I did enjoy Julian's thing on jazz taxis. Only in Japan. Isn't Hibari Misora the famous enka singer? . . . That reminded me of the first verse of a poem I wrote, when I did that quite a lot, while M was pregnant and on for a while after.
Because the decided-upon day is here
the rainy season can now begin
to rain seasonally
all over the area it's supposed to,
making green greener and concrete grey.
—NC Tate
After David posted about the delight of hearing the word rumbustious on a podcast, I found it myself within days. In Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Edward Carpenter, we meet the older Walt Whitman.
By 1877 he had buried his earlier self, the rumbustious Brooklyner who hung out with tough, street-wise New York 'b'hoys', recasting himself as a sagacious 'good grey poet' and democratic patriarch.
And yesterday I read a review of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, which Doug Ireland says recreates "those heady, joyously rambunctious" early days of the movement.
Now all I need is a robustious.
I'm enjoying Carpenter very much. Rowbotham tells us that when his prose poem Towards Democracy first appeared with lines like
I look upon him who makes all things.
I sit at his feet in silence as he lights his pipe, and feel the careless resting of his fingers upon my neck.
I see the fire leaping in the grate; I see the nodding of grasses..."
one wag called it "Whitman and water."
--Julian
On Monday after work, sitting on the patio before dinner with a tall glass of beer and the newspaper, surrounded by green, the air balmy, something or a combination of things took me the other side of the world to a garden of an English country pub, sitting with a tankard of ale on a long summer's evening.
--Julian
Off the top of my head, and in no particular order:
Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Thelonious Monk, Paul Erdós, J.S. Bach, Guy Davenport, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Thomas Pynchon, Plato, Charles Dickens, Niels Bohr, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Coltrane, Samuel Beckett, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Richard Rorty, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Leonardo Da Vinci, William Faulkner, Matsuo Basho, Aristotle, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Joni Mitchell, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georges Perec, Aretha Franklin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Ada Lovelace, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, W.A. Mozart, Franz Schubert, Richard Feynman, Gabriel García Márquez, Anton Checkhov, and George Eliot
are all very likely geniuses.
Michael Jackson: No.
Be serious, please.
--David
someone use the word "rumbustious" in (a podcast) conversation.
--David
—David
that Under the Volcano
(I started a side project over at LiveJournal the idea of which was to record a single thought, as pithily as possible, each day, the sort of thing more hip-and-with-it people do on Twitter. [I've been playing around there, too.] The every day part of that project has fallen by the wayside, and my partner in blockhead suggested in no uncertain terms that it would be a good idea to fold that project into this one, so I have. Today's post is the first instance of that infolding. More such one-liners will follow, perhaps.)
--Julian
The original incarnation of this time waster stipulated that one shouldn't take longer than fifteen minutes to arrive at one's choices. This seems to me a good spur toward spontaneity and, perhaps, honesty: the ten or so films we'd really like to spend the rest of our lives watching, not the ten we feel we should be watching. NC Tate made his selections in ten minutes. Here they are:
Barry Lyndon
Big Lebowski
Detour
Double Indemnity
Godfather 1
Godfather 2
Happiest Days Of Your Life
Late Spring
Out Of The Past
Red Shoes
Searchers
Seven Samurai
Tokyo Story
Ugetsu
Vertigo
I'm happy to be reminded of the two Godfather films. Of course they're essential, and—this isn't true of every good film—infinitely rewatchable.
—David
