Song by George Strait. Voices of the world. Moon by dust and starlight.
Month / July 2018
Robert Gerst: O Beautiful River!
From 35,000 feet it’s hard to see what’s on the ground and nobody on this airplane is looking. We are heading back to Chicago and I am remembering that Carl Sandberg poem about the train rushing to Omaha. “I met a man on a train and asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Omaha.’”
I flew from Boston to El Paso via Chicago on Sunday and the scene on the plane then was a little different but essentially it was the same.
On the first leg of the flight, from Boston to Chicago, though it was summer and dawn, everyone drew down the shades over the cabin windows and took out their handhelds and fell into them so that there seemed to be no world outside, no world around us. There was nothing but the rows of seats facing in one direction and slumped heads and the glow of tiny screens, a constellation of little screens that glowed but bore no starlight.
In the airport in Chicago, men in shorts and women in halters streamed down the corridor in a ceaseless stream heading God knows where while the voices on the TV monitors inveighed and indicted and then we filed again onto the airplane.
On the second leg of the flight, morning now, from Chicago to El Paso, the shades on the windows were already drawn and no one thought to open one. The handhelds emerged. We were a congregation of dreamers looking nowhere but inward. We landed in El Paso.
So I flew across a continent on a sugar day of summer nullifying America. Where birds are hatching and people live and love, I saw nothing.
But when you stand with your legs on the ground and behold what’s before you, the world shimmers with beauty. This photo shows me (that’s my shoulder intruding into the lower right of the image) standing at the bank of the Rio Grande River near Las Cruces, New Mexico. In reality, a glorious mountain rises where this photo shows merely a pale white sky. It’s hardly a photo. It’s all I could capture while I held my laptop in my hands and snapped a shot as the glare from the sun made the screen invisible to me. It’s an intimation of what is.
O beautiful river!
Garth Brooks: The River
August 21, 1922. Citizen’ Military Training Camp, Camp Meade (Fort Meade, Maryland)
“The River,” #1 Garth Brooks Tribute Band
Summer Reading, Jen Cole: “I’m Reading A Heaping PIle of Things…”
Writes Jen Cole: I’m reading a heaping pile of things, and my reading style is to have several books going at once, picking up at any given time what I’m in the mood for. Here are a few select books and excerpts:
EARTH’S NATURAL RESOURCES (John Walther)
Beryllium is primarily used as a hardening agent in alloys, in particular beryllium copper (BeCu). BeCu is a weldable, machinable, nonoxidizing, acid resistant, ductile copper alloy. It is therefore, employed in high-tech applications even though it is relatively expensive. Other items that incorporate beryllium are golf clubs, wheel chairs, and dental appliances.
THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES (Mlodinow)
We also make Bayesian judgments in our daily lives. A film tells the story of an attorney who has a great job, a charming wife, and a wonderful family. He loves his wife and daughter but still he feels that something is missing in his life. On night he returns home on the train he spots a beautiful woman gazing with a pensive expression out the window of a dance studio. He looks for her again the next night and the night after that. Each night as his train passes her studio, he falls under her spell. Finally one evening he impulsively rushes of the train and signs up for dance lessons, hoping to meet the woman. He finds that her haunting attraction withers once his gaze from afar gives way to face-to-face encounters. He does fall in love, however, not with her but with dancing.
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (Gruen)
But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them. They’re crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry – I see you already have. Damn ghosts.
Summer Reading, Angela Gerst: Monsignor Quixote (1982)
… an idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of man–even of a man like Franco–dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence –for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?
Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (1982)
Summer Reading, Carol McCarthy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Apollinare Theatre Company, Chelsea: Performing Cyrano de Bergerac under the sky July 17, 2010 (Images: Gerst)
The Apollinaire Theatre Company plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream this summer 7:30 PM Wednesdays through Sundays, July 11 to July 29, at the Port Park, 99 Marginal Street, Chelsea. Free tickets, free parking. Bring your own blankets and chairs. A Joy!
Summer Reading, Andrew Gerst: Born to Run (2011)
Writes Andrew Gerst:
I recommend the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. The book discusses the sport of “ultramarathoning,” the runners who participate in it, and the distinct running rituals of the Tarahumara people in rural Mexico. Part cultural anthropology, part running memoir, and part adventure narrative, the book does a great job of explaining both the history and science behind the fascination in running 50 or 100 miles.
Summer Reading, Albert Lafarge: Brave New World Revisited (1958)
The Subway, George Tooker (1950)
Writes Albert Lafarge:
I have just absorbed the following passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited in which Huxley quotes liberally from Erich Fromm:
The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without a fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. … Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (1958), p.20 .
And I recently finished George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, mainly via the audiobook edition, which is read by a cast of over 100 people. Saunders is one of my heroes and this novel, his first, is a weird masterpiece.
Summer Reading, Richard Murphy: You Must Change Your Life (2014)
Acrobat, Picasso (1930)
In the following I shall discuss, initially using a literary model and later a psychological and sociological context, how acrobatism became an increasingly far-reaching aspect of modern reflection on the human condition: this occurred when, following the trail of the ubiquitous Nietzsche, people discovered in man the unfixed, unleashed animal that is condemned to perform tricks. (61)
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, p. 61
Summer Reading, Lucinda Smith: Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (2014)
Mushhushhu (Dragon) Symbol of the God Marduk
Syrians are immensely proud of their ancient past. There is a sense that many of the great tectonic shifts in human history are uniquely “Syrian moments” – whether it was the establishment of city-states along the Euphrates River in the far east of the country or the invention of the alphabet by seafaring Phoenecians on the coast. That said…there is an equally pronounced sense among some that history really began with the coming of Islam.
Christian Sahner, Among the Ruins, p 6