“Honey” — TORRES’
I’m so glad it’s summer and that time feels like it’s moving so slowly.
“Ms. O’Brien describes her young self this way: “I was ravenous. For food. For life. For the stories that I would write, except that everything was effervescent and inchoate in my overexcitable brain.” She desired, she says, to be “drawn into the wild heart of things.”
— Edna O’Brien,Seeking the Ardent Life. O, joy! To the wild, wild heart of things!
“I travel because I feel that the world is much larger than my ideas of it. Every stereotype dissolves as soon as I set foot in Syria or Cuba or Vietnam (though not North Korea) and, sitting at home, I’m usually in a perfect state of ignorance and complacency. Living in rural Japan for more than a quarter of a century now has taught me that questions are much richer and deeper than most answers, and that the more I live with someone or something, the less I know of them. So maybe I travel and write to get past the dangerous illusion of knowingness. I’m ever more keen to acknowledge the mystery in everything, even my prosaic old self.”
—
MY PERFECT ADVENTURE: PICO IYER.
Who was it that told me I had to read Pico Iyer? In my To Do List I had his name — “Pico!” Iyer! — but no other relevant notations.
Update: It was Craig. :)
“One reason people like Martha Nussbaum have argued for the benefits of literature is that literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in complexity. Literature turns us away from the simple moral rules that so often prove unhelpful when we are confronted with messy real-life decision making, and gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake. Literature helps us, in other words, to be, or to come closer to being, moral “experts.”
—
Does Great Literature Make Us Better?
I suppose one could hope so.
Found and read this book during an afternoon spent in Chania. It describes the highly contested history of rembetika, dwells heavily on personal anecdote (my favorite), and boasts a final hundred pages of translated songs (some transcribed carefully in the original hand of their writer/singer, then photographed). It’s not particularly well-written, but I came away knowing much more than I did before, and that seems more to the point.
Pictured above is Thanassis, the man who served the author as both a teacher and unofficial historian of the movement. He made most of the instruments you can see behind his head.
One:
“Rembetika songs were written by rembetes for rembetes… The remebtis was a man who had a sorrow and threw it out.” — Rovertakis.
Two:
“And Yiorgos went on playing with nothing but his bouzouiki, beating time with his foot, singing in a voice that was rough and sweet, and I felt that the journey into the rembetika had really begun — we were in a small dark teké or hashish den in Piraeus, with the narghilé being passed around from one rembetis to another, and the sweet black hashish fumes filling the air. A rembetis with a sorrow was throwing it out in song.” — “Turning on to the rembetika”, by Gail Holst
Specially for Cass…
Cass, if you want to cook - you’ll need to turn on the circuit breakers! See my eMail!!!
I love this place. Sending me dispatches via Tumblr.
English Breakfast at Panokosmos. Happy Sunday, with a side of perfectly fried egg.
Today things: we made pizza and I learned about playing djembe from a Congolese ex-pat who has lived one thousand lives.
Alice Kober: Unsung heroine who helped decode Linear B:
It was a mammoth task, performed without the aid of computers. In addition, during the years surrounding World War II, writing materials were hard to come by.
Kober recorded her detailed analysis on index cards, which she made from the backs of old greetings cards, library checkout slips, and the inside covers of examination books.
By hand, she painstakingly cut more than 180,000 tiny index cards, using cigarette cartons as her filing system.
I listened to a piece on this from PRI’s The World in Words not that long ago. It’s pretty stunning to contemplate.
Filed: daily, whimsy.
