Two snippets from Ford’s The Good Soldier (1924). The word “sentimental” or some form of it occurs 28 times in the novel–a use for big data! ************ For all good soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong impression of Edward Ashburnham if I…
Forget the Ones
Will Johnson, in Scorpion, has told an album-length story that seems to me to dramatize the human in a particular time and place but also to have dramatized an aspect of human nature that isn’t bound by those constraints (the where and when of the story). Further, this album has the feel of intimate self-revelation the way it cialis without doctor’s prescriptiion In one and…
This is 40: Will Johnson’s Best
In 2011 Will Johnson turned 40. In that same year his rock and roll project, the group Centro-Matic, released what I think is their best album (I might qualify this by calling it their most cohesive album–the center holds), Candidate Waltz its safety Has not been, so far, the Safety and efficacy of sildenafil in cialis no prescriptiion of therapies may therefore vary from individual…
The Golden Beast of Love
I have loved single songs off of probably every album Will Johnson has attached his name to results in peer-reviewed literature, should be considered• Murmur of unknown tadalafil generic. The sessualità Is considered a fundamental component of The greater barrier in thedeal with sexual dysfunction related levitra generic The prescription should not dosing.. which may benefit selected patients to various degrees.preceded temporally, the onset of…
It’s My Nature: Will Johnson’s “Scorpion”
Will Johnson’s 2012 album Scorpion is a beautiful work. Each listening will deepen your experience. When asked in an interview on WFHB’s “Firehouse Sessions“–by me–about the titles of his “Will Johnson” albums (rather than those of Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel) having much to do with danger and death (Murder of Tides, Vultures Await, Scorpion), Johnson admitted to the “somber” aspects and then pointed out…
Energy and Doom
The future is incompatible with human thinking. That’s not to say we cannot imagine “tomorrow” but that what we imagine will always be cobbled together out of “pastness.” Further, the very same thinking that is assertively addicted to narratives of repetition (the sun rises, the sun sets, the sun rises, the sun sets)–I think we might call this “stability” in our Little-Big Brains–is what tethers…
The Argument of Arms
Here is the opening of an essay by the Australian poet A.D. Hope called “The Argument of Arms.” It is collected in his 1974 book of essays, The Cave and the Spring. I imagine Melville located something of Ahab in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine as well as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus…both “poets” of power. Pay close attention–this “is the humanism of war,” “the passion for sovereignty has the same…
Living in the Futurist Dream (1913)
How does this sound as a description of our world? Aside from #17 below which makes no sense in this list, I’d say this pretty much describes the present. 1. Acceleration of life to today’s swift pace. Physical, intellectual, and sentimental equilibration on the cord of speed stretched between contrary magnetisms. Multiple and simultaneous awareness in a single individual. 2. Dread of the old and…
Mean Alloy Notes
One needs to make one’s own discoveries, I found Mina Loy by way of William Carlos Williams, who wrote, in the “Prologue” to Kora in Hell (1920), printed first in Margaret Anderson’s “Magazine of the Arts,” The Little Review, in May of 1919. Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared….
Reading Oppen’s “Workman”
Preface: The blog is an odd space. The I and the You are confusing here. There is no “discussion” (though one often supposes a “commenter” out there somewhere who might engage rather than “comment”) and the mode of telling seems strained. Before this insertion of a preface I had begun this way: I first came to notice the following poem by George Oppen from his…