happy monday

after months of silence, this!

it's the end of the workday, end of the workweek, and i'm reading an interview with author nelson algren [famous for writing about junkies in the 1950s-60s], and just found this paragraph so absolutely honest and correct and beautiful that i had to burst and share it. it could be applied to anything, to any life or lifestyle or person or community, not just heroin addicts. he taps into truth, absolutely unfettered --

Well, there’s always something wrong in any society. I think it
would be a mistake to aim at any solution, you know; I mean, the
most you can do is—well, if any writer can catch the routine lives
of people just living in that kind of ring of fire to show how you
can’t go out of a certain neighborhood if you’re addicted, or for
other reasons, that you can’t be legitimate, but that within the
limitation you can succeed in making a life that is routine—with
human values that seem to be a little more real, a little more

intense, and human, than with people who are freer to come and
go—if somebody could write a book about the routine of these
circumscribed people, just their everyday life, without any big
scenes, without any violence, or cops breaking in, and so on, just
day-to-day life—like maybe the woman is hustling and makes a
few bucks, and they get a little H just to keep from getting sick,
and go to bed, and get up—just an absolutely prosaic life without
any particular drama to it in their eyes—if you could just do that
straight, without anybody getting arrested—there’s always a little
danger of that, of course—but to have it just the way these thousands
of people live, very quiet, commonplace routine . . . well, you’d
have an awfully good book.

FINALLY!!!!

NEW KINGS OF CONVENIENCE!!!!

album out Oct. 10

Rosh Hashanah

Amy and I have been talking about redemption. About the possibility. And the necessity. Mostly about the first moment in fall when your breath, as I said to her, puffs out in wafts. That moment, she replied, it's like the simplest reminder of the simplest fact: we are alive. We are breathing in and out this air and we can see it.

It started because I realized as I was pulling on my long-sleeved blouse that it smelled of last winter. It smelled of settling in the curve of someone's side and huddling under blankets. I have not worn it since, with the summer's heat, and I must not have washed it.

Today, she told me, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is one filled with contemplation and repentance. And prayer. And psalms, which I love, because they are a textual sacrifice and an attempt to praise the infinite with words. "I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yeah, I will sing praises unto the Lord."

Amy told me that last Saturday at midnight Ashkenazi Jews began reciting Selichot, or Shelosh-'Esreh Middot, poems seeking the thirteen attributes of mercy listed in Exodus 34. Selichot, prayers as she explained them. Key words being: forgiveness, chorus, binding, we have sinned, and petition. Key words being: compassion, mercy, grace, patience, truth, mercy, pardoning. Seeking, beseeching mercy. Forgiveness for: iniquity, transgression, sin. Key words always, insistently: forgive me, forgive me forgive me. It seems appropriate, she continued, to designate full days, weeks, months of awe—both for the things we lose, and the things we redeem. For the compassion, mercy, grace, and truth in the Lord’s infinite mercy.

And the fall is the perfect time for this, I told her. A time of forgiveness and mercy, just what I ought to feel as the sun is saying I've stayed too long already and blushing behind trees earlier in the evening. And things are getting older. Maybe that's why I'm so anxiously waiting for the cold to come and for the humidity to leave. I am craving the assurance of cardigans and warm soups. There is something comforting in the pain of frosted ears warming again. Probably about the thawing of mercy, of redemption from hurt and bleakness that sometimes doesn't seem appropriate in summer.

It seems all too appropriate, she said, to remember with longing those of our past in this week of remembrance and prayer. The many small misdoings we did to each other, the many tender acts we shared together. Even the scent of them lingering in the hems of things.

Also, Amy ROCKS

Because you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore, right, Miss Best American notable? Wahoo!

Score One for the Home Team

Just wanted to draw your attention to our friend Pat Madden's bound-to-be-awesome (wa waaa) book, Quotidiana, coming out in March. And yes, that's a kookaburra on the cover. "Legend has it that Montaigne kept one in his tower to announce the arrival of bothersome warring factions or emissaries from the king requesting his services" (PM's Facebook wall). I shared this fun fact with my roommate, who then informed me about David Sedaris' latest piece in The New Yorker, which led us in a round about way to the following great video, which certainly makes me laugh a whole lot:

Astor Piazzolla: So Hot.

He plays a mean bandoneon. He wed tango and jazz. He collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. He had me at Libertango.

(This one kind of jumps in a second or two into it, but it's Yo Yo Ma. And therefore Awesome.)

(The one below is about the fastest I've ever heard the Libertango performed, and I don't like it as much as the versions that keep the bandoneon/accordion sound in there, but this one is tootally worth watching, just for the conductor (see 1.35 and you'll know exactly what I mean). Hoooly smokes.)

On That Note...

Patricia's post brought to mind one of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers, Chopin. It's his Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66 and it is rapturous. Enjoy!

Oh. My.

Thank you, Rachel, for drawing my attention to this song. I fall more and more deeply in love with the cello every day. I have been listening to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites not stop for the past 2 weeks, and this really hit the spot.