one thing today

  I'm  reading a new six hundred page bio of James Baldwin and he describes attending a church service in Alabama at which King preached - and he notes how glorious the experience was. And it made me remember the time when I did a radio show for the Salvation Army and realized why the Black church was so important, almost like the equivalent to therapy for Whites. Black families can and do abandon their members. The Black Church does not. And when my father died, a reverend I hardly knew who was interviewed on the program sent me condolence and a peace lily.  It had an impact. and I love the image William Styron depicted when Baldwin stayed with him and his wife in conn for an extended stay ... "this little black figure would walk across our land blanketed with deep snow and come inside and after dinner with a drink in his hand he'd pronounce to our very liberal dinner guests - we're gonna burn all your mother fucking houses down." and they were enthralled. balls.

 

is not mine  this day in this park music & dogs & wind smiles & heart & ache no need to explain          loss

 I told my friend Lynda I want to read old and important books cause I'm old and being important wouldn't be so bad. I have this great book ... 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I better get going. I come upon Rosseau. I thought he was a painter, a Naive one, the one who painted the big very flat lion in profile. Rosseau the writer wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker which is described as a wonderfully lyrical, heartfelt and somewhat obsessive account of an aging man's reckoning with his past. I'll give it a try if reading a bit of it at the Strand doesn't turn me off. They say its a vital precursor to the great novels of isolation and despair: Dostoevsky, Beckett, Salinger. Franny and Zooey is one of my favorite books. 

  Use the noun  panopticon  to talk about a circular building — especially a prison with cells distributed around a central surveillance station. Eighteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up the idea and was kind enough to bequeath us the word as well, from the Greek  pan , or "all," and  optikon , "of or for sight."

  Barefoot in the Park ... Robert Redford's character tells Jane Fonda they have downstairs neighbors in their Village brownstone and they're both the same sex ... but nobody knows which one  ...                                                   like that.