Lower Manhattan, New York City
7a.m. I rest in front of George Washington’s statue at Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street. I sit with my camera bag waiting for the light to move so I can get a good exterior shot of the Stock Exchange across the street. I am on assignment this morning recording a segment on the Exchange’s trading floor.
Washington’s statue tells me that he took the Nation’s first Presidential oath of office here on the balcony, the last day of April, 1789. The Stock Exchange across the street was formally started in May a few years later.
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Tattoo Ode to Keats (image from Flickr)
click to enlarge
THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time
-John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Slow Time
I mentioned (here) that Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn figures heavily in my pantheon of influential works. The famous spondee “slow Time” remains one reason. As I said before, the line made Grace smile and giggle as a baby, which is partly what made me repeat over and over again her her, suturing it into my brain. It has a music to it. The line just skips up and down—thou foster child—then quiets with “silence” and brakes into “slow time.”
It is a moment in the poem before the ravishing of the following lines where Keats whispers a kind of invocation. A supplication to beauty, which for Keats is an apostrophe to truth.
Brain Stem
Audiologists know that spondees function differently on the brain and on hearing, that they hold special “spectral characteristics.” Because of the way the stress falls on a spondee, we tend to speak such words and phrases at the same volume and often at a similar frequency.
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My friend Tim, on his blog, burns the “Ten Most Influential Books” internet meme flame and asks what are yours? As he notes, “influential” is a slippery word shooting over every which way. His post got me thinking (as he inteneded), but rather than clog up his blog comments as I usually do, I dashed off a list here.
And man do I feel like a snob, a poser, someone Salinger would bludgeon with a tire iron if he could. But there you have it. And the more I think about the list, the more I go “oh, wait, no that’s not right.” but then I felt like the first instinct should serve.
In order to lessen the self-disgust I feel at my own pretension, I’ve included commentary (because pontificating on classics is so much less pretentious….)
The list in no particular order (and I’ll amend the meme to include 10 texts—some shorter than a “book”) with prodigious links:
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Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? This is a good question, and one that many people, particularly literary-minded people, ask themselves. The answer is: maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way. If we think it’s our duty to read this book, it’s because we’re interested in genius. We’re interested in epic writerly ambition. We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine and, in Wallace’s case, chewing tobacco.
-Dave Eggers, foreword to the paperback edition of Infinite Jest
Like David Foster Wallace, I grew up in Illinois, struggled with depression, and had a fierce addiction to chewing tobacco. The similarities end there.
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