~ Posted this quote on the boards last night, something that I came across while studying (pathetically might I add) for my jazz midterm (which I'm quite sure I bombed today might I add) and it struck me as *so* apporpriate for the person who I credit with changing my life this past year. The backstory is, the author was asked who his favorite jazz singer was, he said Sarah Vaughn, and someone asks him, "What about Bessie Smith?", to whom this entire article was dedicated. His response:


"I could only answer that I had concluded that there could never have been a Bessie Smith; the molds where they stamp out human beings are just too small for stuff of those proportions."

I'm not saying the greek is Bessie Smith...but you know, in my little world, that statement could not have rung more true.

And even if you're not all about the greek...everyone has had someone like that in their life. Or at least I hope so.

~ My husband is well on the way to becoming a communist. I kid you not. He's been walking around with the communist manifesto for about a week, and last weekend bought some more books on communist leaders.

Our exchange regarding this?

"I want to see if I can get arrested under the Patriot Act."

"I think that's only in libraries, not bookstores honey."

"I'm paying with a credit card."

Have I mentioned how much I love this man?

I walked out with a Henry Miller book, a Jack Kerouac book, and something called Lit Riffs where writers talk about the songs they love.

~ Speaking of those books, from Henry Miller's Black Spring :

"To be born in the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a meta-physical certitude. In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature."

Have I mentioned how much I love *good* words almost more than anything else?

~ While we're on a roll, from Kerouac's Desolation Angels:

"It's me that's changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void."

These are first pages folks....one day I'll give up everything but my books, my music and my art. One day.

~ Alright, let's go for the trifecta, shall we? From Lit Riffs - "The Bodies Of Boys" by Julianna Baggott, inspired by Bruce Springsteen's "Sprit In The Night" (an all-time favorite of mine):

"I didn't love the boys then the way I love them now, their lean hips, their hairless, muscled chests, their necklaces - a lot of Italian horns bobbing in the dips of collarbones - their loping gaits, their swelling pricks, their soft wet lips, and teary eyes, some were already deeply sentimental. Then I loved them with deep primal biology; I loved them because of an internal bent, a moist yearning imprinted heavily on my genes, perhaps passed down through my mother, stunted (and fattened, too) by her need for romance. I loved them like we were a country at war, like I was a bullet-wounded nurse, and sometimes I was compelled by a sweeping maternal drive. I had no choice."

*huge deep heavy sigh*

~ Have I mentioned that I will never understand why I turn away from the one thing that has moved me all my life?

Words.

Someday I will move past simply word worship and try and remember how to create words of my own.