from 6.17.10
It’s summertime in Chicago and beautiful down in the city. Heard Vivaldi in Millennium Park this evening. "The Four Seasons" on a wide lawn strewn with picnickers, with their expensive cheese and champagne. Classy. You can’t beat a beautiful woman playing Vivaldi on a ten-thousand dollar violin. With the high cumulus, the skyscrapers behind the amphitheater, the lake breezes. The crush of happy people. We ate hot dogs and read the program. I talked with a Polish woman who told me she’d travelled to five continents but Chicago was still the most beautiful city in the world. I don’t believe it for a second, but hey, it was Vivaldi. Maybe she got a little carried away. We walked through the gardens in the dusk, under the giant reflective arch, and looked off a wide terrace down madison avenue, colonnaded with lamps in the busy dusk. Down the streets marked off with blinking hands and painted pavement, past skyscrapers full of big business – then the station, Waugh on the gliding train. And so home.
Reading:
Evelyn Waugh "Brideshead Revisited"
Dostoyevsky "The Brothers Karamazov"
Listening:
Starflyer 59: Dial M, Everybody Makes Mistakes, Silver
My Bloody Valentine: Ecstasy and Wine
Orient Is His Name: Hidden Mansions
Finished “Brideshead Revisited” and liked it quite a bit. It’s always good to read someone who is at least thinking about the right things. There were some really lovely passages and I was touched by the ending in particular. Beyond some general abstractions though I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I’ll have to do some more thinking and read up on him some more. A good writer to know. Read his “Man Who Liked Dickens” too last night and it reminded me of Flannery O’Connor in its bizarreness and monstrosity. Those Catholics…
Apparently Eliot wrote this to a friend in 1931, shortly after his conversion. “I have [Beethoven’s] A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” And the Four Quartets were structurally modeled on Beethoven’s later string quartets. Something I didn’t know. Makes you want to hear the A Minor Quartet, and read the Quartets. I’ve read them several times and I still feel like I’m getting about 1/17th of it. So perfect though. It makes good sense that it was patterned after a piece of music, and that Eliot described it the way he did. He isn’t just writing about ideas, there’s music there: tone, quality, vibe. Good vibrations. “All manner of thing shall be well/When the tongues of flame are in-folded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the fire and the rose are one.”
I like Starflyer 59 more and more. I’ve been dosing myself pretty heavily this summer, especially with “Dial M.” I like the way he talks about his faith, with simple courage. The true indie rock in fact. I also appreciate the clarity and simplicity of the production, and his voice and the melodies and the way they complement – or embody – what he means. Very listenable, and I’m a real sucker for that. You can have your long boring post rock that I’m not hip enough to suffer through. You can have it all. Sing to me, use words that mean something.
I’m trying to do better with my reading this summer and thinking with growing seriousness about switching gears after TEDS and doing something in English Literature. Not sure where I could get with my specs...I’d enjoy it a lot more anyway. I’m not sure how heavily that ought to weigh in the scales. Jenni still wants to go overseas and it’s something to consider. Just thinking. You only live once.
Things are not that bad
You know we had a hell of a dad
This is what we need
To live out all the love that we read
This ain't no new kinda story
