I will not say what I paid for yesterday's groceries. I have enough to last me through most of the week.
It was warmer yesterday, just as warm today, with temps closing in on 40 degrees.
I got to see most of Bessie yesterday. Very good biopic of Bessie Smith. What holds it together is Queen Latifah - not conventionally pretty, always worth watching for her vitality.
The bus run from here to downtown and back were uneventful until one of the Payless bags broke. Of course, it was the one I did not double bag. A nice lady gave me an empty bag of her own. This is what I lost track of in the days when my depression ramped up - that it is the small gestures that define the better facets of humanity.
CC was to come up and do some typing. She got here last evening, got a bit done. She is supposed to be here today. It is closing in on 10 am and she has not called, so she still sleeps. I get to do my own typing for a while.
While, I did not get much written of "Road Tripping", I did manage to get research done. This was what I tried telling Steve L. back at Fort Dix - I need to touch base with Indiana, I cannot rely only on my memory to spark my imagination. I do not see that much has changed, but I did get the idea to boost more of Wendell Wilkie in the current iteration. Thank you, Google.
CC thought I was tired, I was asleep within an hour of when she left.
Email needing culled this morning, I only skimmed the following from The Guardian:
- Half–bull, half-truth… How English archaeologist claimed credit for discovering home of the minotaur
- What Women Want by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung review – the depths of desire
- American wine isn’t all about California
I did a bit more than skim David Mitchell's Let’s hear it for the dying virtue of modesty, who makes a good argument for modesty:
This is the context in which award recipients routinely use the word “humbled” as a direct synonym for “honoured”. Humility is now such an alien concept, such a forgotten virtue, that the word’s meaning has been reduced to the mere quality of standing at a microphone and saying that you’re humble.
Is this the world that Fineman wishes to conjure? She claims not and writes in her book: “For too long we have paid attention to the wrong people because of their volume and showmanship.” She says her aim is to address that problem by giving those who don’t currently boast, whom she calls the “Qualified Quiet”, techniques with which to proclaim their worth.
That’s flawed reasoning – like the members of the gun lobby who say you can reduce shootings by giving more people guns. Born boasters will never be outboasted by the Qualified Quiet, however many self-help books they’ve dutifully read. If we want to help them, if we favour meritocracy, we must return to a convention where overt self-promotion is taboo – where, if you want to evaluate a person’s abilities, you have to do more than just ask them.
I added a link to this essay to my post Rate the Virtues, Please, 6-29-2010.
Salman Rushdie has a new novel reviewed by The Guardian, Victory City by Salman Rushdie review – a lavish fairytale. You should read Rushdie. It crosses my mind that you will say you do not have time to read - neither do I. What would be a worse excuse is that you are not up to reading a serious novel by a great writer. What does that say about you? That you are a frivolous, mindless creature? No, you are better than that, even if your ambition is not.
I read about an old book last night: McFerron’s Authors of Revolution: Mikhail Bulgakov. Another great book, I have said so on this blog. What I just wrote about Rushdie goes for The Master and Margarita. McFerron explains it all very well, give him a look, please.
My mother took us to musicals when we ere children rather than movies because she said movies would come to television, plays would not. The fleetingness of theatre reminds me of her.
Part of what makes theatre so goddamn beautiful is the sheer presence of it. As an audience, as an actor, on any given day, you sign a sacred contract with the understanding that what’s to transpire for the next few hours has never happened before and, when it’s over, will never happen again. Sure, it’s the same script, the same song, and dance, but it’s never the same. With the variability of a new audience, a new day, and a new present moment dictating how it is to be, what you see one day will never be born again—it will die with the rising of the house lights.
In a world so driven by constant moment-to-moment curation and a greedy hanging onto the past, theatre forces you to live in every single moment—especially as a performer. There’s too much at stake with this type of storytelling to live anywhere else, past or present. Effective theatre-makers know this, do this and grasp with both hands an art form slowly falling by the wayside to the spectacle of cinema and the accessibility of television.
Pitchfork's 8 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Young Fathers, the Men, Raye, and More leaves me feeling old, out-dated even, as I do not know any of these names, and I am not sure if I have the energy to know them better.
Of all the deaths I had heard of recently, this one I did not: Bobby Hull Was Not Complicated. Wow.
Three hours awake and this all I have accomplished - reading and two posts. I will do posts on What's the difference between a commonwealth and a state? and Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Info Dumping before getting down to "Road Tripping."
I have no way of summarizing Los Angeles Review of Books' I’m Looking to Jump Ship Sooner Than I Should: A Conversation with Percival Everett, other than say just follow the link and read and think about what you read.
I leave you dear reader with two poems CC and read last night before she left.
Nikahmi
~after Saeed Jones
Last night I taped
buttercups beneath my eyelids,
flinching as I caught sight,
One last time,
of your amethyst lipstick
seared on my pulse
One stone.
Your fingers undoing me,
my shirt a pool of rusted guilt around your feet,
imploring us to be good girls again.
Ten stones.
Decked in hallowed blood,
We are the priests, the imams, the guests and
the cousins and aunties twirling like tulips in June and
your grandmother’s anklet still tucked away under beaded cloth in her trunk and
Fifty stones.
Dear God, put love and mercy between us.
I fumble over my Arabic,
Partly because
of your glitter eyeshadow blurring in my periphery,
Mostly because
The outcasts cease to caress the language of God.
A hundred stones.
Go, bird.
Your freedom on my tongue
Our bodies braided with the shadows
Eternal sepulchers coiling around
Our bellies
Two hundred stones.
Two violets,
We floated.
By Robert BurnsO my Luve is like a red, red roseThat’s newly sprung in June;O my Luve is like the melodyThat’s sweetly played in tune.So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,So deep in luve am I;And I will luve thee still, my dear,Till a’ the seas gang dry.Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;I will love thee still, my dear,While the sands o’ life shall run.And fare thee weel, my only luve!And fare thee weel awhile!And I will come again, my luve,Though it were ten thousand mile.
sch 11:10 am
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