Hustler of Culture
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
"When we offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains." — Ursula Le Guin
A little list I put together for Book Riot.
I was fortunate to be one of the speakers at 20×2 this year at SXSW Interactive. The question each of us had to answer in 2 minutes was "What Was The Last Thing You Remember?"
My answer…
What was the last thing you remember?
The Act of Remembering is a half-filled promise, an open loop, the brass ring falling to the ground as the carosuel whirls by. You may remember every detail, but you cannot retrieve it or live it again. Memory gifts you every sense, except touch.
Collective Rememering, we remembering is memory you can touch visit, live with, and wrestle to understand. Momuments, cemeteries, labrynths and sidewalk graffiti all say “We were once here and through, stone, paint and time we have reconciled the past and the future in the silent present.
Remembering can be glue, a golden rope, a circle of held hands. The sharing of memory pull us tighter together than the sharing of money, place, even blood. “We have been here” is the hydrogen of history. We have been here is the same as we have shared this, how we begin any understanding of who we are.
Remembering can be curse. Hyperthemesia is a neurological disorder of not being able to forget anything. Sufferers describe it as being a loud party where every past version of yourself. And you can never go home.
Remembering can also be a mistake. Some things are best left as memories. We keep them slung lighty over our backs so we may live looking ahead.
What if the last thing you remember is that there is no last thing? If our memories stand not in a line but at an intersection, arriving, departing, lingering, then circling back again? If our pasts were a library not a well? If to forget and to remember both meant to live, richly?
I'm going to be writing occasional short pieces on classical music in cinema for Salon97.org. The first one explores the use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
In his 1979 review of Apocalypse Now, Roger Ebert called the scene above “simply the greatest movie battle scene ever filmed.” I’m with him on that one and not because of its pacing, photography or that you could watch it 15 times in a row and not bore once. Try muting the sound and it’s still great cinema. Now turn it back up and the music takes a great battle scene and gives it another life–as historical double entendre and a microcosm for the film’s thoughts on war itself. In a hail of strings we all recognize, the triumphant arrival of our military becomes a ironic anti-climax, a white horse dragging a chariot piled with corpses.
When The Beatles released their ninth studio album in November of 1968, its proper name was simply "The Beatles." The all-white cover was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, an admirer of the provocative minimalism of Marcel Duchamp.
The name "The White Album" was probably first dreamed up by journalists and fans to avoid confusion, just as Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums (all named "Peter Gabriel") are nicknamed "Car", "Scratch" and "Melt" according to their sleeve designs. How soon the more wordily nerdy intervened, I don't know, but I've been listening The White Album for nigh on 20 years now before realizing the following..
The name "White Album" is redundant. The word "album" comes from the Latin route word "albus" which means "white."
Early uses of "album" were colloquial variations on "albus" and meant "blank" instead of white. Thus the first uses of the word "album" as a thing, rather than a description of a thing, were used to describe blank things to be filled like sheets of paper. As technology progressed, so did adaptations of the word "album" which adopted to mean something used to hold memorabilia, writings like poems and essays and photographs.
It's easy then to see how "album" again transformed itself to mean "a collection" of songs when that definition first showed up in 1957. As it turns out, "album" became the term of choice for a record due the appearance of a record jacket resembling a blank book, to be filled by the music inside.
(Learned with gratitude, from Podictionary "The Podcast for Word Lovers" (subscribe) that I recommend highly.)
Wended (verb): "To direct oneself, to proceed, to go"
Source: Jonathan Lethem's novel You Don't Love Me Yet, which I just finished, used this word an awful lot. I felt like an imbecile not knowing what it meant.
Your challenge and mine: Use this word in casual conversation with someone other than your lover or spouse and see if they know what you mean.
Sybaritic (adjective): Luxurious, voluptuary.
Seen: In all places, a book about Celine Dion.
Punctilious (adjective): "Careful, demanding, precise."
Use: "One would not describe a kick in the teeth as punctilious. Unless it managed to remove only the left incisor."