LEE MORGAN ~

Here's Lee Morgan (1938-1972), already a veteran jazz trumpeter at age 21, joined on his eighth album with a stellar cast in this 1960 recording on the Vee-Jay label. Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly flowing on piano, Paul Chambers holding bass and the genius Art Blakey making drums. Morgan was shot to death by his common-law wife Helen More in 1972. The ambulance was reluctant to go into the neighborhood of New York's East Village where Morgan lay wounded and would bleed to death from one shot, in the jazz club called "Slug's Saloon."

Scott Heiser (1949-1993)

Fashion    Circus    Spectacle

photographs

edited by Heather Campbell Coyle

Delaware Art Museum, 2014

http://www.delart.org/exhibits/fashion-circus-spectacle-photographs-by-scott-heiser/

cover: two couples, new york (1985)

GO JOHNNY GO ~

Johnny Winter

(1944 ~ 2014)

40 ACRES AND A BEE ~

BURT SHAVITZ

Burt Shavitz, a founder of Burt’s Bees and the subject of the documentary “Burt’s Buzz,” enjoys a life of seclusion on his property in northern Maine. Credit Jody Shapiro 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/garden/burt-shavitz-the-worlds-most-famous-retired-beekeeper.html?src=dayp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region&region=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region&WT.nav=c-column-above-moth-fixed-region 

 

 

 

 

DAISY ZAMORA ~

Daisy Zamora (with Jack Hirschman)

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28227935

TSCHIFFELY'S RIDE ~

Aime Tschiffeley

Tschiffeley's Ride

Ten Thousand Miles in the Saddle

From Southern Cross to Pole Star

Skyhorse 2013

MOUNTAINS and RIVERS WITHOUT END ~

Counterpoint, 2013

Gary Snyder

with 3 CDS

over 3 hours of

the poet reading

THE PLACE OF SCRAPS ~

The Place of Scraps

Jordan Abel

Talonbooks, 2013

www.talonbooks.com

FROSTS / ROTH ~

Just finished one of the more interesting Frost documents: Robert and Elinor's correspondence with their children, but mainly Leslie, the prettiest one and the one that best survived. Then I started in on Dieter Roth's DIARIES. I doubt there is a bigger leap between books. Not intentional, it's just the way things came about and no doubt the way I am feeling in the extremes of summer between construction work, or planting flowers. Bee balm is a month ahead. Daylilies aren't as magnificent as last year (what and who is?), the deer have munched down the hosta plants from here to Hanover. They know a second growth comes with the plant and they'll be back to actually munch down the rebirth. Survival of the fittest. Robert Frost. Dieter Roth. 

 

Roth was a mischief-maker at making his own handmade books, as few as 10 per title and he made these like Fruitmarket Gallery has chosen to go to great lengths to make this heavenly volume: grey boards with gauze to strengthen the spine. Simple is best.

Family Letters 

of Robert

 and Elinor Frost

edited by Arnold Grade

State University of New York, 1972

~

Diaries

Dieter Roth

Fiona Bradley, Sarah Lowndes,

Jan Voss, Andrea Buttner, Bjorn Roth 

 Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2012 
Yale University

                                                                                                   

JOSE ANGEL VALENTE ~

Cover painting by Henri Michaux

please move the screen left to right



Jose Angel Valente
Landscape With Yellow Birds
Archipelago Books 2013

JOY WILLIAMS ~

Joy Williams

Speaks to The Paris Review (but a taste).

I read this in a bookshop cafe, actual copy, off the shelf, book in hand.

Highly recommend.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams

POSTCARD 46 ~

The most famous road sign

 

GREAT STORYTELLER ~

Jean Shepherd

at WOR

"Jean Parker Shepherd (July 26, 1921 – October 16, 1999) was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep.

With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is best known to modern audiences for the film A Christmas Story (1983), which he narrated and co-scripted, based on his own semi-autobiographical stories."

http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/4cc30a-memories-of-fenway-park

http://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Jean%20Shepherd%22

WESTWARD THOREAU ~

Gosh, what an ugly looking book. Your hand might not want to reach for it, but you should, the reading is a delight from both Henry David Thoreau's own time when he traveled by train in 1861 (one year before his untimely death) with young Horace Mann, Jr. (also an early fatality) from Massachusetts to Minnesota and back, to the 21st century author Corinne Hosfeld Smith's charmed and friendly prose. She's a librarian from Paxton, Massachusetts and I want to imagine an ideal one. She has much the same vigor, humor and hankering for detail that Thoreau had and she shares it throughout this sturdy portrait and study. This is the longest and least known of the Thoreau's excursions, which included up and in and around New England and the American Northeast, Canada (Quebec), Maine Woods and Cape Cod. As Thoreau scholar Laura Dassow Walls shares in her excellent introduction, "Walking became a form of thinking, which took shape as writing — he (Thoreau) once remarked that the length of his walks marked the length of his journal entries — and in his second essay, "A Walk to Wachusett," he wrote that "the landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled."

Go west, young man.

___________________

Westward I Go Free:

tracing Thoreau's last journey

Corinne Hosfeld Smith

Green Frigate Books, 2012

greenfrigatebooks.com 

 

ICEHOUSES ~

Another lovely slight of hand primer from a British press that showcases the humble and forgotten old architecture of thatch roof and stone structures with full elegance, at under 60 pages, and you walk away from the reading fully enriched.

Shire Books, UK, 2014

BIRTHDAY GIRL! ~

Back Road Chalkies 9 July 2014

Chalkie created 5:30 AM barely enough light for a photograph

WANTED MAN ~

Bob Dylan with his first wife Sara poking her head out the door — there are some terrific Dylan oddities packed in here, including this great cover photograph, which if I recall correctly was inspired by a Bobby Vee album jacket, or maybe the other way around? Plus an interview with Eric Clapton setting down the rule of law, followed by one with Ron Wood, a look at some of Dylan's cinema work, Johnny Cash also chimes in, as does Joe Boyd re Newport '65. The Girl From the North Country (Jaharana Romney) fills us in. D.A. Pennebaker, Paul Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Foye, Leonard Cohen, Roy Orbison, Daniel Lanois — it's quite a cast.

Wanted Man

In search of Bob Dylan

edited by John Bauldie

Citadel Underground,1991

MASAOKA SHIKI / DONALD KEENE ~

Spring breezes —

How'd I'd love to throw a ball

Over a grassy field.

After killing

The spider, what loneliness —

The cold of night.

Trampling through

Insect cries, I create

A path through the fields.

Columbia, 2013

Donald Keene

Masaoka Shiki (1867 ~ 1902)

haiku / tanka master

cover self portrait watercolor
translations by Burton Watson
 

baseball lover; prolonged spinal illness

the last 7 years of Shiki's life were confined to his sickbed

when he wrote the majority of his work

leaving behind at his death at 35

22 volumes of writing

each book is 500 pages long

Shiki is buried in the cemetery of Tairyu-ji

a temple in the Tabata Section of Tokyo

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/09/28/books/book-reviews/biography-of-masaoka-shiki-excels-in-the-expanded-details/#.U7C8qKge4pQ

HEY, YOU!

drawing © bob arnold

ANOTHER JULY ~

"another july"

music compiled by bob arnold

2014