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.
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Alchemy
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.
a cool word
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."
You know how in the movie ...
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.
Look at this ...
... photo of a guy so in love with language and a big sister type who took one of his songs with her mates and ignited both of their projectories . he looks like he's saying something very personal and she looks like she thinks ... do you really think that or do that ... aaahhhh, that's so sweet or that's so weird or wrong or right ... and he looks like he's ready to hear things that he'll make his own and then ours ... things about love ... or songs that have a lot of guts ... songs that seep into bone and time ... casts of characters and circumstances that grind their ways into fine powder we wear, girls who treat mink capes like ponchos ... damaged men who get breaks that resurrect them from the dead ... Mary went to Florida one winter but wasn't allowed to get a tan and thus began the great folk rock scare and all that followed that aligned with certain peoples lives and shines all day still today.