia Haven, writing recently in a feature for the Poetry Foundation, describes the nature of this spirutal inheritance:

'The death of Milosz in 2004, the year Zagajewski won the Neustadt, effectively marked the passing of the scepter to the younger poet, the crown prince of Polish poetry. “What a joy to see a major poet emerging from a hardly differentiated mass of contemporaries and taking the lead in the poetry of my language,” Milosz had written in a 1985 introduction to his verse, by way of investiture and blessing....

Zagajewski’s quiet, persistent optimism is refreshing in a nation of shallow enthusiasms. What are its roots? Friend and fellow poet Rifenburgh has an insight: “I personally think he believes in a ‘world without end’ and the eternality of the spirit. I think he believes death as a finality would be too easy: it’s not that simple.”

Expressing such a vision is not that simple, either. Milosz once said that “we are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a conversation with Pope John Paul II, who commented upon Milosz’s work, saying, “Well, you make one step forward, one step back.” Milosz replied, “Holy Father, how in the 20th century can one write religious poetry differently?”

Zagajewski concurred: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from ‘professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”

His view is a counterpoint to the current fashion of irony, which he decries. “I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus, but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance,” he said. “How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small, but it’s my space.'

the John Paulson of Verse

"Robert Graves once remarked that just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money. But Katy Lederer sees it differently. Lederer has just published “The Heaven-Sent Leaf,” a collection of poetry animated by the idea of the economic bubble. “It’s so dry when you read it in the papers, but, really, it’s mythic,” she said recently, on a day that the stock market had dropped three hundred and seventy points. “It’s Icarus, it’s ‘Faust,’ it’s Eros and vanitas. It’s ‘Star Wars’!” If this is not a formula for literary success, it’s good market timing, at least; she might be the John Paulson of verse."

-Rebecca Rotham, Ballad of the Bubble (New Yorker, Dec. 8).

Achebe's Red Flag

"In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been eavesdropping, reached Chuku first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed the request, and told Chuku that after death men did not want to return to the world. The god said that he would do as they wished, and when the dog arrived with the true message he refused to change his mind. Thus, men may be born again, but only in a different form.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recounts this myth, which exists in hundreds of versions throughout Africa, in one of his essays. Sometimes, Achebe writes, the messenger is a chameleon, a lizard, or another animal; sometimes the message is altered accidentally rather than maliciously. But the structure remains the same: men ask for immortality and the god is willing to grant it, but something goes wrong and the gift is lost forever. “It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose!” Achebe writes. “For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth . . . horrors can descend again on mankind.”

-excerpted from "After Empire: Chinua Achebe and the Great African Novel," New Yorker, May 26, 2008

Heaney's Directive

...Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.

-Seamus Heaney (last three stanzas of "North")

Whitman's Song of His/Her/Your/Our/Myself

"'What is it then between us?' Walt Whitman asks in his great poem 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.' Well, what is it Mr. Whitman? Was 'Leaves of Grass' just a book of poems, or was it a manifesto of multiculturalism before that notion even existed? Was it a paeon to love and sex and freedom? Was it just some guy's utopian dream of an ideal America, or a blueprint for a real America? A century and a half later, are we ready for the America of Walt Whitman's dreams?"

This excerpt is taken from "Walt Whitman: Song of Myself," a recent WNYC documentary which seeks to answer these questions by teasing out the social, sexual, and political implications of Whitman's landmark collection, "Leaves of Grass." Narrated by Carl Hancock Rux, and featuring commentary by Philip Lopate and Martin Espada, and recitations of Whitman's poetry by Paul Giamatti and Jeffrey Wright, "Song of Myself" portrays a dynamic sketch of The Great Gray Poet.

The commentary returns, as does the poetry, to Whitman's excitable fascination with urban egalitarianism, his robust observations of quotidian street life, his love for the working class, his articulate voyeurism, his deep democratic sympathies. What also emerges from this production is a picture of Whitman as a socio-sexual vanguard who celebrated erotic liberality in a culturally-conservative era. Listening in, we are reminded again and again of the panoramic scope of Whitman's poetic lens. His poetic aim was to "contain multitudes" in his verse. WNYC's well-produced program is alive with a memorable hint of the same expansive, inclusive energy that fires Whitman's electric verse.

"On the cover of C. K. Williams' sensibly packaged retrospective is a color photograph of the author, smiling, in a red turtleneck, pleasant brown v-neck sweater, and winter coat—navy blue with plaid lining. He looks as though he's been foraging for firewood and has just returned to recite a few poems. His eyebrows are slightly raised. "Ah, you're just in time," he seems to be saying, with "COLLECTED POEMS" printed in large white letters across his chest."

-Aaron Belz, "Six Pack: The Charms and Annoyances of Collected Poems," Books and Culture, July/ August '08

Time for Makoto Fujimura

In the Meiji period of the late nineteenth century, a small coterie of Japanese painters decided their contemporaries had endured enough Western influence. Armed with sumi (a Chinese ink made from soot, fishbone, and animal hide), and a complex pigment derived from pulverized semi-precious stones like malachite and azurite-- the coarse, petrous materials their ancestors had relied on for generations-- they sought to extricate their culture's rich artistic heritage from the dominant sway of European aesthetic trends. This movement, led by Shimomura Kanzan, Yokoyama Taikan, and Hishida Shunso, is recognized now as the modern emergence of Nihonga, a derivate name for a technique practiced by Japanese masters for over a thousand years.

This newer generation of painters saw the preservation of Nihonga, with its unique combination of volatile, earth-hewn materials, as the key to sustaining the distinctive form of Japanese visual art. They continued to apply their mixtures to washi (Japanase paper)* or silk, instead of the canvases favored by Western artists. Yet in composing their works to be displayed in frames, they revolutionized the formats utilized by their forebears, who typically painted on scrolls and screens.**

Makoto Fujimura, a Japanese-American artist living in New York City, is one of today's most innovative practitioners of Nihonga. Fujimura, who was born in Boston but later earned his MFA in Tokyo, utilizes the form's traditional techniques and materials to create abstract expressionist compositions remarkable for their stunning contrasts of pattern and hue. The critic Gerard Haggerty has compared Fujimura's paintings to the "rich and subtle coloration of a butterfly's wing."***

"Still Point - Evening" 2003

"Fire" 2006

"January Hour - Epiphany"

"Shalom" 2001

"Gladiolas Red" 2000

"Gladiolas Blue" 2000

"November Hour"

Ken Myers interviewed Fujimura shortly after the release of his book River Grace, which was published earlier this year. An excerpted form of that conversation is available on Audition, Mars Hill Audio's free podcast.

"Like abstract expressionist painters from the mid-twentieth century, Fujimura is profoundly concerned with the action of creating his art and not just with the finished product," says Myers. "And because of the materials he uses, which chemically and visually change over time, looking carefully at his paintings encourages an attentiveness to the meaning of time, and of the things in God's creation that take time. Fujimura's book River Grace reflects on how his art, his life, and his beliefs are as subtly and creatively intertwined as the materials he uses, which as he explained to me in [our] recent conversation, are as much about time as about space and color."

Fujimura, in that conversation, explains his work this way:

"The process of time is a language for me. My work is process-oriented, so it's going to be about the passage of time. The material itself, being organic, will begin to settle hopefully like a good bottle of wine and with time will become distilled on the surface of the painting. I'm using medieval materials, which means mineral pigments, pulverized precious minerals like malachite and azurite, as well as gold and silver and sumi ink on top of paper. They are done on a base mixture of hide, glue and water layered many times--often about fifty layers on a single painting. You're literally trapping time in the process.

It will continue to morph over time. It takes about two years for the surface to settle. So if you use silver, that's going to tarnish over time, so you calculate that in to how it's going to look in forty or fifty years. You have Japanese paintings from the seventeenth century that use silver powder. It's completely darkened now, but it's absolutely one of the most beautiful things you'll see because the artist has calculated that to be part of the piece."

*Wikipedia, **Brittanica, ***Mars Hill Audio Journal, Audition #11

Bloody Sunday and a Fisherman's Ghost

For those of us not well-versed in contemporary Irish history, U2's song "Bloody Sunday" is probably our main link to the tragedy that unfolded in Derry, Northern Ireland on January 30th, 1972. Thirteen unarmed civilians were killed when a British military battalion opened fire on a group of protesters marching in the Bogside neighborhood. In his poem "Casualty," Seamus Heaney approaches the violence of that turbulent time through the death of a local fisherman he knew. Curtis Fox discusses the poem with the professor Joshua Weiner in the latest "Poetry off the Shelf."

You've got more than a friend in Randy Newman

It's largely true that, as Kurt Anderson says, most of my generation knows Randy Newman as the smily-voiced singer responsible for "You've Got a Friend in Me," the little ballad with the happy ache that served as the emotional centerpiece for Disney/ Pixar's Toy Story. And if the generation just after mine doesn't recognize Newman's work in Toy Story, Monster's Inc., Cars, or A Bug's Life, they might recall his parodied appearance in Family Guy as a washed up cocktail singer stumbling through improvised piano numbers at the Griffin's vacation spot.

In a recent interview with Anderson on Studio 360, Newman jokes that even his kids' friends "know me from that." Newman is all the more likable for taking the Family Guy joke with good humor. "You know it isn't a bad song," says Newman. "It's got things rhyming that are pretty good. It's got the same three chords that I use."

If the parody gets Newman's knack for rhyme and simple song structures right, it misses his real appeal entirely. The accuracy of the show's caricature of Newman is debatable. Some may think of him as a burned-out songwriter. But it'd be hard to make a case for him as a songwriter who bases his lyrical material on stream of consciousness observations of bar life, as one character does.

In fact, Newman's actual songs are executed with some of the finest lyrical economy I've witnessed in any American songwriter. You almost never find more details in them than is necessary for him to make his point. Whether talking about U.S. foreign relations ("Political Science"), complicated family ties ("Memo to My Son"), or the isolation of stardom ("Lonely at the Top"), Newman rarely needs more than ten verses, a refrain, and a deft twist of phrase to nail his subject.

Compare him with a descriptive-obsessive like Dylan (a songwriter whose style is a much better fit for The Family Guy critique) and you've got a songwriter of exceptional restraint and brevity who goes further than most with far fewer words. And then there's Newman's secret weapon: a cuddly tone and style of phrasing whose unassuming charm acts an ironic counterpoint when he's delivering his most dubious material. The combination casts a spell few can match. I don't know another singer who can make me want to smile and sing along with a line like "let's drop the big one, pulverize 'em."

His 1972 album Sail Away witnesses these Newman trademarks as completely as any I can think of. While there's nothing wrong with his work for Disney, Sail Away is the Newman more of my generation ought to know.

A Tribute to James Brown

I haven't yet tracked down the artist responsible for the above piece, but when I saw it in the latest New Yorker I knew I had to do some hunting. It's promoting "A Tribute to James Brown at Lincoln Center Out of Doors," and doing a dang fine job, I might add.

Umberto Eco on Teenage Poetry

INTERVIEWER You’ve talked before about trying your hand at poetry in this period. In an essay on writing, you said, “my poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.”

ECO I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

-Taken from an interview for "The Art of Fiction," (Paris Review, Summer '08)

The Grizz-ind: In Praise of Rap CDs Purchased on the Street

"All of my favorite rap albums are CDs I bought on the street," says Davy Rothbart in a hymn to "the rap world's Daniel Johnstons" that ran in The Believer's 2008 Music Issue (with the above title). "I mean, I like some commercial rap, I like some underground hip-hop, but the shit I really get down with is downright subterranean. I love the murky production values; I find it exquisite when someone rhymes a word with the same word. But it’s not the campiness that captivates me, it’s the urgent sincerity, the flares of emotion, the specificities of small but stinging daily struggles. Inside the odd, sparse beats and untreated vocals, I can imagine the scene where the music was recorded: three teenagers in a makeshift basement studio, joined, perhaps, by a couple of younger siblings—one looking on watchfully, the other tugging at pant legs, demanding a turn with the mic. I don’t want my rappers driving Escalades; I want them begging rides from their friends, or driving the same beat-up piece of shit as me."

A Phone Call to the Future

"I think a lot of people of my generation have a fear of the very technology that they've benefitted from," confesses the poet Mary Jo Salter. "I know I do. I'm as addicted as anybody to my cell phone and my email. There's something scary about, on the one hand, feeling that you're behind-- you don't understand the latest thing that's been developed. On the other hand, if you were to go along with it, would you in fact lose some vital aspect of what you thought it was to be human.

So if it's true that we're really going to have all sorts of genetic engineering, or we're going to have little nano robots in our blood-- or whatever-- there's a feeling that we're messing with what it is to be human. If that is the case, what would we consider the essence of being human? It would be art-- it would be the making of art. And for me that's poetry, although I think music in some ways is a greater art because you don't use words. But, in any case, I feel nostalgic in advance about the possible loss of poetry and the things we work on that reaffirm what we used to think of as humanity."

Salter shares her analog-to-digital dilemma in conversation with Open Source's Christopher Lydon as a way of explaining the perspective she's chosen from which to write her poem, "A Phone Call to the Future." It appears below (courtesy of The Borzoi Reader):

1.
Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.


Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.


Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.


The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.


2.
This was the Fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more—this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.


The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter's running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.


They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.


3.
It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,


you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.


Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It's less than that, not anymore a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.


Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental—
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional Fifties.


That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.


All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

Man on Wire

On the morning of August 7th 1974, the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit rigged a 7/8" cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center using a high-powered crossbow and began his first of eight one hundred-story crossings. Petit and the friend who helped him rig the apparatus were soon escorted back down the WTC's winding one thousand foot starewell by a peeved pair of New York City police officers. Man on Wire, a recent documentary film, reassembles the story behind this marvelous feat and the ensuing controversy. If the police had a hard time coaxing Petit back to the building's edge, it wasn't necessarily because the high wire artist was afraid of being incarcerated (footage of him at the police station shows him goofing off with circus clown gags, such as balancing his black bowler hat on his nose--a picturesque image in black and white). No, Petit had "fallen in love" with the buildings, as he passionately discloses to Kurt Anderson in a recent interview featured on Studio 360.

R.I.P. Isaac Hayes (1942-2008)

Hayes, who died Sunday, was introduced at the legendary Wattstax musical festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum in August of 1972 as The Black Moses. Though Hayes' performance at Wattstax was memorable, if any offering by the late soul singer seems worthy of that title it's probably his sage-like appearance in the Wu Tang Clan's "Can't Go To Sleep." Below is the video, in which Hayes can be seen in his classic black shades telling the world-weary Rza and Ghost to stop crying about the sad state of things and "get the jelly out yo spine."

Kay Ryan

"Poetry itself isn't really one of the do-gooding things," says Kay Ryan, the U.S.'s new poet laureate. "It may help us sometimes. It's also a very bity thing, a ferocious thing. I think sometimes the role of poet laureate gets so confused with being a person who does good that we can sort of start thinking that poetry is a social tool in some way. I'm terribly selfish about good poetry. If I find a poet who excites me, what I want to do is not tell anybody...I mean I'm exaggerating. I think that the real nature of one's relationship with a poem is that that poem, if it's important to you, is so interior it's almost frightening. It's a very private thing, and it almost has nothing to do with the external world, even though we use poems in large public ways. When you read a poem that really affects you, in a sense you feel you're half creating it, because you feel, 'oh, how could he know that about me?' And so there's this deep exchange that doesn't have much to do with the larger world of public language."

This excerpt is taken from a conversation with WBUR's Tom Ashbrook in which Ryan speaks about her now job, shares the unique joys and difficulties of her form, and reads a few of her poems. Here's one called "Patience," courtesy of the Academy of American Poets:

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

Pictures, Icons, Headlines, Hypertext, Captions and Images Versus the Printed Word

My last blog post dealt with how the digital age is changing the way we acquire and appreciate music. Matt Allison, Phil and, I think, Sara carried that discussion into the issue of how the web is changing our relationship to books and print media. Over the two months since that discussion I've been particularly tuned into cultural commentary on the issues surrounding the intersection of print culture and the emerging digital age. I've been considering the plausibility of claims that the stimuli of the emerging visual/digital age is perhaps inferior to the act of earnest reading of good books. Without doing any focused research, I've happened across quite a bit of discussion on this subject in my usual media perusing. Below are highlights I've excerpted from magazine articles, podcast programs, radio programs and books. The first is taken from the cover story of the July/ August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled "Is Google Making us Stupid?"

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," writes Nicholas Carr. "My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Carr makes some provocative claims in his piece, many of which I was ready to take as legitimate without much qualification. But if Carr's premise tends toward the sensational--he makes several references to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey as a cautionary example of where our web-based artificial intelligence might be taking us--Dana Gioia's arguments for the detrimental effects increased internet use might be having on our minds seem grounded in more rigorous research. Gioia, the director of the National Endowment for the Arts, has spent the past four years conducting extensive research on the decline in reading among Americans. Gioia's research has been particularly interested in how infrequent readers, who use the internet on a regular basis, are weakening some of their minds' most vital cognitive functions.

In a recent "Mars Hill Audio Journal" segment host Ken Myers comments on the NEA's report, discusses its findings with Gioia, and also quotes a blog entry by Japanese visual artist Makoto Fujimura written in response to the implications of those findings.

"The report documents a disturbing decline in reading habits of Americans over the past twenty years or so," says Myers. "Some cultural observers have suggested that this decline in reading is evidence of a broader loss of interest in verbal communication due to the fact that we're now much more adept at visual communication."

Commenting on what Myers calls an "alleged verbal/ visual tradeoff," Fujimura says "some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society. Now we have a visual culture and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable but perhaps important bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines, but the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings are irreplaceable."

"The internet," says Gioia, "is without question the most powerful informational technology that's been invented since the phonetic alphabet. The problem is that what the internet seems to do, judging from our data, is give you information in pictures, captions, headlines, icons--pieces of information. It's clear that what reading does is something different.

I think it has at least two enormous impacts. First of all, reading requires sustained, focused attention. The development of a line of information across a great span of time-- ten minutes, a half hour, an hour-- which allows you to convey information of complexity or interrelatedness that would be very difficult in a more atomized medium. Secondly, since reading does not give you the image, the background music, these things that film, television, and increasingly the internet does, it requires you to use your memory, your imagination. So it develops a sense of creativity and (I think this is the crucial element) a degree of inner life that does not seem to come from the other media as powerfully.

Now this is a bold claim, but I would maintain that every other piece of data in this report suggests that this hypothesis is accurate. Whey else would people who read volunteer at nearly four times the rate of people who don't read? Why would the poorest people in America who don't read do volunteer work at twice the level of the richest people who don't read? Why do readers vote more? Why do readers become invovled in almost every type of civic and social activity at a higher level than people who simply watch television and go to the internet?

Now the interesting thing is that people who read do absolutely everything that people who don't read do. They watch TV, they play video games, they go to the internet, they listen to radio, but they balance those things, and they read. They also seem to have more human time in a funny way than non-readers. It's interesting, we have a lot of data that just shows you that somehow reading awakens you not only to a deeper sense of yourself, but to a deeper sense of the reality of other people's lives.

Spending nearly four years working through this data, I have fundamentally changed my own opinions of reading. I would have thought early on that reading was a largely private and personal activity, something that was very important for nourishing your innner life, developing ideas, or maybe increading your sense of your own individuality. It is now absolutely clear to me that while all of that is true, that's only half the picture.

Reading is actually an enormously powerful social activity that tends to, by awakening a bigger sense of your individuality and your individual destiny, also encourages you to link with other people. For example, a novel, by meditating on the daily existence of another fictional person in their quotidian existence--socially, psychologically, economically, in terms of their race and gender and social class--gives you the imaginative ability to make a sympathetic projection into the reality of someone else's life. That changes your relationship to other people forever. There's a great awakening, almost a religious experience, that happens in people's imaginations."

Robert Harrison, in his program "Entitled Opinions," broadcast live from Stanford's KZSU, claims that "the act of reading makes the same sorts of demands on us that life does, namely to make sense of things where any number of meanings are possible, and where final meaning is lacking. How can we presume to know ourselves if we don't know how to read? I mean read carefully, complexly, alertly, with the lightfootedness of the dancer instead of the heavy plod of the logician?

We live in an age that hates ambiguity and militates against uncertainty. The more complex the world becomes the more we seek out easy simplifications. We want a clear distinction between good and evil. We want to judge before we understand. Literature doesn't let us get away with that, at least not when we meet it on its own terms.

I think it's because we're so much in favor of anything that reduces and simplifies that so many of us these days prefer movies to books. The difference between a book and a movie is the difference between a cube and a square. If you cast a light on a cube and project its shadow on the wall, you reduce it from a three dimensional object to a two dimensional square. While the square is comprehensible from the perspective of the cube, the reverse is not true. The square cannot comperehend the cube's third dimension.

The same applies to books and movies. Movies, for the most part, take the cube of literature and project it onto a screen where it becomes a square. And we sit there in the projection hall, like Plato's prisoners in their cave watching shadows flicker across the screen, and we're content with the show. Literature, which gets inside our heads, is sometimes too three dimensional for us."

C.S. Lewis, in his essay "On Stories," points out how "Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green, writing in English...remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I myself would strongly disagree with it if 'religious' is taken to mean 'Christian.' And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard's romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any. But I think Mr. Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right. If so, nnothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the cinema."

Ammon Shea, interviewed on NPR's "Morning Edition" last Friday, took a year recently to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary--all six volumes. Shea, saddened by the feeling he gets when finishing a good book, decided to read a book that promised to hold out its ending for twenty-one thousand, seven hundred thirty pages.

"It was such a moving experience," he says, "It felt very similar to reading a great work of literature, coming across these great English words hidden in the depths of the English language. One thing that I find so interesting about coming across these forgotten words is that I'll think about the thing they describe more often....For instance, the beautiful word 'petracore,' which describes a sort of warm lonely smell that comes off the pavement when it first rains. I've always loved that smell when it first starts raining. I don't talk about it quite as much, but I think about it often when I come across that gentle smell wafting off the ground."

When asked if he ever thought of buying the OED on CD-Rom and reading it on the computer, Shea replies: "I did try to read straight through the OED online, however I just felt physically ill. A large part of the appeal of this project was just that I love reading, the tactile sensation of turning one page to the next and feeling my fingers across them; I love feeling the weight of the book in my lap; I like the way the books smell, that's a huge part of it. In fact, the first thing I do with a new book is I like to open it up and take a sniff of the pages. These are all sensations you can get from a book that you can't get from a computer."

The Thrill is Gone

Is the Web Taking the Excitement out of Record Collecting?

I savor the edgy competition of a good Ebay bid-war. I still relish the thought of my narrow victory last year over a guy from Vancouver contending for a very rare, out-of-print, vinyl-only Neil Young album from 1973. Yet I wonder if that experience can compete with the quiet rush of seeing a rare album in a neighborhood record shop like Chad's here in Chattanooga. It's hard to replace the sensation of waiting, almost suspended in time, while the acknowledgment of such an ideal coincidence washes over me.

There is a certain excitement a collector feels when holding the clear plastic-sleeved case of a classic record in his own hands, studying the details of its cover art, sliding out the album and noting the exceptional quality of its condition. The pleasure of visually appraising the actual item is one thing. To handle it while conducting an internal debate over the prudence of dropping the remainder of one's paycheck on this rare find is another, more exhilarating, thing.

These kinds of experiences do still take place in the basements and storefronts of our cities, the kinds of places where record shops are still open for business (The latest issue of Paste features an article called—surprise—“The Record Store: A Good Thing” which features a short compendium of quality music outlets from around the nation). We can still drop in to one of these establishments during business hours and spend thirty minutes browsing the bins looking for a worthwhile album to purchase. Yet we can also log into a bit torrent and have that same album downloaded onto our PC’s hard drive in mp3 format in the amount of time it would take us to slip on our sneakers and locate our wallets.

At the end of the day, what has really changed? Musical gems are still out there waiting for us in the cultural soil, same as before Ebay, Amazon or Napster, Lime Wire and the bit torrents. Except now we have a silicon drill with which to mine them, in ten seconds flat, from the earth. Recent or rare recordings, ripped from the stockpile of a distant collector and converted to easily-translatable files, are available to us at a button’s touch. True, this is simply another example of organic industry becoming obsolete, an update of the twentieth century trade-off of man hours for the convenience and efficiency of technological labor-saving devices.

I am not necessarily opposed to convenience and efficiency. Nor I am opposed to the way the net has removed the obstacle of distance from our media sharing or purchasing; I like that a kid who lives in a remote location of Wyoming that is hundreds of miles from the nearest record store, but who has an internet connection and a file sharing application, can now get a hold of an mp3 version of the Bob Dylan album he's been wanting. I also like the fact that he is now able, if he desires, to purchase that album on vinyl or compact disc and have it Fed Exed to his doorstep. So why am I hesitant to celebrate the part recorded music has to play in the story our grandchildren will read about in cultural history books as “The Advent of the Digital Age”?

In one sense, I'm divided. I appreciate the time we save and the effort we conserve by using our tech pets. Let me be the first one to say I think it an amazing thing that I can carry my entire music collection, along with a small library of audio books, podcast programs, movies and videos to work with me everyday on my ipod. I like knowing that I can have any song or book or movie I'd like to listen to playing at the press of two or three buttons; I also like that the player holding this media fits easily into my shirt pocket.

Let me also be the first to admit that I sometimes feel like my appreciation of music is growing stale. This usually happens when I notice that, over the last week, I’ve taken in a dozen albums without opening a case or inserting a disc (and also, in that same amount of time, listened to an entire book without turning a page). When I'm at home, I listen to music in the old style. I enjoy manually flipping through my record collection, pulling out an album I haven't heard in a while, reappraising its cover art and remembering what it was I liked about the design in the first place. Though it may take twenty seconds minutes, I enjoy pulling the album or disc from that cover, keying up the player and letting it roll. Yet will I still be doing this five years from now, when I'm feeling lazier and media technology has made it even easier for me to stay that way?

To further the point, take iphones as another example. Everyone I know who owns one adores it. These people can be seen standing a step off from the crowd at social functions, coddling those portable information epicenters in their palms, petting their shiny touch screens affectionately, and purring quietly under their breath (sometimes I can almost hear those iphones purr back). If a dispute breaks out over the release date of a certain movie, the correct Latin name for a species of flower, or the capital city of an obscure South Asian country—well, the ipod owners have surfed over to Wikipedia and fished up the answer before any of us can agree to disagree. “Amazing!” we say. We didn’t even have to sit our beers down and walk inside to consult our atlas or Encyclopedia Britannica for the answer.

But how many of us coming of age in the tech generation still keep oversized atlases or encyclopedia collections on hand these days? Which of us still bothers to pull out a leather-bound volume for the sheer joy of flipping through its pages, running our fingers over the glossy photos, and smelling the faint musk of the pages as we flip each over and read on to the next? Why waste time with dusty National Geographics and World Books when there’s Wiki?

But the sensory joy we get from the processes of handling hard copies of books and albums is not the only thing becoming lost from our appreciation of knowledge and art. For music lovers, something else has begun vanishing from our lives, disappearing amidst our recent technological steps forward: namely, the thrill of the impulse buy.

It was one thing to walk into a record store in the mid nineties and pick up the latest Beastie Boy’s album. I was a fan of the band when I walked in to the store, and would be a fan when I walked out. What’s more, I had already heard the album’s hottest song (“Sabotage”) on MTV and was sold on its goodness; was already convinced that the Beastie’s almost never struck out; and so was confident that even if Ill Communication didn’t completely blow the doors off my pleasure centers, the purchase would still more than pay for itself in listening enjoyment. It was a sealed deal in my book, one made with next to no doubt.

Now, it was another thing to walk into a record store on any given day and see an album by a band I’d never heard tracks from, but yet whose name, or album art, or track titles, or something mysterious and telepathic I couldn’t put my finger on, caught my attention, and made me consider its purchase. To walk home with this album was to take a considerable step in the dark. It was to give a band a chance and hope that its members delivered the goods and met the generosity of my purchase with music worth hearing more than once.

There was always the danger that the band would turn out to be engaging in name or appearance only. But still, that’s the price you paid. And this was the nature of the risk. It was a risk taken because of those admittedly rare instances when the enjoyment of a somewhat dubious purchase endows the product with a value that overshadows its price tag. We took it because we believed that a splurge could become a good-hearted gamble we ended up winning. We believed surprisingly good music could do surprising things—like stop time for three-and-a-half minutes, or, if the volume was at the right level, turn ordinary blood to fire, or, in some cases, revise history.

Is this step in the dark still made? Of course. Every day. By thousands—maybe even millions—of people. I think it’s a safe bet that the bit torrents serve copious amounts of music consumers by the hour with mp3s by bands most of them are hearing for the first time.

What drew them in for a listen? Most consumers are probably responding to a buzz generated by an online music zine or a friend who is always recommending new bands. But I imagine there are those listeners who were drawn to a certain band or songwriter by a detail as arbitrary the act’s name—a name that, for whatever reason, she is fond of. So she (let’s say the listener’s a she) simply downloads that act’s latest album in mp3 format, uploads those files onto her ipod, and gives them a listen on her next car or subway commute. If the music those files hold turns out to be as good as she’d hoped, then she has found herself a new title to add to her ever-expanding list of good records. What’s more, she can rejoice that the returns on her recent venture far outweigh the effort she expended.

Eight years ago, while perusing the results of a Napster search, I came across a song titled “Punishing Sun” by a band called Giant Sand. Something about the oxymoronic moniker of this group piqued my curiosity, and so I decided to take a chance and download “Punishing Sun.” This dusty little desert ballad delivered. I quickly downloaded the album it came from, and then tried to get my hands on every Giant Sand release available. That album, Chore of Enchantment, easily stands beside my favorite LPs of the last decade.

But what if “Punishing Sun” had turned out to be a dud? What if the song, and also the album that housed it, failed to excite my musical palate, but instead ended up sounding, even after a repeat listen, like music destined for the junk pile? If I’d downloaded the album in the recent era of ipods and portable mp3s players, then the unwanted files could be left to take up a meager amount of space on my player’s eighty gigabyte storage bin, or else be deleted and forgotten. In the end, a little over an hour of my valuable time would have been wasted. If you don’t count the time it’d take me to listen to the album once through, then we’re actually talking about a couple minutes burned, what with the stalagmite-slow dial-up connection I was using back then.

Had I gambled and lost on an actual hard copy of Chore of Enchantment, much more effort would have been required for me to break even and see a satisfying return on my transaction. I would have needed to gather up the unwanted record from my disc changer or turntable, return it to its package, slip on my sneakers, locate my wallet and catch a bus back to the record shop. Once inside, I’d probably have to wait in line for a cashier and then haggle with him over a decent exchange payment. Then, after getting my mind off the three dollar loss with a shake at the café down the street, I’d need to catch the bus back home where, in the comforting world of a favorite novel or film, I’d try to forget all about my blunder.

Thanks to the advent of digital file sharing, we’ve successfully eliminated this waste of time, money and effort. Essentially, we’ve taken the sting out of music acquisition. We’ve done away with the risk. And in axing the risk, we’ve cut out the thrill. I’ve noticed this loss countless times since first logging on to Napster almost a decade ago. And I was reminded of it again last week when, perusing the new releases section of an online music zine, a certain band’s name caught my eye.

The band, Wye Oak, had taken its name from a giant tree that once stood in the sleepy town of Wye Mills, Maryland, just thirty minutes from the neighborhood where I grew up. Throughout my life, this five hundred year old White Oak (which was the largest of its kind in America) was a symbol that stood not only for robust virility and rugged beauty, but also for my growing appreciation of my Grandfather, the man who first took me to see it.

If I had seen Wye Oak’s debut album, If Children, nestled away in the W bin of the rock section at my local record shop, I would have grabbed it in a flash. As I reached for the album’s cellophane case, my mind would be rolling with a montage of images of my grandfather and me standing alongside the tree. Processing the emotion each remembered image would inevitably bring, I’d b-line for the counter, pull out a twenty, take my change and head for the bus stop. Once in my bedroom, I’d rip that cellophane from the disc case, and key up the player, eager to hear the sound of a band whose choice of a name is a direct channel into my childhood.

Hitting play, I’d fidget a little, nervous that what I was about to hear might not live up to the expectations I’d already assumed for it. In fact, I’d be prepared for it to fall miserably short. For what band’s music could match the cinematic montage of a childhood memory note for note? What song cycle could rival a string of nostalgia-soaked flashbacks from a time in our lives most of us have revised to fit our adult longings for the unique sensation of innocent discovery? Few albums can stand this test. Indeed, most collectors are in search of a new one to add to those few.

Yet we are also in search of records that might simply reward the impulse that prompted us to purchase them. We ask nothing more than that they succeed in transcending our expectations, if only by a hair. So we take that step in the dark, however slight; we risk time and money. This risk was, and still is, worth it. Even if it means we’ll have to drop our last dollar on bus fare. But of course catching that bus means stepping away from the cyber-highway, if only for an hour or two.

Watch

1.
Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you've pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn't fall too far short, might let you
hear how the hum of bees in the pink fuchsia
and among the buttercups and fat blackberries
is echoed by that deep swissshhh sound that is
your own blood coursing its steady laps
and speaking in beats to the drum of your left ear.

2.
When you watch the way the sycamore leaf curls,
browns, dries, and drops from the branch it's lived on
since spring, to be blown by a soundless breeze
along the seed heads of the uncut grass, then
the mystery that is its movement—the movement,
that is, from seed to leaf-shard and so on
to fructive dust—holds still an instant, gives a glimpse
of something that quickens away from language
into the riddling bustle of just the actual as you
grab at it and it disappears again, again unsaid.

-Eamon Grennan

"Every reader has two lives—one public, the other secret. The public life is the one visible to our teachers, friends, and families, though none of them ever sees it fully. It consists of our homes and houses, schools and schoolmates, friends and enemies, lovers, colleagues, and competitors. This is the realm of experience universally known as real life. But every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex, and important. The books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people, or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread, or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order. Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much. They serve as our intimate companions. Some books guide us. Others lead us astray. A few rescue or redeem us. All of them confide something of the wonder, joy, terror, and mystery of being alive."

-Dana Gioia (from his essay Lonely Impulse of Delight)

Recent Apparitions

One day someone looked up and saw it--
not the dirty window it had been
for five years after the seal broke,
three floors up in a brick wall
in the Milton Hospital in Massachusetts,

not just that cloudy pane of glass
but the Virgin Mary, head bowed in sorrow.
Within a week twenty-five thousand people
arrived to see her. A boy in a wheelchair
touched the wall with his legs,

but didn't walk away. His mother wept.
Many left flowers. A man from Florida,
who'd recognized the Virgin once before
in the window of an insurance company
in Clearwater, said, "Whether or not

it's a true apparition, it's a sign to us."
For a day or two the story gets in the papers.
Then the figure starts to change
and the crowds thin out. Soon
it's only a broken window except to those

who want to remember, maybe wonder
how long she might have been there
before anyone noticed. Perhaps
every window contains a secret apparition.
Perhaps the world is full of signs,

and if we looked around we'd see things
as they really are--not just a stony hillside
and a tree, not just the bitter rain,
or that trail of smoke
always disappearing in the sky.

-Lawrence Raab

Of All the Gin Joints

"What is it with coincidence? Without it, movies could barely function: of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Bogart’s place has to be the one into which Ingrid Bergman walks. His liquorish rant against the odds of her doing so is a clever trick from the writers of “Casablanca”: it drains her arrival of silly contrivance and floods it, instead, with a sense of damnable romantic destiny. The big screen is crucial if that trick is to succeed: watch a Fritz Lang thriller like “The Woman at the Window” or “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” on DVD and you find yourself scoffing at the unlikely curves and switches in the plot, whereas the same setups, viewed in the dreamy imprisonment of a movie theatre, feel like the machinery of fate. Every film attracts doubt, but the great ones stretch beyond our reason."

-Anthony Lane (from his May 26 review of Edge of Heaven)

Low

It’s not happiness, but something else; waiting
for the light to change; a bakery.

It’s a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by
pines.
There’s a couple.

It’s a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is
walnut.
They used to lie down on the carpet

between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left.

The cups and saucers were still.

Their memories of everything that occurred took place
with the other’s face as a backdrop and sometimes

the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there
was an ending
in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning,

in which they are walking.

It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a
brown rooftop
early in March. The ground hadn’t softened.

One walked in front of the other breathing.
The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The
reflections in the windows

made them hear the sounds on the hill: a crow, a dog, and
branches—
and they bent into the hour that started just then, like bending to
walk under branches.

-Arda Collins (from The New Yorker, June 2, 2008)

Mad Doctors

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they kept thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

wondering what they would do if they didn't
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

It's 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even the science wasn't on our side.
In the movie, Dick Decker's
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past--

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they believed themselves
betrayed by the world.

Maybe no one ever told them
we don't live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

-Lawrence Raab (published in Gulf Coast, Summer/ Fall '08)

It's the same for a boy or a girl,
The meaning of the world lies outside the world

-David Berman (from the Silver Jews' "People")

****

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in every intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experiences is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing in itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. ...Do what they will, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."

-C.S. Lewis (from "The Weight of Glory")

****

Love Calls Us to the Things of this World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

-Richard Wilbur

"Try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose....Save yourself from general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty--describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."

-Rainer Maria Rilke (letter to a young poet, February 17, 1903)

"It is the Wisdom of this World which demonstrates to us that the Wisdom of this World isn't enough."

-Randall Jarrell (speaking of Robert Frost's poem "Provide Provide")


"I know nothing--I have read nothing--and I mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'get learning--get understanding.' I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humor on all they meet."

-John Keats (in a letter to John Taylor, April 24, 1818)

Reaching into the Future

It Still Moves

"In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia--the end of the Appalachians or the beginning, depending on your point of view--there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few "dead Presidents" for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: "I've got a gal, she's long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!"

This is the opening graph of a very fine piece by Burkhard Bilger published in the April 28th issue of The New Yorker. "The Last Verse: Is there any folk music still out there?" traces the history of field recording in the U.S. from the pre-War days of the Lomaxes to the folk-revivalist era of Harry Smith and right up to the north Georgia doorstep of Sweet Petunia Bryant, where "one morning in December" Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum showed up with microphones and a flash recorder.

Rosenbaum is a folklorist, painter, and professor of art at the University of Georgia who has "spent fifty of his sixty-nine years traveling around the South and the Midwest, recording folk musicians." Ledbetter is the man whose Atlanta label, Dust-to-Digital, released a four-CD retrospective of Rosenbaum's work last fall titled "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1."
In this edition of Out Loud, Bilger discusses his recent article and samples tracks from "Art of Field Recording: Volume 1," and Ledbetter's gospel collection "Goodbye, Babylon."