Rachel > Recent Status Updates

Bubber Miley
Sam Nanton

Starvation Blues

James Reese Europe

Backwater Blues

Eubie Blake - Sounds of Africa

Sidney Bechet

Pg 143 ‘Morton was the first theorist, the first intellectual that jazz produced. And jazz has never been sympathetic to the intellectual.’

Pg 139 ‘ Morton added that he started using the word ‘jazz’ in 1902, specifically to show people the difference between jazz and ragtime.’

The Legs

‘The Celtic substratum in Britain, and to a lesser extent in France, is the collective equivalent of the repressed unconscious in the individual.’

“Not really about an experience in the bum city, this poem is about the experience of making a poem about an experience in the bum city.”

‘Few sensations excel in delicacy the pétillement of minute raindrops tingling over the whole surface of the skin, warmed at the same time by a silvery sun.’

“Tatiana’s letter is before me ... “

Love the foot fetish stuff

‘You’ll be forsworn,’ said he, ‘sooner than I; Forsworn I tell you, forsworn utterly!’

This made me laugh 😂
I require more coffee to get through the day

“The feeling is that all that makes for liberty and liveliness is against those that either by weakness or by strength want to suppress the others and so the Germans who are the Germans who are the arch-disciplinarians because both of their weakness and their strength they want to stop liberty so those who want liberty suppressed because liberty is a criticism of them are pro-German.

“Every one always is repeating the whole of them. . . If they get deadened by the steady pounding of repeating they will not learn from each one even though each one always is repeating the whole of them they will not learn the completed history of them, they will not know the being really in them.”

Note: Digital photos: 300 dpi to print quality images

“If the study which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not benefiting the human mind...”

Godwin reference to Political Justice: scientist’s need for society/danger of technology reducing humans’ reliance on one another

“Then those who have no experience of wisdom and virtue, who are always at their feastings and so forth, are being carried downwards...
Like brute beasts, they look downwards, and feed stopping over the ground and poking their noses into their tables ... they kick and butt with iron horns and hooves and kill one another because of their insatiate desire”

“...and the more they value money the less they value virtue; in truth, we may imagine riches and virtue as always balanced in scales against each other.”

“Every seed or growth,” I said, “vegetable or animal, the stronger it is the more it falls short of being its proper self, if it lacks the nurture that each ought to have and the proper place and season: for evil is more opposed to the good than to the not-good.”

Brings to mind Sondheim's 'Sunday in the Park with George': "Pretty isn't beautiful; pretty is what changes ..."

Book V taken from summary: "Changing world of the senses is the object of opinion, but the unchanging world of realities is the object of true knowledge."

"Then everything which is in a good state, either by nature or by art or both, least admits change by something else."

Strength: “Strength’s power is love. She loves the lion, the lion loves her back, and he does her bidding. Power comes when we love ourselves, control our cravings, and take on hardships for the sake of others.”

Wheel of Fortune: “Change may work in our favor but not always. As we distance ourselves from its ups and downs, we start to identify with our eternal soul.”

Akousmatikoi-their meditation focused on memory

‘Directing his memory, with all the lights on and all the masks of the mind a-miming, toward the days of his fervid and receptive youth ( in a brilliant cosmos that seemed all the fresher for having been abolished by one blow of history), Pnin would get drunk on his private wines as he produced sample after sample of what his listeners politely surmised was Russian humor.’

‘I had always been interested in the person of Emperor Nicholas II; he seemed to me to be a remarkable man in many ways; but he was completely misunderstood and did not understand his own self.’