"There is no more evanescent quality in an accomplished fact than its wonderfulness. Solicited incessantly by the considerations affecting its fears and desires, the human mind turns naturally away from the marvellous side of events."

- Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.

"I was as welcome as the flowers in May, once the crew knew that I was going across with them. A man who thinks he may have to be a hero is consoled by the thought that his friends may read about it."

- A.J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited, 1955.

- Giovanni Tiepolo, The Procession of the Trojan Horse Into Troy, 1760.

"So from now on history will be a matter of necessary adjustments to Earth’s biophysical reality. We will be deploying ever-more powerful technologies, and we may get better at understanding our problems and addressing them. We could very possibly build a sustainable civilization that shares the planet with the other animals, and gives all humans alive a chance at a fulfilled existence. This is what the combination of justice and science working on physical reality could do, if we were to successfully shove history that way.

So two possibilities exist at once and are in a kind of awful race: utopia or catastrophe are both possible from our current moment. The thing is, the catastrophes will be wide-ranging but not universal, and will play out over decades and centuries, and in those same decades we will be struggling to accommodate to whatever situation exists, to make the best of it, and even to make it better. So there will be an ongoing struggle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from this interview.

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

– Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934

From the remarkable futility closet

"A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above....When his voice ceased, the enormous stillness, without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud's senses like a powerful drug. He didn't know at times whether he were asleep or awake. Like a man lost in slumber, he heard nothing, he saw nothing. Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his eyes. The change from the agitation, the passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore, was so complete that it would have resembled death had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like the unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul having just returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been."

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, 1904.

Lincoln at Gettysburg. He is to the the left of the tall bearded man (his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon), in the center facing the camera, looking down, hatless.

T. Monk's Advice

Advice from Thelonious Monk, transcribed by Steve Lacy. From here. 

Venter: We're much more genetically determined in terms of our physiology. We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

Goetz: So on a cellular level, since the genes control the function of the cell, no matter what happens in that cell's environment, we're more the product of our genes than our environment.

Venter: Yes.

- from this interview with Craig Venter

In an attempt to unburden the unrelieved morbidity of recent posts, here is Ray Charles on Sesame Street sometime in the '70s proving that he could make literally anything sound like the best thing you've ever heard. "Aw man, that's terrible."

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part III

Paul Chambers died of tuberculosis January 4, 1969 at 33 years old.  His thoughtful, patient tone and his deep and beautiful timbre consistently surprises and delights the listener. One's surprise at the sheer amount of albums with his name on the cover is only surpassed by the realization that a majority of them are first-rate. Some of them, a surprising amount, are among the finest recordings in jazz; music that will persist, music that will endure. Here then is a small list of albums ineffably enriched by Chambers' presence:

"The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to piece without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude, caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners."

- Anton Chekhov, "Gusev", 1890.

Tolstoy with Chekhov. 

Taken May 17, 1943 at Camp David. From here. 

"Two people who are unable to move their limbs have been able to guide a robot arm to reach and grasp objects using only their brain activity, a paper in Nature reports today."

- From this paper in Nature.

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part II

Scott La Faro died in a car crash on July 6, 1961 when he was 25 years old. The handful of albums that he made with Bill Evans and Paul Motian in the year or so before his death comprise a body of work almost unparalleled in beauty and influence in jazz history. There seems to be no live footage of this trio extant.

- From the album "Waltz for Debby", recorded June 25, 1961 with Evans and Motian.

Le Faro is at left, sitting next to Evans and Motian, sometime around their immortal live recording "Sunday at the Village Vanguard".

 A wonderful pre-trio album of La Faro's from 1958, from when La Faro was 22:

Early Deaths of Jazz Musicians Part I

Clifford Brown was killed in a car crash on June 26, 1956 when he was 25 years old.

- From 1953, with Gigi Gryce, Charlie Rouse, Percy Heath, John Lewis and Art Blakey, "Brownie Eyes"

Brown seems to me to be simultaneously the most trenchant and the most lyrical jazz trumpeter, and I think his music is some of the most beautiful jazz ever recorded.

"Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers, who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1934.

La Paloma Azul

- The Modern Jazz Quartet with Paul Desmond, Christmas, 1971.

"His life followed a familiar pattern. There were in Russia scores of noblemen who gambled, got drunk and wenched in their youth, who married and had a flock of children, who settled down on their estates, looked after their property, rode horseback and hunted; and there were not a few who shared Tolstoy's liberal principles and, distressed at the ignorance of the peasants, their dreadful poverty and the squalor in which they lived, sought to ameliorate their lot. The only thing that distinguished him from all of them was that during this time he wrote two of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. How this came about is a mystery as inexplicable as that the son and heir of a stodgy Sussex squire should have written the Ode to the West Wind."

- W. Somerset Maugham, "War and Peace", 1948.

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

"All that science has done is given man a dozen new sets of eyes --- and that makes it a great deal worse. For instance, there's the germ (if it is a germ) that is always swimming just outside the edge of the brightly lighted field of the microscope, that eludes even the electronic microscope. There's the planet (if it is a planet and not some vast black sentient thing poised above the earth) that is seen out of the corner of the telescope's eye. There's the radar echo that doesn't  seem to be coming quite from the moon, but somewhere else. There are the atomic glows that aren't just what the nuclear physicist expected. There's the buried thought that the psychologist can never quite reach, not even when he employs the hypno-analytic technique which can dredge up memories of events that occurred when the patient was six months old. (And is the buried thought a human thought, or a demon's?)....

- Fritz Leiber, from Weird Tales, 1946.

Thanks Fritz. Likewise, there's this underwater frequency that scientists can't quite place.

To an Unborn Pauper Child

 I

Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,
And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,
Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here,
And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.
II
Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,
And laughters fail, and greetings die:
Hopes dwindle; yea,
Faiths waste away,
Affections and enthusiasms numb:
Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.
III
Had I the ear of wombèd souls
Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls,
And thou wert free
To cease, or be,
Then would I tell thee all I know,
And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?
IV
Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence
To theeward fly: to thy locked sense
Explain none can
Life’s pending plan:
Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make
Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.
V
Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot
Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not
One tear, one qualm,
Should break the calm.
But I am weak as thou and bare;
No man can change the common lot to rare.
VI
Must come and bide. And such are we—
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary—
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou wilt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!

-  Thomas Hardy

Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines
     And below

Not a breath of wild air;

Still as the mosses that glow

On the flooring and over the lines

Of the roots here and there.

The pine-tree drops its dead;

They are quiet, as under the sea.

Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

     And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

     Even we,

     Even so.

- George Meredith, 1870.