#lit window

Throwback Thursday, as it were, brings a reading from a fave one of RWK’s—

https://soundcloud.com/ryland-walker-knight/civilization-and-its-discontents

Hump day has this song sung from Eric Marsh—

Robbie Basho didn’t just hear music but he saw it, too: diagnosed with synesthesia, he literally saw music as colors, which is probably why he referred to his compositions as ‘guitar paintings’. His relentless curiosity and voracious appetite for global music and culture—American folk, Hindu ragas, Native American chants and dream-myths, to name a few—fueled his dramatic and personal rendering of America as a panoramic landscape of transcendental beauty.

Visions of the Country, his ode to the untrammeled American west, marks one of the peaks of a mountainous career. The foundation for this expansive and bombastic vision of texture and feeling is laid by his virtuosic acoustic steel string finger-picking (worthy of his one-time associate and primitive guitar god John Fahey) but is through his voice—which is to say his soul—in which he reaches out towards the astral plane. He bellows, whistles, chants, and speaks in tongues; an outpouring of emotion. Booming and ecstatic, he delivers paeans to mountains and rivers and deserts. Brooding and melancholic, he offers laments for orphans (he was one) and the wilderness. His songs are not, he once said, “far out, but another level of feeling,” and in this unique, deeply felt, and spiritual vision the feelings cascade. Ride the milky way, home!

A new Tuesday brings about a soft suplex as only he can, Uncas Blythe—

Ryszard Kapuscinski tells this story: “I was upcountry in Rhodesia (a country that no longer exists) and I ran across a group of teen — it was not so much yet the time of child soldiers — criminals who had some vague and loose allegiance to Nkomo. One of them was wearing a strange shirt with a sideways kanji that said OFFICE KITANO. I asked him about the shirt and they said that their Colonel, a dangerous fool who went by the name of Comrade Rogozhin, was showing them Kitano movies to instill hope and revolutionary discipline. ‘We love Kitano. He is funny. He has the deep killing sadness.’ the kid said without visible melancholy. I traded him some French cigarettes and a long loaded clip from a kalashnikov, and wore the shirt for years until this Montenegrin woman stole it.” So this isn’t a copy of that shirt but an homage to those long ago teenaged killers who loved Kitano. I find this tone of blue very soothing and I suspect you will too. It is also a great way to show off your vast and rising ethnoeccentricity. Tell everyone that the kanji means “the hegemony of poetry” or you can say instead it is the proportions of the human body according to Kitano Takeshi.

For sizing, coloring options—click here. 

Our first blurb comes from Daniel Coffeen—

David Cronenberg doing Burroughs which, at first, might seem impossible. But it’s actually quite the contrary as Burroughs’ writing is explicitly cinematic; Burroughs felt cinema was years ahead of literature in the ways it could fold time and create synchronicity. The film gives us Burroughs’ baroque burlesque as so much giddy visual candy — hilarious, grotesque, and delirious.

Here is Judy Davis as Joan Lee, Burroughs' wife whom he shot in a Willam Tell trick gone awry — in real life and in the film. He’s an exterminator who keeps running out of bug powder when he learns his wife is stealing it to inject it. “It’s a literary high,” she tells him. He then walks in as she’s shooting the bug powder. Unphased, she utters, “You weren’t supposed to see this."