The New Yorker, 2007-12-24&31

[fiefoe]

"Jazz Dept.: Life on Mars" / David Remnick
__ The Bad Plus are the Coen brothers of jazz: Midwesterners, both ironic and dead earnest, technically brilliant, beyond versatile, unembarrassedly derivative, a little chilly sometimes, but funny, surprising, and pretty hard to pin down.

"Twilight of the Books" / Caleb Crain

• Whether that development sparked Greece’s flowering she leaves to classicists to debate, but she agrees with Havelock that writing was probably a contributive factor, because it freed the Greeks from the necessity of keeping their whole culture, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, memorized.
• “Enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity,” he wrote.
• According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,”
• It is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
  

John Updike:  in the plump snap of the shutter
Susan Sontag:  All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. . . . A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.
http://www.la-grenouille.com/
http://themoth.org/podcast
Led Zeppelin - Kashmir

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