![\"Ferdinand](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jazzmasters.nl\/gif\/povel_ferdinand_et.jpg?w=584\")
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I need to get caught up here.<\/p>\n
Reading: Just before sleep last night, I read and fell in love with David Denby’s piece in the latest New Yorker<\/em> on James Agee.<\/a> Two immediate thoughts here. One is that I would love to write like James Agee (I hear my toy-piano version of his Steinway in my head as I write), and I must get the new Library of America collection of his writing<\/a> right away. The other is that Denby writes the essay like a man possessed, and I wish he wrote more like that in his movie reviewing. The reviews often strike me as tepid, superficial, and overly moralizing, but this essay on Agee, like Denby’s writing about Columbia U. in his piece on Edward Tayler many years ago, is something else altogether.<\/p>\n Viewing: Last night I finished Richard Linklater’s Waking Life<\/em><\/a>. My Donne students, and my colleague Eric, had been after me for weeks to watch this movie. I certainly understand why. I had trouble falling asleep because it thronged my head with thoughts. I was hoping for a lucid dream last night as the perfect complement to the movie, but it didn’t happen. Come to think of it, I haven’t had a lucid dream for years, though they were quite common when I was a kid.<\/p>\n Listening:
\nDream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke<\/em>. No one does a music biography as well as Peter Guralnick<\/a>, and this is a wonderful follow-up to the acclaimed two-volume Elvis biography. So far Sam’s still with the Soul Stirrers, but he’s watching Little Richard<\/a> burn up the charts with “Tutti Frutti” and wondering if he should put different words to his own gospel songs as well. Fascinating and compulsively readable.<\/p>\n
\nMorten Lauridsen<\/a>‘s setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” leaves me breathless, rapt.
\nI treated myself to “Astronomy Domine<\/a>” and “Comfortably Numb” before bedtime. It occurs to me I’ve probably undervalued The Wall<\/em> and should finally break down and buy a copy. At the time of its release, it was very hard to hear beyond the notoriety and celebrity. Now that “Jessie’s Girl” and Hi Infidelity<\/em> aren’t echoing in my head, I can hear the Floyd’s work<\/a> more clearly.
\nI wish I could find something else with Ferdinand Povel besides MF Horn 4 & 5: Maynard Ferguson Live at Jimmy’s<\/em>. FP’s work on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” (one of my very favorite jazz standards) is spine-tingling. I see from this page<\/a> where he went from there, but tracking it down will be another order, and a tall one. Maybe it’s time to learn Dutch. Thankfully, the fan page very generously shares a lovely “These Foolish Things” mp3<\/a> with us.<\/p>\n