▰ RIVER SONG:
“London is out there, not muted, but blurred into a saltmarsh soundscape. The sense of being surrounded calls to my drowsy mind a line in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are: ‘That night ... the walls became the world all around.’”The Country Diary in the Guardian is “the oldest newspaper column in the world. This is Amy-Jane Beer writing not from Crook, County Durham, or North Hertfordshire, but from River Roding in London.
. . .
▰ FULL CYCLE:
“‘I ride an 1800cc BMW,’ Sahara said. ‘Of all the BMWs, this one has the highest displacement and the engine makes the nicest, boldest sound.’
Kaho didn’t say anything. I couldn’t care less what you ride — a BMW motorcycle, a tricycle, or an oxcart — she silently muttered to herself.”The “silently” carries a nice amount of weight in this moment from “Kaho,” a Haruki Murakami story in the July 1, 2024, issue of The New Yorker.
. . .
▰ SOMETHING BORROWED:
"Music scaled a height
Past fire escapes, so that I heard
A tune that scored itself
Across the paper sky: a bird
Perched on the tree's top shelf"That is from “Blackbird at Dawn,” a poem by A.E. Stallings in the July 18, 2024, issue of the London Review of Books.