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The Sunday morning after a Mary and the Strays concert is always a certain kind of Sunday morning. Sweetness and slowness and the memory of a lyric that swirls inside you like dark honey. You make another cup of tea, you turn the day down a notch: not so loud, not so fast. Not even too happy — because tristezza and because dolce. That's it. That's it. Let's do less. Let's do it softly.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[domenica 28 settembre 2014 ore 11:13:48] [¶]
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Canticle, from the poem by William Griffith, about how "The little feathered forest folk / Are praying sleepy prayers."
Praying the summer to be long
And drowsy to the end,
And daily full of sun and song,
That broken hopes may mend.
***
Coelacanth, from a New Yorker piece by Teju Cole, about James Baldwin, and how "American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes."
And yet I (born in the United States more than half a century after Baldwin) continue to understand, because I have experienced in my own body the undimmed fury he felt about pervasive, limiting racism. In his writing there is a hunger for life, for all of it, and a strong wish to not be accounted nothing (a mere nigger, a mere neger) when he knows himself to be so much. And this "so much" is neither a matter of ego about his writing nor an anxiety about his fame in New York or in Paris. It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals, thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism, let alone so many people in so many places. This unflagging ability to be shocked rises like steam off his written pages. "The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless," he writes, "but it is also absolutely inevitable."
[The town of] Leukerbad gave Baldwin a way to think about white supremacy from its first principles. It was as though he found it in its simplest form there. The men who suggested that he learn to ski so that they might mock him, the villagers who accused him behind his back of being a firewood thief, the ones who wished to touch his hair and suggested that he grow it out and make himself a winter coat, and the children who "having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish" as he approached: Baldwin saw these as prototypes (preserved like coelacanths) of attitudes that had evolved into the more intimate, intricate, familiar, and obscene American forms of white supremacy that he already knew so well.
***
And cabochon, from a world I can't hyperlink.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[venerdì 26 settembre 2014 ore 08:19:23] [¶]
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You wake up in the morning and you come here. You wake up in your life and you pack your bags. No one says of course to it. Except maybe Lawrence and Frank and that girl with the eyes like Honolulu. You thrum and you click. You cup your hands like a venus flytrap and catch a cold. You kick the back tire so hard the rubber comes up like hurt flesh. You whistle and you hum. Tomorrow the landslide and yesterday the fault. Never ever say whatever. You mumble and you tick. Whatever.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[giovedì 25 settembre 2014 ore 23:35:25] [¶]
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Wendy Cope says she does not want her work "all over the internet." Well, alright then. Let's let Google do the dirty work:
"Wendy Cope" "Leaving" "Next summer" "The summer after" "With luck we’ve a few more years"
Alia and Humayun? I miss you.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[giovedì 25 settembre 2014 ore 22:01:08] [¶]
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