The divine mundane at Thomas Merton’s monastery: In a review of a new book by the monastery’s caretaker, Danny Heitman writes about what life was—and is—like at the Abbey of Gethsemani.
Berenice Abbott’s jazz-age photography: “It must have vexed her former employer that another of Abbott’s early portrait commissions was James Joyce, in his post-surgical eyepatch, a sitting at his apartment that he would further immortalize in Finnegans Wake: ‘Talk about lowness! Any dog’s quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle for the very fourth snap the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with coldblood kodak shotted the as yet unremunderanded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy.’ Joyce had earlier sat for Man Ray—a publicity shot for the 1922 publication of Ulysses, commissioned by Sylvia Beach. One looks in vain for signs of Man Ray’s influence on Abbott’s work. Her portraits of Joyce (from two different sessions) seem to convey more of the writer’s personality than Man Ray’s grainy, tightly cropped profile and three-quarter-view shots—perhaps an effect of the natural light she used or her greater depth of field. The classical composition of her best-known image of Joyce (with the hat) from the second sitting also displays his beautiful, long hands, a revelation.”
Remembering the day Sweden went from driving on the left to driving on the right: “As well as hoping to boost the country’s international reputation, the Swedish government had grown increasingly concerned about safety, with the number of registered vehicles on the roads shooting up from 862,992 a decade earlier to a figure of 1,976,248 recorded by Statistics Sweden at the time of H-Day. Sweden’s population was around 7.8 million. Despite driving on the left, many Swedes already owned cars with the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the vehicle, since many bought from abroad and major Swedish car manufacturers such as Volvo had chosen to follow the trend.”
Harder, better, faster, older: Willie Nelson will release his 73rd studio album on April 29. Two days later, he’ll hit the road again … at 85. “He’s got plenty of cash and a legacy that rivals any musician who’s ever lived, so no one would blame Willie if he spent the rest of his life doing nothing but lounging on a beach near his home in Maui or enjoying edibles at his ranch outside Austin. Yet he’s still writing songs, playing guitar, and making music nearly every day…Why does he still do it?”
Download 16,016 BBC sound effects. “One lorry slowly passing” is my new ringtone.
Essay of the Day:
Quit worrying about “getting” classical music and your inability to describe it in technical terms. Trust yourself:
“I was talking about music recently with a friend who makes his living cloning genes, manipulating molecules and investigating the pathways of the human immune system. This is a person whose intellectual molecules are clearly very well arranged. But he proceeded to tell me that although he loved classical music, when he listened to it he wasn’t able to perceive anything other than his own emotional reactions. Could it be true? Well, he thought it was. But he was wrong.
“What my friend was expressing was merely a symptom of a common affliction, one that crosses all intellectual, social and economic classes: the Classical Music Insecurity Complex. Immediate therapy was indicated.
“There’s no question, I pointed out, that he perceives more than just his own reactions. Lots more. In every piece he listens to he perceives changes, both great and small, in tempo, volume, pitch and instrumentation. He perceives melodies, harmonies and rhythms, and their patterns. He perceives, in short, virtually all the musical ingredients that composers manipulate to stimulate emotional effects, which is precisely why he’s emotionally affected. His ‘problem’ isn’t perception — it’s description. And what he doesn’t know is the jargon, the technical terms for the ingredients and manipulations.”
Photos: Tea hill
Poem: Brian Bilston, “On Tender Hooks”
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