Grant-Lee Phillips: Mona Lisa

Jammin' Java, Vienna VA, 11/8/14

Nightwoods

Yet more proof, as if you needed it, that the world would be a better place if every-damn-body didn't feel some need to reproduce. But God in his infinite wisdom had apparently thought it was an entertaining idea for us to always be wanting to get up in one another.

Also, the children were here, and what was Luce to do? You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution. And you take care of whatever needy things present themselves during your passage through it. Otherwise you're worthless.

Charles Frazier, Nightwoods (2011)

Take Your Eye Off The Ball

A fan should recognize that there are really four quadrants of a football field -- a team's goal line out to the 25-five yard line, from the 25-yard line to midfield, midfield to its opponent's 25-yard line, and from the 25-yard line to its opponent's goal line -- and coaches approach their play-calling differently depending on where they are on the field.

Pat Kirwan, Take Your Eye Off The Ball (2010)

Nighcrawler

D: Dan Gilroy. Jake Gylenhaal, Rene Russo (2014)

Kill The Messenger

D: Michael Cuesta. Jeremy Renner, Rosemary Dewitt (2014)

The Half Has Never Been Told

One word, "stole," came to be a history -- an interpretation of the past and how it shaped the present -- from Maryland to South Carolina to Texas and everywhere in between. Enslaved people recognized that the slavery they were experiencing was shaped by the ability of whites to move African Americans' bodies wherever they wanted. Forced migration created markets that allowed whites to extract profit from human beings. It brought about a kind of isolation that permitted enslavers to use torture to extract new kinds of labor. It led to disease, hunger, and other kinds of deadly privations. So as these vernacular historians tried to make a sense of their own battered lives, the word "stole" became the core of a story that explained. It revealed what feet had to undergo, and the way the violence of separation ripped hearts open and turned hands against body and soul, these were all ultimately produced by the way enslavers were able to use property claims in order to deploy people as commodities at the entrepreneurial edge of the modern world economy.

In this critique, slaveholders were not innocent heirs of history, which is what Jefferson had made them out to be. Instead, slavery's expansion was consciously chosen, a crime with intent. Years after slavery ended, former slave Charles Grandy reflected reflected on the motives of the enslavers who had shipped him from from Virginia to New Orleans for sale. After a lifetime, he had made it back to Norfolk. Now he asked his interviewer if the young man knew the significance of the statue of the Confederate soldier that loomed on a high pillar down by the harbor. Grandy himself had once passed the statue's eventual site in the hold of a slave ship. "Know what it mean?" But the question mark was rhetorical, he already had an answer ready: it meant, he told the interviewer, "Carry the nigger down south if you want to rule him."

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism (2014)

Zone One

The city could be restored. When they were finished it could be something of what it had been. They would force a resemblance upon it, these new citizens come to fire up the metropolis. Their new lights pricking the blackness here and there in increments until it was the old skyline again, indigenous and defiant. The new lights seeping through the black veil like beads of blood pushing through gauze until it was suffused.

Yes, he'd always wanted to live in New York.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011)

Rod Picott: Getting To Me

Ashland Coffee & Tea, Ashland VA, 9/10/14:

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

A false dilemma is an argument that presents a limited set of two possible categories and assumes that everything in the scope of the discussion must be an element of that set. Thus, by rejecting one category, you are forced to accept the other. For example, "In the war on fanaticism, there are no sidelines; you are either with us or with the fanatics." In reality, there is a third option, one could very well be neutral; and a fourth option, one may be against both; and even a fifth option, one may empathize with elements of both.

Ali Almossawi, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: Learn the Lost Art of Making Sense (2013)

Deep Song

Deep song sings like a nightingale without eyes. It sings blind, for both its words of passion and its ancient tunes are best set in the night, the blue night of our countryside. It knows neither morning nor evening, mountains nor plains. It has only the night, a wide night steeped in stars. It is song without landscape, withdrawn into itself and terrible in the dark. Deep song shoots its arrows of gold right into our heart. In the dark it is a terrifying blue archer whose quiver is never empty.

Federico Garcia Lorca, Deep Song (1929)