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Friday, November 15, 2013
Shadows Took Shape
One day in the late 1930s, Herman Blount, an African-American music student in Alabama, had an unusual experience.
Beings from Saturn picked him up and carried him off to their planet.
“They had one little antenna on each ear,” he later recalled. “A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me.”
What did they say? They told him to forget school and start making music on his own, that the world was falling apart and that people needed to hear what he played. He took their advice. To compress a long story, he started composing and playing a highly unorthodox way-beyond-freestyle jazz. He formed a symphonic-size band. He made himself robes and crowns and called himself Sun Ra, said he had always been Sun Ra, and that outer space had always been his home, always would be.
Did he make this all up? Did he believe it? Who cares. Sun Ra revolutionized contemporary music. He gave African-American identity a new, loose, utopian way to go. And he inspired an interdisciplinary cultural movement called Afrofuturism, which is the subject of a fabulous exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
The show’s title, “The Shadows Took Shape,” is a phrase from a Sun Ra poem. And the musician himself, who died in 1993 at 79, is represented by archival souvenirs: a ballpoint pen drawing for the cover of the 1960s album “Other Planes of There”; his annotated copy of a 1950s religious tract called “Let God Be True”; and a photograph of him by Charles Shabacon, in which he seems to have a high-beam headlight for a face.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/arts/design/the-shadows-took-shape-at-the-studio-museum.html
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Amanda McCracken
I have always been a saver. When I was a child, I saved my Halloween and Easter candy for over a year. By the time I finally took a bite, the candy was hard and stale. I still have gift cards that are over eight years old. By the time I get around to using them, I realize they’ve already expired. My fridge is full of exotic jams, untouched and unsavored but certainly spoiled. Full bottles of French perfume decorate my dresser, their fragrance fading every year.
-Amanda McCracken
source
If I Were to Die Tomorrow
If I were to die tomorrow
I would turn on the heat today
and bake a turkey in the oven
and clear off the desk
and write letters to all my friends.
I would turn on the heat today
and bake a turkey in the oven
and clear off the desk
and write letters to all my friends.
The Afterlife
by
Louis Jenkins
Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie… "I didn’t get it,"
they are saying.
He says, "It didn’t seem to have any plot."
"No." she says, "it seemed like things just kept coming at me. Most of the
time I was confused… and there was way too much sex and violence."
"Violence anyway," he says.
"It was not much for character development either; most of the time
people were either shouting or mumbling. Then just when someone started
to make sense and I got interested, they died. Then a whole lot of new
characters came along and I couldn’t tell who was who."
"The whole thing lacked subtlety."
"Some of the scenery was nice."
"Yes."
They walk on in silence for a while. It is a summer night and they walk
slowly, stopping now and then, as if they had no particular place to go.
They walk past a streetlamp where some insects are hurling themselves at
the light, and then on down the block, fading into the darkness.
She says, "I was never happy with the way I looked."
"The lighting was bad and I was no good at dialogue," he says.
"I would have liked to have been a little taller," she says.
From North of the Cities (Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2007) © Louis Jenkins.
The Bear's Money
Every fall before he goes to sleep a bear will put away five or six
hundred dollars. Money he got from garbage cans, mostly. Peo-
ple throw away thousands of dollars every day, and around here
a lot of it goes to bears. But what good is money to a bear? I
mean, how many places are there that a bear can spend it? It's a
good idea to first locate the bear's den, in fall after the leaves are
down. Back on one of the old logging roads you'll find a tall pine
or spruce covered with scratch marks, the bear runes, which
translate to something like "Keep out. That means you!" You can
rest assured that the bear and his money are nearby, in a cave or
in a space dug out under some big tree roots. When you return
in winter, a long hike on snowshoes, the bear will be sound
asleep. ... In a month or two he'll wake, groggy, out of sorts,
ready to bite something, ready to rip something to shreds ... but
by then you'll be long gone, back in town, spending like a
drunken sailor.
from The Winter Road: Prose Poems by Louis Jenkins. © Holy Cow! Press.
It's Best Not to Remember these Things
Polar bears swim in the tank
at Roger Williams Park Zoo.
You can see them in the turquoise window,
they have huge black claws,
they look snuggly.
I love them,
I want to swim with them.
But one bit a guy's head off
in Canada when he answered the door,
and a Brooklyn boy in The Bronx jumped in to cuddle
and was eaten.
It's best not to remember these things.
at Roger Williams Park Zoo.
You can see them in the turquoise window,
they have huge black claws,
they look snuggly.
I love them,
I want to swim with them.
But one bit a guy's head off
in Canada when he answered the door,
and a Brooklyn boy in The Bronx jumped in to cuddle
and was eaten.
It's best not to remember these things.
Before You Know It
Change
by Louis Jenkins
All those things that have gone from your life,
moon boots, TV trays and the Soviet Union, that
seem to have vanished, are really only changed.
Dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth but
evolved into birds and crock pots became bread
makers and then the bread makers all went to
rummage sales along with the exercise bikes.
Everything changes. It seems at times (only for
a moment) that your wife, the woman you love,
might actually be your first wife in another form.
It's a thought not to be pursued….Nothing is the
same as it used to be. Except you, of course,
you haven't changed…well, slowed down a bit,
perhaps. It's more difficult nowadays to deal with
the speed of change, disturbing to suddenly find
yourself brushing your teeth with what appears
to be a flashlight. But essentially you are the
same as ever, constant in your instability.
"Change" by Louis Jenkins, from Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005. © Will o' Wisp Books, 2009.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Happy Birthday Joe Mantegna
Joe Mantegna by Nathan Rabin
The actor: Joe Mantegna first burst into the public consciousness as the favorite leading man of playwright/screenwriter David Mamet, who gave Mantegna a career-making role in Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, then cast him as the lead in Mamet’s first two films: the 1987 cult classic House Of Games and its well-received 1988 follow-up, Things Change. Mantegna continued to work with Mamet, most recently in 2008’s Redbelt, but he also found considerable success outside their partnership. He earned a place in the hearts of Simpsons fans as Fat Tony, Springfield’s Mafia don, and played less-comic mobsters in The Godfather: Part III and the Mario Puzo-derived television movies The Last Don and The Last Don II. On television, Mantegna starred on the beloved cult drama Joan Of Arcadia,and he can currently be seen on Criminal Minds. In 2003, Mantegna starred in the gentle family comedy Uncle Nino, which just came out on DVD.
Uncle Nino (2003)—“Robert Micelli”
Joe Mantegna: Uncle Nino, it’s kind of funny how that came about. A friend’s ex-wife calls me from Chicago that I hadn’t heard from in probably 25 years. Tracked me down through mutual friends and said “As you know, I’m divorced from your old friend, but I’m remarried to a guy who’s a film producer, and he has another partner who’s a writer-director, and they’ve written this script, and they basically wrote this part for you. You inspired them to write this role. Would you consider looking at the script?”
So it was like one of those phone calls I get on Friday night, didn’t come through an agent or anything like that, and was totally out of the blue. And since I did know this girl and had known her for many years prior, I said, “Look, sure, send the script.” But I really didn’t think anything of it at the time. I thought “I’m just being courteous. I’ll give this thing a read and probably just have to call back and say, ‘You know, thanks, but it’s just not going to pan out.’” But when I got the script, there was just this very sweet kind of—I don’t know, it touched me. I related to it because it very much paralleled many things in my own life. And then ultimately my daughter wound up playing my daughter in the film, because when I got to page three, there was a daughter named Gina who was within a year of the real age of my own daughter, whose real name is Gina. And these people didn’t know that I even had a daughter Gina, or anything like that. I had lost contact with them. And in talking to the guy later, I thought, “Well, maybe he just kind of snuck that in there to kind of hopefully…”
Hot Shot Mystery
Somebody mysteriously sent us hot shot rechargeable heating pack warmers. My husband and I charged them up and then sat at the dinner table with our new warmed pouches. Just like those King Cavalier dogs bred to warm laps, he said.
The Cavalier King Charles spaniel is the descendant of a small toy spaniel depicted in many 16th, 17th and 18th Century paintings of northern Europe. This dog was originally bred to warm laps in drafty castles and on chilly carriage rides. A prescription written in Olde English for the Queen of England directs her to keep this "comforte dog" on her lap to treat a cold. The Cavalier's other job was to attract fleas and thereby spare their masters the flea-transmitted bubonic plague.
During Tudor times, toy spaniels were common as ladies' pets and, under the Stuarts, they were given the royal title of King Charles spaniel. King Charles II was seldom seen without two or three Cavaliers at his heels, and he wrote a decree — still in effect today — that his namesake spaniel be accepted in any public place, including the Houses of Parliament, which were generally off-limits to animals.
In the early days, breed standards were not recognized, although toy spaniels generally had flat heads, pointed muzzles and high-set ears. By the mid-19th century, the English fashioned a new look for the toy spaniel and standardized its appearance. These modern King Charles spaniels, also known as "Charlies," had flatter faces, undershot jaws and domed skulls. In the early 1900s breeders attempted to recreate the earlier version of the breed; they were largely successful and so was born the Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Breeding of the Cavalier King Charles spaniel in the United States took hold on a limited basis in the 1950s, but the breed was not fully recognized by the American Kennel Club until 1996.
Propolene on Titan
NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Finds Ingredient of Household Plastic in Space
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected propylene, a chemical used to make food-storage containers, car bumpers and other consumer products, on Saturn's moon Titan.
This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth.
A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). This instrument measures the infrared light, or heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons in much the same way our hands feel the warmth of a fire.
Propylene is the first molecule to be discovered on Titan using CIRS. By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical with a high degree of confidence. Details are presented in a paper in the Sept. 30 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene," said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the paper. "That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom -- that's polypropylene."
CIRS can identify a particular gas glowing in the lower layers of the atmosphere from its unique thermal fingerprint. The challenge is to isolate this one signature from the signals of all other gases around it.
The detection of the chemical fills in a mysterious gap in Titan observations that dates back to NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft and the first-ever close flyby of this moon in 1980.
Voyager identified many of the gases in Titan's hazy brownish atmosphere as hydrocarbons, the chemicals that primarily make up petroleum and other fossil fuels on Earth.
On Titan, hydrocarbons form after sunlight breaks apart methane, the second-most plentiful gas in that atmosphere. The newly freed fragments can link up to form chains with two, three or more carbons. The family of chemicals with two carbons includes the flammable gas ethane. Propane, a common fuel for portable stoves, belongs to the three-carbon family.
Voyager detected all members of the one- and two-carbon families in Titan's atmosphere. From the three-carbon family, the spacecraft found propane, the heaviest member, and propyne, one of the lightest members. But the middle chemicals, one of which is propylene, were missing.
As researchers continued to discover more and more chemicals in Titan's atmosphere using ground- and space-based instruments, propylene was one that remained elusive. It was finally found as a result of more detailed analysis of the CIRS data.
"This measurement was very difficult to make because propylene's weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals," said Michael Flasar, Goddard scientist and principal investigator for CIRS. "This success boosts our confidence that we will find still more chemicals long hidden in Titan's atmosphere."
Cassini's mass spectrometer, a device that looks at the composition of Titan's atmosphere, had hinted earlier that propylene might be present in the upper atmosphere. However, a positive identification had not been made.
"I am always excited when scientists discover a molecule that has never been observed before in an atmosphere," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "This new piece of the puzzle will provide an additional test of how well we understand the chemical zoo that makes up Titan's atmosphere."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The CIRS team is based at Goddard.
For more information about the Cassini mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Mason Currey
The Death of Letter-Writing
By MASON CURREY New York Times
In recent years, a number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary letter. The publication of Saul Bellow’s letters in 2010 and William Styron’s last year were accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can expect.
Letters were not only a way to stay in touch with colleagues or test out ideas and themes on the page, but also a valuable method of easing into and out of a state of mind where they could pursue more daunting and in-depth writing.
John Updike, for instance, often began his writing day by answering a letter or two. Cynthia Ozick has said that she does the same thing, answering letters after breakfast, before beginning her real work. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast, turned to his letters when his fiction wasn’t going well; they were a welcome break from what he called the “awful responsibility of writing.” Iris Murdoch worked on her fiction in the morning, wrote letters in the afternoon and then returned to her fiction for a couple hours in the early evening. Thomas Mann’s days followed much the same pattern: serious writing in the morning, then letters, reviews and newspaper articles in the evening.
For these writers, and many more like them, keeping up with their correspondence was a valuable para-literary activity — not quite “real” writing, but something that helped them warm up for or cool down from the task. (And, of course, it should go without saying that many of these letters were beautiful works of literature in their own right.)
This is not to say that all writers found dealing with their correspondence pleasant. H. L. Mencken replied to every letter he received on the same day that it arrived — out of politeness, he said, and also for more selfish reasons. “I answer letters promptly as a matter of self-defense,” Mencken once explained. “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”
Charles Darwin was similarly compulsive. He made a point of replying to every letter he received, even those from obvious cranks. If he failed to do so, it weighed on his conscience and could even keep him up at night.
. . . don’t think of them as letters at all — think of them as telegrams, and remember that you are paying for every word.
Fernando Pessoa
Tobacco Shop
But the Tobacco Shop owner has come to the door and stands there.
I look at him, straining my half-turned neck,
Straining my half-blind soul.
He'll die and so will I.
He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave poems.
A little later the street will die where his signboard hung,
And so will the language my poems were written in.
-by Fernando Pessoa
Luis Alberto Urrea
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached. I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.
I was in a small house in Cuernavaca with old healer women. We were eating green Jell-O. One of them told me this: "When you write, you light a bonfire in the spirit world. It is dark there. Lost souls wander alone. Your inner flame flares up. And the lost souls gather near your light and heat. And they see the next artist at work and go there. And they follow the fires until they find their ways home."
Aside from thinking my old Baptist preacher would not be amused by this kind of pagan talk, I recognized the beauty and awe, the deep respect in a woman who didn't read, for the act of literary creation.
Now, if it is all story, I believe we are the narrators. Many writing instructors will tell you that to be a great writer, you must be attentive. Shamans will tell you the same thing: If you want to be a good person, a whole person, wake up! Pay attention! Be here now! Zen monks will go so far as to hit you with a stick. Look!
I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku! But I found out something entirely different. I learned that if I went into the world and paid attention (in Spanish, you "lend attention," presta atencion), the world would notice and respond. I would have demonstrated my worthiness to receive the world's gifts. It's a kind of library where you lend attention and receive a story. Or God will toss off a limerick for your pleasure.
In South Carolina recently, I was telling my hosts before a speaking engagement all about this idea. I told them that Story comes on the wings of hummingbirds and dragonflies. My host told me to turn around. A hummingbird hovered outside the window, three inches from the back of my head. After the event, I was in the street enjoying the silence. A dragonfly came and hovered over my head. Both times, all I had to do was look.
- Luis Alberto Urrea, This I Believe
Eve Birch
I used to believe in the American dream that meant a job, a mortgage, cable, credit, warranties, success. I wanted it and worked toward it like everyone else, all of us separately chasing the same thing.
One year, through a series of unhappy events, it all fell apart. I found myself homeless and alone. I had my truck and $56.
I scoured the countryside for someplace I could rent for the cheapest possible amount. I came upon a shack in an isolated hollow, four miles up a winding mountain road over the Potomac River in West Virginia.
It was abandoned, full of broken glass and rubbish. When I pried off the plywood over a window and climbed in, I found something I could put my hands to. I hadn't been alone for 25 years. I was scared, but I hoped the hard work would distract and heal me.
I found the owner and rented the place for $50 a month. I took a bedroll, a broom, rope, a gun and cooking gear, and cleared a corner to camp in while I worked.
The locals knew nothing about me. But slowly, they started teaching me the art of being a neighbor. They dropped off blankets, candles, tools and canned deer meat, and they began sticking around to chat. They'd ask if I wanted to meet cousin Albie or go fishing, maybe get drunk some night. They started to teach me a belief in a different American dream — not the one of individual achievement but one of neighborliness.
Men would stop by with wild berries, ice cream, truck parts and bullets to see if I was up for courting. I wasn't, but they were civil anyway. The women on that mountain worked harder than any I'd ever met. They taught me the value of a whetstone to sharpen my knives, how to store food in the creek and keep it cold and safe. I learned to keep enough for an extra plate for company.
What I had believed in, all those things I thought were the necessary accouterments for a civilized life, were nonexistent in this place. Up on the mountain, my most valuable possessions were my relationships with my neighbors.
After four years in that hollow, I moved back into town. I saw that a lot of people were having a really hard time, losing their jobs and homes. With the help of a real estate broker I chatted up at the grocery store, I managed to rent a big enough house to take in a handful of people.
It's four of us now, but over time I've had nine come in and move on to other places from here. We'd all be in shelters if we hadn't banded together.
The American dream I believe in now is a shared one. It's not so much about what I can get for myself; it's about how we can all get by together.
-Eve Birch, This I Believe
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