“apposition

Etymology
* From Latin appositio > appositum, past participle of apponere (“‘to put near’”).

Noun
apposition (plural appositions)
1. (grammar) a construction in which one noun or noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, both having the same syntactic function in the sentence.

For example, in the phrase “my friend Alice” the name “Alice” is in apposition to “my friend”.

2. The relationship between such nouns or noun phrases.
3. The quality of being side-by-side, apposed instead of being opposed, not being front-to-front but next to each other.
4. A placing of two things side by side, or the fitting together of two things.
5. In biology, the growth of successive layers of a cell wall.”

– Wiktionary

PS. I really need to figure out how to do that thing where you put the quoted text on a different color background square.

Yusef Komunyakaa has one in the New Yorker now. Great issue. Really great issue for writers writing about writing and art. James Wood, John Clare, Oliver Sacks…Anthony Lane on Eurovision, Schjeldahl on Klein…and a fabulous Huckabee profile too. But I really like this poem. It’s called “Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades.” I don’t want to post the whole thing here but do go read it.

“…I don’t remember
exactly what I said at the ticket office
my first visit here, but I do know it grew
ugly. The classical allusions didn’t
make it any easier…”

right.

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I know it’s only an error message but having just reread Howard’s End last night, it seems like something more…

“Does every performance of a Mozart sonata only include what Mozart put there? I remember years ago a very interesting conversation where somebody asked Milton Babbitt that question. Babbitt had noticed something very provocative in one of the symphonies of Mozart, something about the way Mozart used a certain register only for certain instruments, and it really was the kind of thing you’d expect Babbitt to do, and a kid put up their hand and said, “Mr. Babbitt, did Mozart put that there?” and Babbitt said, I think quite aptly, “It doesn’t make any difference.” ”

– Bruce Brubaker interviewed at New York Pianist, via his AJ blog, PianoMorphosis

"…in the same way whalers had to sail farther and farther for their prey, oil companies are drilling deeper and deeper to tap the gulf’s oil, to levels made possible only by the most advanced technology, operating near its limits. The Coast Guard has warned that this technology has outpaced not only government oversight but — as events have shown — the means of correcting catastrophic failures. An admonition from Nietzsche that Mr. Hoare cites in reference to “Moby-Dick” seems just as pertinent to the spill: “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Mr. Delbanco cautions, however, against the tendency to read environmentalist moralizing into “Moby-Dick,” as often happens when it is applied to contemporary disasters. Melville did, memorably, wonder whether the whale “must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe.” But one gets the sense that he would have considered the loss a greater one to literature than to the ecosystem. ”

Randy Kennedy, "The Ahab Parallax: ‘Moby-Dick’ and the Spill," in the NYT

while her withers wither with her–
and no one keeps a cow for a friend!

– Stephen Sond"best lyrics ever"heim, Into The Woods: Prologue. Why has the Broadway version of this with lyrics been taken off YouTube? All there is is the karaoke version…

“José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, has died at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, his publisher said on Friday. He was 87. ”

– Article via the NYT

(1) Two days ago, heading north to campus on St. Paul, just outside Eddie’s, two bodybuilders in tank tops and sweat, drinking hot coffee on a summer morning. One to the other: "See, that’s what makes it different from witchcraft."

(2) Last night, at TASTER at 2640, hearing experimental music put on by the Normals/Red Room/High Zero folks. It was a sampler: each act played for only ten minutes, and there were five or six of them.

The MC of the evening, one of the Normals organizers, claimed in his introduction that Baltimore artist / musicians are uniquely Baltimorean in three things, which I think–can’t quite remember–were quirkiness, collaborativeness, and sophistication. In other words, pretty out there, working with one another, and not really caring about money.

There was a quadrangle of my favorite shades-of-AVW folding chairs in the middle of a huge church, and the acts were arranged all around the outskirts. In between each act, the audience was asked to pick up their chairs and rotate them. The music was varied: it contained acts of profound emotional intensity, from pedal steel guitar to cello, and other acts that were more difficult to interpret. But that difficulty was part of the experience. I loved the evening, but I was almost as much in love with the chair rotation business.

(3) This morning, on 29th, a stand full of free newspapers has blown open, and the pages are all over the street. Two men in T-shirts, standing on the open pages while talking, with one foot on each page, as if they were in the middle of a game of hopscotch. When I walk by, they look a little embarrassed, but don’t move.

“The most difficult part for the artists is having to tear themselves away at the end of the day. But the schedule has demanded a certain discipline and forced them to take breaks they would not have ordinarily taken — to live more balanced lives.”

– NYT article on Governor’s Island artists’ colony. Via AJ.