Thursday, April 27, 2023

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023), and "Jamaica Farewell"

There are certain songs, during your life, that especially touch you, and stay with you. Harry Belafonte's recording of  "Jamaica Farewell," from his 1956 album Calypso, is for me one such song.  I have listened to it since childhood, and have never tired of hearing it.

The song itself--lyrically, musically--is lovely. Mr. Belafonte's singing, on the recording--which includes his double-tracking, during the choruses--is exceedingly beautiful; it is crystalline, assured, wistful, intimate.

The song's spare instrumentation is marvelous--in particular, the guitar-playing heard at the opening and conclusion of the record, and in the song's interludes; it is skillful, and soothing.

Here is a YouTube link to the recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1ihPzpZgyI

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Earth Day

In 1970 (at age fourteen), I saved the magazine advertisement, below, about the first Earth Day. 

At some point, I attached the ad to the white paper visible behind it, in order--as I recall--to frame it.

Part of the ad is obviously missing; it got torn decades ago.  

The title originally read:  "April 22 is Earth Day. The beginning of the end of pollution."

The ad was from the Environmental Action Coalition of New York. The group (which was active for many years) was originally created to oversee New York City's 1970 Earth Day events.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Sunday, April 16, 2023

Ten years later

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon terror attacks. 

The devastation was enormous, the attacks hideously cruel. There were three deaths, and hundreds of injuries.  Seventeen of those injured lost limbs.

Those killed in the bombings were Martin Richard, age 8, from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston; Krystle Campbell, 29, of Medford; and Lu Lingzi, 23, of China, a graduate student at Boston University. (Lu Lingzi has often been referred to as Lingzi Lu, in news stories.)

There was, too, the terrible related violence which took place days later.

There was the April 18th shooting death of M.I.T. police officer Sean Collier, 27. 

And: the severe injury suffered by Boston officer Dennis Simmonds--from an explosive device thrown by one of the Tsarnaev brothers, during the April 19th firefight in nearby Watertown. He died a year later, at 28, as a result of the injury.  

A Boston transit officer, Richard Donohue, was shot, near-fatally, during the Watertown battle. In 2015, local officials said that his injury, in the midst of the chaos that night, was likely from friendly fire.  Officer Donohue returned to work in 2015, yet in 2016, at age 36, he retired, due to the continuing effects of his injury.

Here are two moving stories, from yesterday's Boston Globe, about two survivors of the bombings.  

The first is about Jeff Bauman, who was 27 in 2013. He was grievously wounded by the first of the two explosions on Boylston Street. 

The second story is about Jane Richard, 7 years old in 2013, who was injured terribly by the second bomb. Her brother Martin was killed.  Her mother lost her vision in one eye; her father was wounded as well.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/13/sports/jeff-bauman-boston-marathon-bombing/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/13/metro/ten-years-later-jane-richard-her-family-reflect-their-trials-since-marathon-bombing/

Here, too, is the first part of a lengthy Boston Globe article about the Richard family, published in April of 2014; there is a link, at the end, to the second part of the article: 

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/12/loss-and-love/a19pcWz6WF5nNozPPItwYI/story.html

Friday, April 14, 2023

Morgan White, Jr., on WBZ Radio

Since the 1990s, my friend Morgan White, Jr. has been a popular talk host--in varying capacities--at the Boston radio station WBZ-AM.  His weekly program, The Morgan Show, has aired, most recently, from 10 p.m. to midnight (Eastern time) on Saturdays.

Beginning this weekend, the show adds another hour: it will now be heard from 9 p.m. to midnight.

https://wbznewsradio.iheart.com/

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Writers, and Math

I was recently putting together a post about the subject of writing, and mathematics.

Last Friday (April 7th), before I was able to finish the post, The New York Times published an essay about the subject, by British mathematician Sarah Hart. (Dr. Hart's book, Once Upon a Prime, was published this week by Flatiron Books; its subtitle--The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature--was also the title of the recent Times essay.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/opinion/the-wondrous-connections-between-mathematics-and-literature.html

https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Prime-Connections-Mathematics/dp/1250850886/ref

My interest in writing about the subject was rooted in a couple of things I had recently read.

The first was an obituary, from The New York Times online archive, of the novelist James M. Cain--who wrote such works as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941). Mr. Cain died in 1977, at age 85.

The obituary was by the book critic John Leonard, and included the following, about Mr. Cain's writing style:

In his last years, Mr. Cain explained that it was "my algebra...moves...progressions.  Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right."

A few days after seeing this, I was looking at the Wikipedia page about the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The page included an excerpt of a New Yorker review of Mr. Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow; the review was by the poet, and essayist, L.E. Sissman.  Mr. Sissman wrote, of Mr. Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks."

(I will note that I have not yet read Gravity's Rainbow--have wanted, though, to do so for years--yet its opening words ["A screaming comes across the sky."] constitute, I think--I am certainly not alone in believing this--one of fiction's great introductory sentences.)

After stumbling upon these references to math and writing. I looked online to see what else I might locate about the subject.  I landed on a 2012 essay from The New Yorker, by writer Alexander Nazaryan, "Why Writers Should Learn Math."

Mr. Nazaryan wrote, in the piece:

Poets have been more conversant with mathematics than fiction writers, probably because they have to pay attention to the numerical qualities of words when working in meter, forced to consider the form and even physical shape of what they write, not just its meaning. Wordsworth praised “poetry and geometric truth” for “their high privilege of lasting life,” while Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”

Fiction writers have rarely expressed such earnest appreciation for mathematical aesthetics. That’s a shame, because mathematical precision and imagination can be a salve to a literature that is drowning in vagueness of language and theme. “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, in 1945. Even if Papa never had much formal training in mathematics, he understood it as a discipline in which problems are solved through a sort of plodding ingenuity. The very best passages of Hemingway have the mathematical complexity of a fractal: a seemingly simple formula that, in its recurrence, causes slight but crucial changes over time. Take, for example, the famous retreat from Caporetto in “A Farewell to Arms”:

When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.

Mr. Nazaryan continued:

The procession here has an algebraic deliberateness, but that simplicity gives way to a complexity of meaning. Hemingway starts with the material (snow, wet, daylight, sun) only to end with the unexpected and intimate “comfortable sound” of the receding Austrian guns... Everything in this passage is intentional, from the plain imagery to the heightening of narrative urgency that comes with the repetition of “we expected.”

In last week's New York Times essay, referred to above, mathematician Sarah Hart wrote this:

Good mathematics, like good writing, involves an inherent appreciation of structure, rhythm and pattern. That feeling we get when we read a great novel or a perfect sonnet — that here is a beautiful thing, with all the component parts fitting together perfectly in a harmonious whole — is the same feeling a mathematician experiences when reading a beautiful proof.

Dr. Hart also wrote:

Great literature and great mathematics satisfy the same deep yearning in us: for beauty, for truth, for understanding. As the pioneering Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya wrote: "It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in [one's] soul … the poet must see what others do not see, must see more deeply …. And the mathematician must do the same.”