But it's coming

1) From “Pirate Jenny,” sung by Nina Simone (1964)



You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin the floors while youre gawking
Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell
In this crummy southern town
In this crummy old hotel
But you'll never guess to who youre talkin.
No. you couldn't ever guess to who youre talkin.

Then one night there's a scream in the night
And you'll wonder who could that have been
And you see me kinda grinnin while I'm scrubbin
And you say, "What's she got to grin?"
I'll tell you.

There's a ship
The black freighter
With a skull on its masthead
Will be coming in


2) From “Keep the Car Running,” by The Arcade Fire (2007)



There's a weight that's pressing down
Late at night you can hear the sound
Even the noise you make when you sleep
Can't swim across a river so deep
They know my name cause I told it to them
But they don't know where
and they don't know when
It's coming, when it's coming

There's a fear I keep so deep
Knew its name since before I could speak
They know my name cause I told it to them
But they don't know where and they don't know
When its coming, oh when but its coming

Keep the car running

In and of itself

1.a) Fade out to “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun,” by Al Green (1973)



Love is the morning sun
shining so brightly
it’s me that’s missing your love

I’m tired of being alone
I’m still in love with you
Let’s stay together

1.b) First six tracks of “Al Green’s Greatest Hits,” by Al Green (1975)

1. "Tired of Being Alone"
2. "Call Me (Come Back Home)"
3. "I'm Still in Love With You"
4. "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)"
5. "Love and Happiness"
6. "Let's Stay Together"


2.a) Third verse of “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” by Spoon (2005)



Where did you get for so long
I been learning my scene
I been watching my friends move away
I summon my love back to me
And I went down by the seawall
That's when I knew, knew they never got you

2.b) Side B tracklisting of “Gimme Fiction,” by Spoon (2005)

7. "I Summon You"
8. "The Infinite Pet"
9. "Was It You?"
10. “They Never Got You"
11. "Merchants of Soul"

On dark invisible wings

1) From “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood (2000)

“Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the colour of wet slate they fly toward each other on dark invisible wings, searching, searching, doubling back, drawn by hope and longing, baffled by fear. In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it’s more like a collision, and that is the end of the flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutes, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy groundfire comes up to meet them.”


2) “Define dancing” from “WALL-E” (2008)

As if you had made your life

1) Final lines of “The Exile’s Return,” by Robert Lowell (1946)

…You will not see
Strutting children or meet
The peg-leg and reproachful chancellor
With a forget-me-not in his button-hole
When the unseasoned liberators roll
Into the Market Square, ground arms before
The Rathaus; but already lily-stands
Burgeon the risen Rhineland, and a rough
Cathedral lifts its eye. Pleasant enough,
Voi ch’entrate, and your life is in your hands.


2) Final paragraph of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” by John Updike (January 3, 1959)


“When we came into the tunnel country, the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the 10 a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility — you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element — and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a wide spreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state - as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.”

The space to say whatever I like

1) From “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood (2000)

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”


2) From “Change Clothes” by Jay-Z (2003)



I ain’t a New Jack
nobody gon Wesley Snipe me
It’s less than likely,
move back
Let I breathe
Jedi knight
The more space I get the better I write
Oh, never I write,
but, if,
ever I write
I need the space to say whatever I like.
Now just change clothes, then go.

Hit the soft spot in my heart

1) From “The Book I Read,” by Talking Heads (1977)



I’m embarrassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart
When I found out you wrote the
book I read so

Take my shoulders as they touch your arms I’ve
Got little cold chills but I feel alright the
book I read was in your eyes oh oh


2) From “Fiction,” by Alice Munro (2009)

“Your name?”
“Just Joyce will be fine.”
Her time is passing so quickly.
“You were born in Rough River?”
“No,” says Christie O’Dell with some slight displeasure, or at least some diminishing of cheer. “I did live there for a time. Shall I put the date?”
Joyce retrieves her box. At Le Bon Chocolatier they did sell chocolate flowers, but not lilies. Only roses and tulips. So she had bought tulips, which were not actually unlike lilies. Both bulbs.
“I want to thank you for ‘Kindertotenlieder,’” she says so hastily that she almost swallows the long word. “It means a great deal to me. I brought you a present.”
“Is that a wonderful story.” The saleswoman takes the box. “I’ll just hang on to this.”
“It isn’t a bomb,” says Joyce with a laugh. “It’s chocolate lilies. Actually tulips. They didn’t have lilies so I got tulips, I thought they were the next best thing.”
She notices that the saleswoman is not smiling now but taking a hard look at her. Christie O’Dell says, “Thank you.”
There is not a scrap of recognition in the girl’s face. She doesn’t know Joyce from years ago in Rough River or two weeks ago at the party. You couldn’t even be sure that she had recognized the title of her own story. You would think she had nothing to do with it. As if it was just something she wriggled out of and left on the grass.
Christie O’Dell sits there and writes her name as if that is all the writing she could be responsible for in this world.
“It’s been a pleasure to chat with you,” says the saleswoman, still looking at the box which the girl at Le Bon Chocolatier has fixed with curly yellow ribbon.
Christie O’Dell has raised her eyes to greet the next person in line, and Joyce at last has the sense to move on, before she becomes an object of general amusement and her box, God knows, possibly an object of interest to the police.

Walking up Lonsdale Avenue, walking uphill, she feels flattened, but gradually regains her composure. This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell someday. She wouldn’t be surprised.

Deliberate Deceit

1) From “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan (1997)

“I spent the afternoon in the reading room of the London Library, looking up some of Darwin’s more obscure contemporaries. I wanted to write about the death of anecdote and narrative in science, my idea being that Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles. Here was a letter to Nature dated 1904, a contribution to a long-running correspondence about consciousness in animals, in particular whether higher mammals like dogs could be said to have awareness of the consequences of their actions. The writer, one Mr. –––––, has a close friend whose dog favored a particular comfortable chair near the library fire. Mr. ––––– witnessed an occasion after dinner when he and his friend had retired there for a glass of port. The dog was shooed from its chair and the master sat down in its place. After a minute or two sitting in contemplative silence by the fire, the dog went to the door and whined to be let out. Its master obligingly rose and crossed the room, whereupon the pooch darted back and took possession once more of the favored place. For a few seconds it wore about its muzzle a look of undisguised triumph.

“The writer concluded that he dog must have had a plan, a sense of the future, which it attempted to shape by the practice of a deliberate deceit. And its pleasure in success must have been mediated by an act of memory. What I liked here was how the power and attractions of narrative had clouded judgment. By any standards of scientific inquiry, the story, however charming, was nonsense. No theory evinced, no terms defined, a meaningless sample of one, a laughable anthropomorphism. It was easy to construe the account in a way that would make it compatible with an automaton, or a creature doomed to inhabit a perpetual present: ousted from its chair, it takes the next best place, where it basks (rather than schemes) until it becomes aware of a need to urinate, then goes to the door as it has been trained to do, suddenly notices that the prized position is vacant again, forgets for the moment the signal from its bladder, and returns to take possession, the look of triumph being nothing more than the immediate expression of pleasure, or a projection in the mind of the observer.”


2) Fu Manchu, from Radio Lab (01-25-2010)

“In our last episode of Radiolab, Animal Minds, we asked whether it was possible for one animal to know what is going on in another animal’s mind. For us, it was a really about whether we, as humans, can really share a meaningful moment with an animal. In this podcast, we take that question a step further. Can an animal know what’s in our heads so well that they can manipulate and deceive us? To answer that question, reporter Ben Calhoun took us back to the 1960s to tell the story of a showdown between zookeeper Jerry Stones and a wily orangutan named Fu Manchu. Then, to help us get a grip on the science behind animals and deception, Ben talks to primatologist and orangutan expert Rob Shumaker of the Great Ape Trust.”

Times that we met/ Before we met

1) From “Where or When” by Rodgers and Hart (1937)



It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other the same way then
But I can't remember where or when

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again

And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when?


2) From “The Mystery Zone” by Spoon (2010)



Picture yourself
Set up for good in a whole other life
In the mystery zone

Make us a house
Some far away town
Where nobody will know us well
Where your dad's not around
And all the trouble you look for all your life
You will find it for sure
In the mystery zone

Times that we met
Before we met
Times that we met
We'll go there
To the mystery zone
Ah the mystery zone

Shirt cardboards

1) From "Franny and Zooey," by J.D. Salinger, (1961)

"With his face in his hands and his handkerchief headgear drooping low over his brow, Zooey sat at Seymour's old desk, inert, but not asleep, for a good twenty minutes. Then, almost in one movement, he removed the support for his face, picked up his cigar, stowed it in his mouth, opened the left-hand bottom drawer of the desk, and took out, using both hands, a seven- or eight-inch-stack of what appeared to be — and were — shirt cardboards. He placed the stack before him on the desk and began to turn the cards over, two or three at a time. His hand stayed only once, really, and then quite briefly.

"The cardboard that he stopped at had been written on in February, 1938. The handwriting, in blue-lead pencil, was his brother Seymour's:

"My twenty-first birthday. Presents, presents, presents. Zooey and the baby, as usual, shopped lower Broadway. They gave me a fine supply of itching powder and a box of three stink bombs. I'm to drop the bombs in the elevator at Columbia or 'someplace very crowded' whenever I get a good chance.

"Several acts of vaudeville tonight for my entertainment. Les and Bessie did a lovely soft-shoe on sand swiped by Boo-Boo from the urn in the lobby. When they were finished, B. and Boo-Boo did a pretty funny imitation of them. Les nearly in tears. The baby sang 'Abdul Abulbul Amir.' Z. did the Will Mahoney exit Les taught him, ran smack into the bookcase and was furious. The twins did B.'s and my old Buck & Bubbles imitation. But to perfection. Marvellous. In the middle of it, the doorman called up on the housephone and asked if anybody was dancing up there. A Mr. Seligman on the fourth—

"There Zooey quit reading. He gave the stack of cardboards a solid-sounding double tap on the desk surface, as one taps a deck of cards, then dropped the stack back into the bottom drawer and closed the drawer."


2) From "The Puttermesser Papers," by Cynthia Ozick, (1997)

"Puttermesser went on studying. In law school they called her a grind, a competitive-compulsive, an egomaniac out for aggrandizement. But ego was no part of it; she was looking solve something, she did not know what. At the back of the linen closet she found a stack of her father's old shirt cardboards (her mother was provident, stingy: in kitchen drawers Puttermesser still discovered folded squares of used ancient waxed paper, million-creased into whiteness, cheese-smelling, nesting small unidentifiable wormlets); so behind the riser pipe in the bathroom Puttermesser kept weeks' worth of Sunday Times crossword puzzles stapled to these laundry boards and worked them indiscriminately. She played chess against herself, and was always victor over the color she had decided to identify with. She organized tort cases on index cards. It was not that she intended to remember everything: situation—it was her tendency to call intellectual problems 'situation' —slipped into her mind like butter into a bottle."

There is, nevertheless, a place where you can find it.

1) From “The Way of Man,” by Martin Buber (1950)

“Rabbi Bunam used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel of Cracow. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king’s palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eizik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening. Finally the captain of the guards, which had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Eizik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: ‘And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew— Eizik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Eizik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Eizik and the other half Yekel!’ And he laughed again. Rabbi Eizik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called ‘Reb Eizik Reb Yekel’s Shul.’

“’Take this story to heart,’ Rabbi Bunam used to add, ‘and make what it says your own: There is something you cannot hind anywhere in the world, not even at the zaddik’s, and there is, nevertheless, a place where you can find it.’”


2) From “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” by Flannery O’Connor, published in “Mystery and Manners” (1969)

“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting first hand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

A Day In/Is The Life

1. From "Saturday," by Ian McEwan, (2005)

"He closes his eyes. This time there'll be no trouble falling towards oblivion, there's nothing can stop him now. Sleep's no longer a concept, it's a material thing, an ancient means of transport, a softly moving belt, conveying him into Sunday. He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day's over."

2. From "A Day in the Life," by The Beatles (1967)

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
And somebody spoke, and I went into a dream
...
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Craftsmanship

1) The Lacemaker, by Johannes Vermeer, c.1669-1671



2) Louis Vuitton advertisement, c. November 2009

A nervous wild thing

1: From “Dictation,” by Cynthia Ozick, 2008

“From the alley below her bedroom window — the flittering panes that sheathed her in a dusky mist of almost-light — Lilian heard a sharp clatter: a metal trash barrel overturned. The fox again, scavenging. A sly fox out of a fable, a fox that belonged in a wood—but there are sightings of foxes in the outlying streets of London, and once, coming home in the winter night from her mother’s, she had glimpsed a brown streak under the lamppost; and then it was gone. And another time, in the early morning — the woman and the animal, both of them solitary, two stragglers separated from the pack, transfixed, staring, panicked into immobility. The fox’s eyes were oddly lit, as if glittering pennies had got into its sockets; its ears stood straight up; its white tail hung low, like a shamed flag; its flanks trembled. A nervous wild thing. It twitched the upper muscle of its long snout—she saw the zigzag glint of teeth, the dangerous grin of ambush. How beautiful it was!"


2: Wes Anderson on Fresh Air, Nov. 23, 2009



“Meryl Streep, she told me that she had a moment just before we started recording this where she saw a fox on her doorstep in England, and the fox looked up and saw her, and they just stared at each other for five minutes. And she sort of had this sort of mesmerizing moment with this animal, and she said she sort of thought about that.”

No horror, no misery, and no childhood

1. "Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.


2. from "The Old Country," by Ethan Coen

"I never met Michael Simkin's parents, though I have a vivid false memory of his father standing on the open lot upon which their house is to be built. His hands are on his hips and a pith helmet shades his eyes; he is directing the operations of a backhoe as it digs a trench for the ball return. Though I remember it now, years later, it is something I could have imagined only then. In the beginning there was fear, a deep shadow that goes with the gaudy colors of early youth. It shades Michael's father's face as he stands unmoved while around him heavy machinery roars and the earth trembles; it makes a monster of Slim the Talmud Torah goy; it dwells in the narrow creaking staircase of our own little home. Some forget that darkness, and the silence, and the chaos inside. But despite what Scripture says, it will never be banished, for without it there would be no horror, no misery, and no childhood.”


3. Trailer, "Where the Wild Things Are"

The good old days

1) From "Learning to Fly," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1991)

Well the good ol' days, may not return
And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn

2) From "Ultimate," by Gogol Bordello (2007)

There was never any good old days
They are today, they are tomorrow
It's a stupid thing we say
Cursing tomorrow with sorrow

3) Ecclesiastes 7:10

Say not thou: 'How was it that the former days were better than these?'
for it is not out of wisdom that thou inquirest concerning this.

The process never ends

1) A Dream, by Jorge Luis Borges, from July 6, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

“In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.”

2) The (Multi)verse(s), from Radiolab, August 12, 2008

In this episode of the program, Brian Greene says that if the Universe is infinite and if the particles that form the Universe are finite, then our world and everything we know about it must repeat endlessly and in endless variety. Just like a finite wardrobe can only me mixed- and matched a finite number of times before it must repeat.

He goes on to hypothesize about multiple universes contained within a single system. He compares it to Swiss cheese: the universes are the holes and the system is the cheese. In this model, everything is expanding — both the universes and the substance between the universes. But the system — the “cheese” — is expanding faster than the speed of light, meaning: faster than anything can travel. Therefore, no matter how fast something moves through the “cheese,” it can’t cross the distance from one universe to the next.

In this model, each universe is contained and finite, while the system as a whole is pervasive and infinite. Because our universe is finite, we would theoretically be able to know everything there is to know about it. But we would never be able to know whether the other universes we assume are out there are really out there.

Depends

1) “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams, (1962)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


2) from “Hand in Glove,” by The Smiths, (1983)

Hand in glove
We can go wherever we please
And everything depends upon
How near you stand to me

Look see the sights

1) from “Souls on Fire,” (1972) Elie Wiesel quoting the Baal Shem Tov

“The man who looks only at himself cannot but sink into despair, yet as soon as he opens his eyes to the creation around him, he will know joy.”


2) “From the Morning,” by Nick Drake, from “Pink Moon” (1972)



A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around.

So look see the days
The endless coloured ways
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.

And now we rise
And we are everywhere
And now we rise from the ground
And see she flies
And she is everywhere
See she flies all around

So look see the sights
The endless summer nights
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.

As above, so below

1) “Powers of Ten,” Charles and Ray Eames, 1977




2) Log Lady Intro, “Coma” Episode 9, Twin Peaks, 1990

"As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside.

"Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does.

"Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe? What really *is* creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else?"

The Creator's Pride

1) From "The Laboratory," by Wislawa Szymborska

Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

2) From "The Tyger," by William Blake

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?