- Claude Debussy was born 151 years ago today. It's love. Here's last year's post with playlists from both me and Hamster. The above chosen by the poem below.
- 35 years. 35 years won't be half of my life for another 16 years. Three days ago 24 years ago I started working at Illtophay, it's eleven more years to 35.
- Chelsea Manning was sentenced to more time in prison than all the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib murder, rape, and torture COMBINED.
- Free Chelsea Manning.
- Fuck the Guardian, part two. Excellent debate.
- UPDATE! On the above by the author of the above.
- William Vollmann uncovers his FBI file.
- William Vollmann was suspected of being the Unabomber?
- William Vollmann was suspected of being the Unabomber? Reading one’s FBI file is rarely pleasant,” Vollmann writes. He discovered that someone — Vollmann gives him the codename “Ratfink” — turned him in to the authorities as a possible Unabomber suspect because of the content of his fiction. His file claims that “anti-growth and anti-progress themes persist throughout each VOLLMANN work.” In this case, his accuser was referring to “Fathers and Crows,” a novel “set mostly in Canada in the seventeenth century.” Even more conclusive, the FBI observed ominously that “UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing.
- UPDATE! I've a scan of the Harpers article, email me if you want it. Provided we're copacetic, it's yours.
- I'm - serendipity is awesome, and I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago - finishing up my rereading of Fathers and Crows. I've an extra copy. You know the drill.
- UPDATE! Three claims so far. I'll buy you one if you want one and let me know by morning. Provided we're copacetic, it's yours.
- Vollmann's article in Harpers (subscription required).
- Glimmerglass.
- Well and truly fracked.
- Capitalism.
- The privilege paradigm.
- The party goes on behind elevator doors while the elevator plummets.
- Maxims for apolitical artists.
- A world without feeling.
8/22/08
David Lehman
Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando and Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.
Much was made of it in 1962,
centenary of Debussy's birth.
And if today I play his Rhapsody
for Saxophone and Orchestra
for the ten minutes it requires of
my undivided attention, who will attack me for
living in Paris in 1908 instead of now?
Let them. I'll take my stand,
my music stand, with the composer
of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.
