...on readings, writings, rants, and random reflections
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Riffs: Totally Jazzed
Check out this New Yorker Magazine article about a jazz aficionado whose unique powers of memory place him somewhere on the boundary between obsession and genius: a musical ascetic; a saintly, flesh-and-blood, encyclopedia of jazz.
I am an introverted blue collar pilgrim, surviving near the center of the continent, on the fringes of a shopworn civilization. I abide in rooms full of partially-read tomes, each bookmarked with the fragment of a shattered illusion.
Everything which is inspired, heroic or saintly is derived from contemplation.
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One--the smallest of numbers... That is the infinite. A number which increases thinks that it is getting nearer to infinity. It is getting further away from it. You have to stoop to rise.