Today is the shortest day of the year. Daylight Savings Time in the US means that the clocks are set ahead an hour in the spring. This means today is only 23 hours long while sunrise and sunset will happen about an hour later than it did yesterday. People have different ideas as to what that means and why we do it. The history of it points to federal laws borne from Department of Commerce notions from fifty years ago about daylight for farmers, getting products to market in daylight, cutting down on traffic accidents. Saving insurance money. Most folks just seem to see it as a hassle and a day or two of jostled sleep patterns, the kids will need an explanation, the pets start bugging us for food earlier than what the clocks tell us.
Of course as the earth's tilt in the northern hemisphere brings longer daylight hours, the course around the sun makes sunrise happen about a minute earlier and the sunset about a minute later every day without this clock adjustment. Until late June. Sunset does come an hour later today and in a month's time this slow accretion of minutes does add up.
But here today there is an absence of sun. It rains for the third day in a row. The daffodils have shot their spears up in alliance with their annual rhythms and today I've seen their very first yellow trumpet bell plop out. The rain makes it hang its head in dripping assent. That one will get plucked and brought in and lain out on a dry sheet of cardboard in the front room. When it dries out it will get set in a teacup on a book shelf just above eye level. A reminder. Last year's soldier will get taken out and placed with the others on a ledge in a closet where the others lie in quiet rows. Paper-thin fragile, crimpled brown testament to passing time on another scale.
An intermittent drip outside the window here counts an irregular beat. The coffeemaker's heater still clicks tho it's given off today's last heaving huff of steam. The thermostat clicks on to the right, and the drop furnace to my left with a whoosh comes alive. The low roar builds softly, the metal of the furnace creaks expanding in the heat generated. The thermostat clicks again, the furnace fire goes out. Again I hear the refrigerator has kicked on circulating it's fluid with the whirring of its motor hidden in, but making obvious, the layered blankets of white noise found everywhere these days.
The rain outside comes harder again. The drip outside the window more insistent. I hear a train horn in the distance. It's good I don't have any reason to go out. Groceries gotten yesterday, rent and bills got paid the week before. The trickle of news I see seems dumb, numb like a shuddering worn out train slowing before a weather-beaten station. The AP and Washington-Post act as though they're hand-wringing over the President's forty minute commute every other weekend to go to church and see his grandkids. If that's what they think is news they should listen to the rain dripping outside my window.
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Last year I got subscriptions on a whim to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. They give a good excuse for some performative discipline. If I read an article or two a day I can keep up with the relentless supply of topics fed out of the NY Review. Even though I have to stick with it this process I've allotted to myself feels easy since the topics range so far and wide feeding my parallel curiosities. More on that later.
Late last month they had a Zoom'd symposium with a number of their contributors talking about the crisis in journalism. Compiled and edited, the youtube clip of that runs just under eighty minutes. They talk about our cloistered indoor activity necessitated by the pandemic over the last year. Conversation grew around how social justice has been hampered, then exploded, then exploited over the last year and how the institutions of the media has come under simultaneous attacks, an ongoing mass delegitimization over the last several years. Also acknowledged is the hive-mind of internet-delivered social media where people tend to listen only to those like themselves, which in turn, tends to have a polarizing effect on our day to day thoughts.
But the internet also exposes us to those outside our humid silos and people react to those 'other voices' generally out of ignorance. "Because they just didn't know about that." More people feel they are being forced to reckon with all of the old wounds and old disparities and injustices as each confrontation with supposed 'new information' flares up. There's plenty of hurt to go around. It will be a real series of hard tests to make sure these don't all metastasize, or get met with harsher, overcompensating forms of stricter authority. There are people in Congress and the Senate and all over the country who feel they don't need to learn anything new, and that the answers that only they can supply is just what 'those people' need.
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On the other hand I've been reading back issues of The Paris Review. Started in 1953 by Americans wanting to present new literature to a country that hungered for it, they've managed, despite the odds, to keeping itself afloat for over 67 years delivering poetry, short stories and interviews with writers and readers from all over the world. Adjusting to its format took a little slowing simmer. Perusing the 67 year digital archive whose access comes with the subscription, it quickly became apparent that the best writers and thinkers in print of the twentieth century were represented. And also there were so many that I had never heard of! Issue number 236 just arrived the other day but I won't get to that for months probably. Instead I try to read a back issue every week. Older issues are shorter, but recent ones run over 200 pages each so that keeps me busy reading every one cover to cover. So much variety!
Last week I read inspiring 1993 interviews with Toni Morrison and Don De Lillo. That one also had a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a 'lost' Ezra Pound Canto when he was running with the fascists in Italy. This week the spring 1977 issue I see sports a long interview with Kurt Vonnegut, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Soto & Frank O'Hara, and, a short story from William S. Burroughs telling when he spent a summer in The Valley of the Rio Grande in 1949.
Next week in the queue, issue 7 from fall-winter 1954-5 has a bunch of work from writers I've never heard of but has a number of drawings from Pablo Picasso. Two weeks ago, in issue 5, there were a number of line drawings called Livres d'Or. Collected by Parisian restaurants and clubs and kept in closets for decades they show, leaf after leaf, momentary sketches from (now very famous) artists who sat for a moment in the darkened booths and, handed a pen and paper, delightful flourishes of another age's brilliance. Never having known these existed they appear before my eye like new flowers. One that really jumped out at me was by Leonor Fini who I had never heard of. This blog talks a bit about her.
edit: Oh yeah! today is Π (Pi) day: 3.14... round and round it goes. And I guess the Grammy Awards are tonight which is an especially weird thing this year since so much just didn't happen last year.
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