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.
Read More…
He published his last story in the New Yorker the year before I was born.
Then he went dark. He’s been gone for forty-four years.
Read More…
After reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Bruce Springsteen sat down, wrote, and recorded “Nebraska,” perhaps his best social and political work. Zinn once said he decided to write A People’s History after listening to Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre. Guthrie goosed Bob Dylan towards political consciousness who in turn moved Springsteen to consider writing stories “from below” — stories against the grain of the “great men” theory of history.
It’s a nice group, a kind of four horsemen of social justice in a way, who has lost another one it’s members.
I learned of Zinn’s death late last night while checking the news between connecting flights from Denver to Billings. I sat in the plane’s darkness looking out the window at the lights below — cities and towns — but from this height, not people in cars driving kids but abstract patterns, lights, moving slowly below or not at all.
For me, this distance-created abstraction is a Zinn moment. It recalls his commentary on modern warfare, which he oft repeated and goes this way in one of his talks:
Read More…
