1001 Disco Days

 Tonight I went with Siyal Music's Galactic Road on Mixcloud 2 hour mix. It got me all the way there. I headed first to the free library at Skillman Park. It's been magic for me lately. Last time I went I found the PERFECT gift for my student Li-yen, to thank him for fixing my i-Phone, two Chinese Wuxian novels. There were on the end of the stacks, the first thing I noticed, as if waiting for me. Tonight I couldn't believe how many great books were there. But the first one I found was called The Proust Project, contemporary writers, great ones like Lydia Davis, choosing a favorite passage from Proust and then writing an essay about it. I can't even imagine finding a better book. And once again, it was right there on the end of the stack, as if waiting for me.  What to make of this kind of magic. You certainly can't question it. Part of the magic is believing it, against all logic.  The next thing I found was a best of John Prine CD. This also felt destined to me. Li...

 I've been out a few times Today teaching Ferlinghetti in memoriam,  His Queens cemetery poem, went to a Jewish museum. Fell in love with a Sadie Sternberg who died in 1928 at the age of 21 but the photo with miles of style and a radiant smile I notice next her sister on the other side of her father and mother Rose Sternberg, died in 1923 at the age of 27. What happened to these sisters?  The mother went in 1925 at the age of 51. Suddenly I am that father and it's literally too sad to bear, I find my mind running away from the pain and back into that smile, as if the other side of it cannot be accepted, and so I simply don't. The brother outlived his whole family, and outlived his sisters by a factor of 3. I can't imagine his pain either, seeing Sadie's smile, knowing what it was. I still dance though  in the snow, as though on a frozen river of tears on the crystal frontier. Proust is on my mind too, he of the Jewish mother with a divided France, what every subtle ...

Back up in CT lake house for winter break.  Dance in basement to new Joel Davis Vibrarian mix, "Arctic Blue". Still shaking it, still got it, moved by the music, sweating out the toxins. Snowball fight with the girls later.  Little to no Fat Tuesday celebration. Two holes in toast make a mask. And a Mardi Gras toast. Tomorrow I give up bread for lent.  Also poetic discovery of Coleridge's "Dark Lady", his Genevieve, in the poem "Love" from the Richard Holmes biography. I've been thinking a lot about the dark lady, as I suggested a podcast History of Literature on Aemilia Layner, Shakespeare's Dark Lady, to Melissa Paredis in my poetry class. 

 At cemetery with Vibrarian mix "The Eyes of It". Cold, but the mix is so good I listen through it twice. Lots of nice surprises, like George Harrison and Wu Tang mash up. Seeing it in color. Stopping before every song to reset. Taking pictures of planes through trees.  Also music on my mind because of these Proust passages. Here is the assignment I gave to the seniors before break (yesterday) Winter break reading assignment: Here are three passages from Marcel Prousts’ early 20th century French masterpiece, “Remembrance of Things Past.” Each of these passages describes the same passage of music, a "little phrase" of music from a fictional composer named Vinteuil. In the first one, the main character, Swann, has yet to fall in love with Odette, whom he has just met, but he is enraptured by the “little phrase” of music. In the second passage Swann and Odette have already fallen in love and been together for awhile, and so Swann’s perception of the “little phrase” has...