Epiphany No 1: […] you never knew what you were going to find and how much of it was going to be there. It was as if every record store, fleamarket and charity shop in the world had been connected by a searchable database and had flung their doors open, begging you to walk away with as much as you could carry for free.
Epiphany No 3: File sharing is non-contextual. The cohesive vision of an album has been ditched in favour of the single or the playlist. Many people getting music online have no idea where something came from, nor do they care.
“Sophistication seems a shared longing more than a set style; it’s the desire to see the world shine brighter than it does while still knowing that all the light that shines from it is the light we bring to it. In a darkening time, maybe it isn’t so shabby an aspiration.”
“The Constant reproach to the Königsberg case is that candor and confession can become cruelty by another name. The categorical Kantian, in turn, warns that the cult of privacy can shelter abuse, protecting the powerful from the scrutiny that might expose what they have done. The Prussian within us wants to force everything into the open, insisting that anyone with nothing to hide should be willing to put everything on display. Our inner Parisian wants to protect twilight concupiscence, believing it essential to civility. Between Prussian and Parisian lies a permanent argument of our moral modernity, unresolved and probably unresolvable. We can try to recognize malfeasance while resisting malice, but doing so requires patience, proportion, and case-by-case judgment—qualities made nearly impossible by the modern media, already emerging in Königsberg in the form of newspapers and helping to fuel the scandal there.”
Not much, decided my husband and proceeded to use language in the way that Homer says the gods do. All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings alongside our meanings. They flip the switch at will.
My husband lied about everything.
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) via Newyorker.
Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia is made of poems / Utopias that aren’t so much imagined re: ideas of perfection as they are built with particular friends and her associations with them (her intimacies with them) in mind. This is incredible to me, that utopia could never have anything to do with perfection and everything to do with attention to the dynamic shades of closeness / that blistering blossom.
… when we were younger and he was still alive, when morning could yawn until afternoon, heavy plates of eggs with roasted potatoes by the window where Bowery seemed wide enough to hold all our days, and anything would happen.
Light clarity avocado salad in the morning after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love and love is love nothing can ever go wrong though things can get irritating boring and dispensable (in the imagination) but not really for love though a block away you feel distant the mere presence changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing
Les fleurs parlent. Leur langage original permet de dire, sans un mot, l’amour, l’amitié mais aussi le désespoir, le regret, et bien d’autres sentiments. Cet ingénieux mode d’expression fut véritablement codifié au xviie siècle en Perse, où l’arrangement symbolique d’un bouquet (sélam), discours de parfums et de couleurs mêlés, formait une sorte de message secret. Diffusé en Europe par la vague romantique, ce langage fleuri devient un genre littéraire prisé : plusieurs dictionnaires et guides de conversation florale paraissent alors. (Klincksieckéditions).
I am the smoke king, I am black. I am swinging in the sky, I am ringing worlds on high; I am the thought of the throbbing mills, I am the soul of the Soul toil kills, I am the ripple of trading rills. Up I’m curling from the sod, I am whirling home to God. I am the smoke king, I am black.
I am the smoke king, I am black. I am wreathing broken hearts, I am sheathing devils’ darts; Dark inspiration of iron times, Wedding the toil of toiling climes, Shedding the blood of bloodless crimes, Down I lower in the blue, Up I tower toward the true. I am the smoke king, I am black.
I am the smoke king, I am black. I am darkening with song, I am hearkening to wrong; I will be black as blackness can, The blacker the mantle the mightier the man, My purpl’ing midnights no day dawn may ban. I am carving God in night, I am painting Hell in white. I am the smoke king, I am black.
I am the smoke king, I am black. I am cursing ruddy morn, I am hearsing hearts unborn; Souls unto me are as mists in the night, I whiten my black men, I blacken my white, What’s the hue of a hide to a man in his might! Hail, then, gritty, grimy hands, Sweet Christ, pity toiling lands! Hail to the smoke king Hail to the black!
