Knocking At The Gate

By algorithmic happenstance, today I came across "Stay" by Matt Rollings, featuring Allison Krauss and Vince Gill . It was originally recorded by Alisan Porter in 2016 . This recording with Krauss' angelic voice caught my attention, and so I didn't skip through it. As I listened, I was struck by the beauty of the chords and of course by Krauss' abundant soul gushing out of every syllable.  I realized I was feeling the new-to-me song a lot stronger than I would have expected when it finally dawned on me that this song is about a mother speaking to her children. What was apparently on my mind as I listened to the sweet lyrics was the mothers and fathers of the children murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas yesterday. I am yours and you are mine Bound together from the start I will carry you until it's time to go And I'll always be the home You come back to in your heart Oh stay, stay, stay What must it feel like, I keep wondering, to never hold...

Writing in X-Ray Literary Magazine , Curtis Smith connects a great many feelings in only six paragraphs. Here's the first: You stop at the market after work. This Tuesday, that feels like a Thursday, these speeding years and forever days, and, short of death, there’s no end in sight. The weekends where all you want to do is sleep. The vacations you can’t afford. You’re here for dinner, although cereal feels like a saner option than making one more decision. A song plays, and here you are, adrift on a marketer’s algorithm, taken back to your teenage bedroom, and what would that girl say if she could see you now?   Full text of "The Song In Your Head" here.

In X-Ray Literary Magazine , Quinn Forlini's "After Not Leaving The House For Three Days" describes how Anna and her mother at last went for a walk:  Anna’s mother convinces her to go for a walk. The weather’s getting warmer. Anna feels like she’s been living inside a tunnel, or an artery.   She’s thirteen. Last week she dyed her hair purple from a box at the drugstore and it’s ugly. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, feeling the roughness as it passes through her fingers from the cheap dye. Her mother tried to warn her, and that made her want it more. Full story here.

Writing in The New York Times , T.M. Brown describe how a couple found an old milk crate full of old cassette tapes left behind in a house on Fire Island. The tapes turned out to be a vivid testimony of how music was used to fight death and hate during the AIDS epidemic. Full story with multimedia gallery here.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,    haunting the black air, braver at night;    dreaming evil, I have done my hitch    over the plain houses, light by light:    lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.    A woman like that is not a woman, quite.    I have been her kind. Anne Sexton. (1981). "Her Kind" from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Full poem here.

Bo Bartlett. (2021). "Huntsboro." Oil on linen. 70 in. x 120 in. This painting is typical of Bartlett's work: dazzling daylight, idealized but detailed human figures set in wide swaths of color, and a strong sense that we are seeing a single frame from a longer and more detailed story.  In this case, we are viewing the beachgoers as they view the scenery that we don't get to see. Why are we watching them watch the waves? One is gesturing with his hand as if he is speaking. What is he saying? To whom is he speaking? One person has rested his head on the shoulder of a companion. Is he listening to the speaker or is he just enjoying the moment?  This painting comes from a series titled Things Don't Stay Fixed , which happens to be the same name of a movie directed by Bartlett in the same year this painting was made .   Artist site. 

Photograph of Janelle Monáe by Jheyda McGarrell Speaking with NPR's Weekend Edition , musical phenomenon Janelle Monáe discusses how she came to write her new collection of short stories The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, and what authenticity means in her work: Sometimes what you really want to do can take a backseat because you feel like, "I have to prove this first and then I'll get to that." And I'm at a space where I'm making the most fun music I've ever made, just for the people that I love and care about around me, for us to vibe out to. [I'm] just curating my life in a way where I can do that. You know, giving myself permission — and I think with this book, I hope that people feel the permission to show up as their authentic selves. When the world tells you that everything about you — your queerness, your Blackness, you being a woman, you wanting to be an artist on your own terms — when people try a...

I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the tongue, which is prehensile muscular organ that most of us have in our mouths. It includes four muscles that are attached to bones and four quite strong muscles that are only attached to the organ itself. Those muscles are supplied by massive blood vessels that you can easily see if you look underneath. Your tongue grows right out of the floor your mouth, it is covered with little nipple-like structures, it is soaked in spit, and it is THERE ALL THE TIME even when you're eating or speaking or singing or sleeping. It's pretty much right there in the way of everything 24/7. Chances are pretty good that you are either moving or clenching your tongue in your mouth right now as you read this sentence. Okay, that's all for now so you can go back to whatever it was you were doing. Thanks for coming to my tongue talk.   — J.F. "Jeff" McCullers

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Atlantic about how things got this bad, and offers suggestions on how to respond: Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon. But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent? This, I believe, is...

Jessica Hagy at Indexed reminds us that morality is normally distributed: Full site here.

Professor of Religious Studies Alejandro Nava writes in American Scholar : I don’t deny that these genres are flawed and ambiguous, and sometimes deserve their reputation as “devil’s music”—as when they promote toxic masculinity, sexism, violence, gross materialism, nihilism, and a culture of drug use. But what may seem predictable and uniform to a distant observer, like a view of the ocean from above, can contain remarkable depth, variety, and idiosyncrasy. From this perspective, I suspect that a listener may come away with what I have known: the genre’s bursting joy and inventiveness, its thrilling beats, its love of rhyme and rhetorical extravagance, its portraits of racial injustice, its longing for freedom and equality, its pining for God.  Full article here.

The Hugo Award nominations for 2022 include a short story by Blue Neustifter that was originally presented as a Twitter thread from Bi Dyke Energy (@Asure_Husky). She covers a lot of ground quickly and deftly: agency, identity, time travel, gender, self-affirmation, causality, regret, technology, triumph, and spirit. "Unknown Number" by Blue Neustifter

In The Paris Review , Rachel Cusk reviews Taryn Simon’s Sleep (2020-2021), which is composed of photographs of sleeping children: When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its realit...

In Guernica , Xiao Xi's poem "the wind would not stop" is translated from Chinese to English by Yilin Wang: a child licks the candy wrapper; the treat has fallen into the mud. those who sing romance of west chamber under wintersweet trees, nearly all lonely elders. Full poem here.  

Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic with possible explanations for why everyone seems to have gone nuts — and why it is worrisome: During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit. Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” ...

Julien Crockett interviews Justin E. H. Smith in The Los Angeles Review Of Book s, regarding his new book The Internet Is Not What You Think : So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.  Full interview here.

Dona and I watched Spielberg's remake of West Side Story yesterday. I am kicking myself hard that I didn't see this in a cinema. It's completely flawless, a sparkling gem of a movie, and it's a big movie with big themes deserving of a big canvas.   This story has been worked and reworked over the course of four centuries by some tremendously expressive people: William Shakespeare, for starters, and also Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Wise, and now Tony Kushner, Janusz Kamiński, Justin Peck, and Steven Spielberg. There are many layers on this palimpsest, many versions all reaching across time. Spielberg uses all of these contributions, remixes them, adds to them, awakens them.   The most obvious of these is Rita Moreno's marvelous turn from starring in the 1961 as Anita and returning in this film as both on-set executive producer and in a reworked role of Valentina. She brings dignity and resonance in every scene she...

  From Lauren Berry's 2010 collection The Lifting Dress : The entire red carnation in my mouth. Like any panicked schoolgirl, I’m inarticulate       and constantly introduced to beautiful things.   Full poem here.

Beton (Бетон). (2022). "Kyiv Calling." [Authorized cover version of "London Calling" by The Clash.)

Sometimes we get away without suffering the consequences of our questionable decisions and sometimes we don't. One of the more questionable decisions I ever got away with was when I made a reminiscence slide show for my own senior high school class, to be shown on the occasion of our final class assembly. The show consisted of photographs of the senior class from their entire school experience from kindergarten through high school, carefully timed and faded between two synchronized projectors, with audio-triggered advances cued to specific lines in four or five popular songs of the day that I thought had special meaning for us. Yearbook advisor Jeananne Grace and school district media guru Tim Osborne had taught me how to make these slide shows. In those ancient times I thought they were a powerful storytelling technology. My eighteen-year-old self wanted to add stage lighting and pyrotechnics to this performance, though. Drama teacher Jean Ball helped me with the stage lighting. I...