Hair's Breadth Beneath Outrage

 

Driving in this morning I thought we’d done enough of The Jam for a while and threw on The Clash for my part of the drive over to school wiht the little one.  I point out, likely not for the first time, that it changed my lift the time I saw them and bought this album in 1979.  It’s impossible to know what “Clash City Rockers” sounds like to her.  Assuredly,  it sounds like aggressive noise to her, but perhaps less threatening, and more of a spent noise than it sounded out as loud as my little white speakers would play it out there in Pleasantville New York.

I had to look up Amy Goodman, later in the day.  “Democracy Now” is a program that must have been on the radio for decades now.  Didn’t we listen to this in 1992, from my tenement on Pitt St? It must have been WBAI and Pacifica, at that time. Her voice seems permanently set just a hair’s breadth beneath outrage.  Somehow, I imagined her as older, but she’s only got ten years on me.  After dropping my daughter off, she exited with The Clash on her phone and I toggled  a default; WFMU but when the Clay Pidge wasn’t playing anything to keep my attention on Wake n' Bake I fiddled the dial to WVKR where Ms. Goodman was interviewing writers from Gaza.  I kept it there for the whole ride home.

 

I had written a group of friends after finishing Michael Cooperson’s translation of “Imposutres” by Al Hariri.  Dazzled by the fifty medieval Arabic rogues tales translated into fifty distinct English dialects and literary styles I sent the word out to a likely cabal of chums that it was a fabulous read that had me gut-laughing on the toilet I was surprised to have one friend one friend write back and suggest he was familiar with the Al Hirari from having read about it in the Lapham’s Quarterly.  “Oh yes.  I see.  Right.”   What is the Lapham’s Quarterly?  It isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this publication. 

I went online, had a quick look: “A Magazine of History and Ideas.”  I noodled around a bit and started a subscription and forgot about it.  I noticed my first copy in the mail the other day.  A plain white cover with an old spinning wheel on the front entitled:  "Technology."  Today I began to make my way through in earnest.  Each article is only four or five pages long.  There are numerous, if unrelated quotes positioned throughout alongside photos, serving to provoke, to transport. And soon we’re moving from an essay on rainy London streets to Huck Finn on the Mississippi and Virginia Wool and her proper place settings.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 05/18/21