from p. 21 of the Samuel Beckett Letters:

I have been doing a little tapirising & reading Keats, you'll be sorry to hear. I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats - squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands, 'counting the last oozings, hours by hours.' I like him the best of them all, because he doesn't beat his fists on the table. I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green richness. And weariness. 'Take into the air my quiet breath.' But there's nobody here to talk to, & it's so rarely one is enthusiastic, or glad of something...

25 years after the coal miner's strike--Remembering Britain’s forgotten civil war

‘I don’t think we could have gone back with any dignity at any time. So it was all out, it was out to the end, win or not. To do a year on strike was not easy, I don’t want to look back with rose-tinted glasses. But given the chance I’d have done exactly the same, I’ve no regrets at all. I just wished that we’d lamped a few more Bobbies.’

easy to forget that country music was as much a Canadian as an American invention: the link between Jimmy Rodgers & Hank Williams a certain Mr. Hank Snow of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, heard here at his relaxed best...

"Chilliwack Magnolia,2009" from Anodyne

"Bergotte pleased to hear Marcel has read every word he's written..."

from Resemblance: The Proust Portraits

via

Anita Carter

But more than the
cuts -- produced in Nashville and New York by Jerry Kennedy, Shelby
Singelton, and Milt Okun -- this recording reveals that Carter's voice
is one of the purest and most expressive vehicles either country or
folk ever produced.

Local trees

Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell's Defaced Library Books

Beckett & Eisenstein

Three months beforehand, in March, 1936, he had written—and this is hard to believe, even as one reads it—to Sergei Eisenstein, in Moscow, confessing to an interest in “the scenario and editing end” of cinema. “I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of these, and beg you to consider me a serious cinéaste worthy of admission to your school,” he added. There was no reply, and we are left to ponder what unholy offspring might have resulted from their collaboration, and what the director of “Battleship Potemkin” would have made of Beckett’s hope that “the industrial film will become so completely naturalistic, in stereoscopic colour and gramophonic sound, that a back water may be created for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped.”

terrific Hypertextual & Illustrated Companion to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

Local trees

Allen Lane and the paperback revolution

The ‘paperback revolution’, as it is still occasionally referred to, was not ultimately about books or those paper-thin profit-margins, never mind about Penguin: it was about answers - and about people who had never needed them so badly on such a scale. It was about a world that had never spun so giddily nor cried out so urgently to be made sense of. Anyone with a paperback in their hands is holding the history of
the last hundred years or so in their hands, whether they know it or not...

The Big Takeover

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It...

Monte Hellman's 1971 TWO LANE BLACKTOP , as precise & thorough an excavation of the American character as Melville's "Confidence Man", is on TCM tonight, 1130 PST...

G.T.O explains the 455 V8

Filming Two-Lane Blacktop

tales of Blossom Dearie

If there's such a thing as "white writing" (and Roland Barthes insists there is) then Blossom Dearie is "white singing." No, not simply because she's white by racial classification, or because of the whiteness or her hair. The very sound she emits is whiteness, of the sort Poe described at the climax of "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," and Mallarme alludes to constantly. Naturally it's associated with Death. If anyone is planning to musicalize Jean Cocteau's "Orphee" then Blossom would be ideal as Maria Casares. To say she is "difficult" is like saying Catherine Deneuve is French. Look up "Difficult" in the dictionary and you'll discover Blossom's picture. It's a kind of a trade-off -- the sweet softness of her voice for the hard shell of her actual person...

IDF in Gaza

"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said...

more from Beckett

To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer.

Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?

How Google Earth Ate Nanaimo - TIME

"I think it's pretty cool we're the Google Earth capital of the world," said Jakob Brzovic, 25, who works in a local electronics retail
store. "I just wish somebody would have told me."

"For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool," he added. "But, to be fair, if you've been living here your whole life like I have, you don't need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain."

from Abandoned Amusement Parks in Asia

U2 free St Patricks Day Podcast

...two hours of Irish punk rock, new wave, underground and just plain rock-n-roll THUNDER...