music

From the binary stars a whisper

The singer James Joyce, author of a short story about a man who heard distant music, shelved this concert review in Leopold Bloom’s library.

“The Dead”; Ulysses 17.1373

Observing a bewhiskered black body in morning sun, Mr. Bloom remembered nights before and thought, “They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips.” The hungry black body moved toward him, was captured by his field, and became a satellite. Two desiring bodies making a little island group, his cat and he were seen by a storyteller to be orbiting each other in harmony.

Ulysses 4.15-42

Color shock: in the morgue, the drop of red

The article about the Rorschach inkblot test and its surprise late-sequence transition from black to color is online at http://captainmnemo.se/ro/hhrotex/rotexcolour.pdf. The undated, unattributed photograph of Wilhelm Furtwängler is in the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, https://vzg-easydb.gbv.de/object/30eaad07-8e97-4875-a003-f3a5dbddd5b1. I’ve reversed some of its color decay.

For coloring in your own emotions, you might try this tool. It was made in a factory under the auspices of Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude), the Third Reich’s recreational and community-building arm. Under what auspices, do you think, could one of these black-and-white faces be retooled into yours?

From deep inside soft warmth,

shy glance outward and daring intimate pressure on the instrument that opens her to memory. It serves her as a speculum.

George Eastman, whose Eastman Kodak atelier fashioned the speculum for the hands of mezzo-soprano Ina Bourskaya, was born in 1854. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. Because portraiture is an art of revealing the body, a new way of portraying will equip the eye with new, bodily ways of experiencing. Wielded a century ago under Eastman’s influence, this cable release was a newly seductive unbuttoner.

Eastman’s original advertising slogan was this. Consider it sung by Don Giovanni.

They that carried us away captive required of us a song

John Vachon, September 1940, “John Dyson, FSA (Farm Security Administration) borrower, playing the accordion. He was born into slavery over eighty years ago. Saint Mary’s County, Maryland.” Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017810802/. Contrast and detail restored.