April 2009
26 posts
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Earth, Take Me Back
I have been dying a long time In this cool valley-land, this green bowl ringed hills— The cup of a giant flower whose petals are These forests round about, still wet From the fresh April rains. Night draws on. It is growing dark. The trees are silent. The hills are dark and silent. All things fall silent, or look the other way, When you are dying. There is a delicate...
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Photo courtesy of Sorrowfree on Flickr.
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Photo courtesy of patita pirata on Flickr.
Song, ‘Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer),’ written by Bob Wills and performed by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys on their live record, For the Last Time, recorded in early December 1973.
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Late Spring
Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies after losses and feet on stairs
after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew finally I saw you sitting in white already waiting
you of whom I had heard with my own ears since the beginning for whom more than once I had opened the...
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Photo courtesy of TopTechWriter.US on Flickr.
The Face of the Deep By Fred Saberhagen, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, September, 1966.
part 3
He got up from his chair and turned. A single step to the rear brought him to the curve of the glass. He looked out, following half a mile behind him, caught in the same string of space-debris, was the berserker-ship whose pursuit had...
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The paleolithic cave artist was apparently a shaman who existed in a sense-rich world which he took for granted. Like a very young child, we was apparently only dimly aware that this world could be experienced as separate from himself. He did not understand many natural events, particularly since he had no control over them. Indeed, it is likely that art was one of man’s first efforts to...
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Photo courtesy of karpov the wrecked train on Flickr.
He boarded the No.3 train. The subway car was filled with the smell of the gyro some guy was wolfing down. He got out at West Fourth Street and walked down Sixth Avenue. Over an apple turnover and a hot cocoa in a bagel joint, he said he was once a skateboard freak who loved the Dead Kennedys and drew countless pictures of skulls before his...
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The Chinese Checker Players
When I was six years old I played Chinese checkers with a woman who was ninety-three years old. She lived by herself in an apartment down the hall from ours. We played Chinese checkers every Monday and Thursday nights. While we played she usually talked about her husband who had been dead for seventy years, and we drank tea and ate cookies and cheated.
—...
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Photo courtesy of the Crowthorne Carnival on Flickr.
Song, ‘Nikki Oh Nikki,’ written by John Darnielle and John Vanderslice and performed by Vanderslice on April 6, 2009. Originally appeared on Life and Death of An American Four Tracker, 2002.
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A Way of Looking
It is the association ater all We seek, we would retrace our thoughts to find The thought of which this landscape is the image, Then pay the thought and not the landscape homage. It is as if the tree and waterfall Had their irst roots and source within the mind.
But something plays a trick upon the scene: A different kind of light, a stranger colour Flows down on the...
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Photo courtest of DJMcCrady on Flickr.
The Face of the Deep By Fred Saberhagen, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, September, 1966.
part 2
Even a slight change in his orbit would have been immediately visible to him, for his bubble was somehow locked in position within a narrow belt of rocks and dust that stretched like a threat to girdle the vastness below him. Before the...
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Photo courtesy of Jazz Fest Wien Team on Flickr.
Charlie Parker, incidentally, was conceived in Memphis. The place of conception is what is most important and so, I come from something that is very rich. Looking back on it now, it was very fortuitous and a beautiful place to be born and all my high school peers and classmates were great musicians. Booker Little was my best friend in high...
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Family Portrait
Filled with water There’s a jar Eating of gruel begins Wooden spoons Berry wine All is supported By a heavy table.
There’s a man Wearing coarse cloth Sitting Strong arms Fierce Beard Eyes fixed In a gaze At a field still dark.
There’s a woman Large breasts Coiled-up hair Hot hands On the man’s shoulders.
There’s a child His curved brow Smeared with...
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Today, I start a series of posts that will be continued on Sundays. In this series I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
Photo courtest of turbojoe on Flickr.
The Face of the Deep By Fred Saberhagen, first published in If: Worlds of Science...
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Photo, “Barber Shop,” courtesy of lecercle on Flickr.
“Almost Cut My Hair” written and performed by David Crosby, without help from his friends. The song orignally appeared on Déjà Vu, though this is an outtake from those recording sessions.
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City Trees
The trees along this city street, Save for the traffic and the trains, Would make a sound as thin and sweet As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade Out of a shower, undoubtedly Would hear such music as is made Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb Against the shrieking city air, I watch you when the wind has come,— I know what sound...
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This ‘freezing’ of standards is socially enforced upon the agencies themselves. Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener’s attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call ‘natural’ music: this is, the sum total of all the conventions and...
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Photo, ‘In a Sentimental Mood,’ courtesy of phil h on Flickr.
…the session with Duke Ellington was a daring move—both parties may have seemed accomodating on the surface, yet each was driven by a tough-as-nails commitment to their personal principles—but this odd couple proved that, on occasion demigods do consent to dive-and-take. On “In a Sentimental...
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Tacit
Even language leaves us—even the train
traveling fog ends—hot foot
powder all round my bed—the ants
who my house invaded heading everywhere, hungry
for what is not there.
Since you, honey, my cupboards being bare.
I off the army quickly unlike a child
who holds her magnifying glass above the hill, picking
& aiting—patient—till sight spirits into...
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Photo of startrails in Namibia, from NASA’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’.
Fix your camera to a tripod, lock the shutter open, and you can make an image of star trails - graceful concentric arcs traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. Of course, the length of the star trails will depend on the exposure time. While exposures lasting just five minutes produce...
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Photo courtesy of Natasha Tylea on Flickr. Will, Paul and Ned Oldham in tribute of their father, live in Baltimore, 2006. Song, via Daniel, ‘Tell Old Bill,’ performed by Will, Paul and Ned Oldham at Joe’s Pub in NYC, 2006.
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April
If you had come away with me into another state we had been quiet together. But there the sun coming up out of the nothing beyond the lake was too low in the sky, there was too great a pushing against him, too much of sumac buds, pink in the head with the clear gum upon them, too many opening hearts of lilac leaves, too many, too many swollen limp poplar tassels on the bare branches! It was...
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Most painters know that they a re dealing with relative degrees of abstraction; whatever they do depends on vision and must be translated into other senses. Paintings can never directly reproduce the taste or smell of fruit, the touch and texture of yielding flesh, or the note in an infant’s voice that makes the milk begin to flow in a mother’s breasts. Yet both language and painting...
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Photo courtest of aussiegall on Flickr.
The musicians convened in the RCA studios in New York, and although he managed to smile for photographers, Louis was uncomfortable. His lip was down, and worse, he was recording material that we new to him. Duke, meanwhile, was suffering from a persistent headache. No matter. Their performances were perfect—there is no other word to describe them....
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XXIV
and this day it was Spring….us drew lwedly the murmurous minute clumsy smelloftheworld. We intricately alive,cleaving the luminous stammer of bodies (eagerly just not each other touch)seeking,some street which easily tickles a brittle fuss of fragile huge humanity…. Numb thoughts,kicking in the rivers of our blood,miss by how terrible inches speech—it made you a little...
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Photo courtesy of CodyR on Flickr.
All of the young pilots had been selected for their perfect eyesight, but even more important was how broadly they could see, how wide a horizon they commanded, and how quickly they could focus in on the faintest off-center visual cue. They competed to locate stars in daylight. Sakai wrote:
Gradually, and with much more practice, we became quite adept at our...