-
sponsorship
Stirred by Mr. Agger's call for scoops on cultural sorbet—records that tune up dulled ears, movies that refresh tired eyes, and so on—I spelunked into the den and grabbed the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein-ese blasts the mind clean of caked-on verbal gunk. "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense," she once said. To cope, she cultivated her own sense of sense, in a sense. The book falls open to her portrait of Picasso: "This one was one who was working and certainly this one was needing to be working so as to be one being working. This one was one having something coming out of him." There is structure, and there is cadence, and that is that.
Discovering practical applications for her radical grammar, Stein babbles as clear as a brook. In the last section of the memoir Wars I Have Seen, titled "The Coming of the Americans," she thrills at meeting the first Americans to arrive in Culoz, her adopted home, after the liberation of France. On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of D-Day, check the breeze of its final paragraph. It would be almost unpatriotic not to dig it.
How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado and then everybody was tired out and they gave us nice American specialties and my were we happy, we were, completely and truly happy and completely and entirely worn out with emotion. The next morning while they breakfasted we talked some more and we patted each other and then kissed each other and then they went away. Just as we were sitting down to lunch, in came four more Americans this time war correspondents, our emotions were not yet exhausted nor our capacity to talk, how we talked and talked and where they were born was music to the ears Baltimore and Washington D.C. and Detroit and Chicago, it is all music to the ears so long long long away from the names of the places where they were born. Well they have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America next Sunday and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember.
-
sponsorship
My brother once lived down the hall from two guys who were music guys. They had a wall of compact discs, neatly arranged. One February, for no apparent reason, they put all of the CDs in the closet—except for 13 or so Tom Waits albums, lined up on the mantle. After a few weeks of listening exclusively to Waits, they resumed their omnivorous listening habits. Waits acted as a palate cleanser, allowing them to care about new sounds once more. When I'm tired of movies, or music, or television, or books, I follow their strategy and rely on certain touchstones to get me interested again: Blue, Solo Faces, Dazed and Confused. Am I alone in this? Send me your cultural palate cleansers at michaelagger1 at gmail dot com.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?