LUNPFM

More from the brilliant Mr. James Agee: (I recommend reading it outloud, as does he)

All over Alabama, the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider’s net is heavy. The roads lie there, with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast. The plow handles are wet, and the rails and the frogplates and the weeds between the ties: and not even the hurrying and hoarse sorrows of a distant train, on other roads, is heard. The little towns, the county seats, house by house white-painted and elaborately sawn among their heavy and dark-lighted leaves, in the spaced protections of their mineral light they stand so prim, so voided, so undefended upon starlight, that it is inconceivable to despise or to scorn a white man, an owner of land; even in Birmingham, mile on mile, save for the sudden frightful screaming, almost instantly diminished and silent, of a closed black car, and save stone lonesome sinister heelbeats, that show never a face and enter soon, a frame door flush with the pavement, and ascend the immediate lightless staircase, mile on mile, stone, stone, smooth charted streams of stone, the streets under their lifted lamps lie void before eternity. New Orleans is stirring, rattling, and sliding faintly in its fragrance and in the enormous richness of its lust; taxis are still parked along Dauphine Street and the breastlike, floral air is itchy with the stilettos and embroiderings above black blood drumthroes of an eloquent cracked indiscoverable cornet, which exists only in the imagination and somewhere in the past, in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong; yet even in that small portion which is the infested genitals of that city, never free, neither of desire nor of waking pain, there are the qualities of the tender desolations of profoundest night. Beneath the gulf lies dreaming, and beneath, dreaming, that woman, that id, the lower American continent, lies spread before heaven in her wealth. The parks of her cities are iron, loam, silent, the sweet fountains shut, and the pure facades, embroiled, limelike in the street light are sharp, are still:

The Old Wild King

SO, my first go around at senior year I was in a creative non-fiction class and one of the books we were assigned to read was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but I only read the parts we were to discuss in class because it's a whoppin' 400+ epic work and I drank a lot and did other things in school that were apparently more important than reading about tenant farmers in 1930s rural South.

Anyway, I picked it up again last night. And so far, so brilliant and beautiful, and I love James Agee, and Walker Evans pictures are great. Here's a poem by Agee to Walker, starting off the book:

Against time and the damages of the brain
Sharpen and calibrate. Not yet in full,

Yet in some arbitrated part

Order the facade of the listless summer.

Spies, moving delicately among the enemy,

The younger sons, the fools,

Set somewhat aside the dialects and the stained skins of feigned

madness,

Ambiguously signal, baffle, the eluded sentinel.

Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,

Bring your blind father, and describe a little;

Behold him, part wakened, fallen among field flowers shallow

But undisclosed, withdraw.

Not yet that naked hour when armed,

Disguise flung flat, squarely we challenge the fiend.

Still, comrade, the running of the beasts and the ruining heaven

Still captive the old wild king.

I love it. I'll keep you updated.