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The Jazz of Herstory and History

Two quotes I didn’t know I needed until I encountered them in my reading marathon last weekend. They speak to my heart, which clamors for mending; they fuse its two sides with a resolution I could never achieve alone. This is one of the many reasons I read so copiously. I am always searching for blueprints undetectable in my regular life.

She knows that her name will find its way into his speculations. So will his. Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.—Erika Swyler, The Book of Speculation

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one make some dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: here comes the news. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, y’all, and everything’s ahead at last.–Toni Morrison, Jazz

The Thrills of Life: David Bowie, 1947-2016

It feels so typical of David Bowie that he died when he was already on all of our brains, not only because of his birthday but because he’d just released an album that inclined us to especially celebrate his birth. He had a beautiful–and increasingly elusive–knack for keeping relevant through his art rather than his personal life. A few times I saw him out and about in New York, once by himself and once with Iman, the one woman who could so graciously overshadow him. Each time it was like glimpsing a ghost who would never entirely pass over, which is a fact I cling to today. We’ll miss him terribly but will have all the blueprints he gave us for as long as we listen to music alone and together. As usual, he said it best: “It’s the darkest hour and your voice is new.”

Whitman at the Grocery

I sing a song of Red Hook Fairway. I sing of all the makings of meat ragu and matzo brie; of fennel; of wild rice and farro; of smoked fish and capers and everything bagels still warm from the oven. I sing of meyer lemons and blood oranges and two kinds of kale and chili lime dried mango and seltzer. O! Seltzer gets its own stanza in my song. So does Mz. Liberty, to whom I sing rain or shine–always while munching an egg sandwich made by someone besides me. Coda! I sing of water rushing all about me; of people I love whom I don’t really know: of fish mongers and handsome butchers and checkout sweeties and produce guys with dastardly senses of humor. I sing of mauve skies and salty spray. I sing of fetching the fuel my body needs to sing. I sing.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy