Reading Today

In the subway, heading home after dropping off the rental, in the NYT review of the Rickie Lee Jones concert it would have been interesting to see, beginning by quoting her, "Songs are like rooms. We all go in and look around, and then we go out again." Her new music, songs based on themes of the teachings of Jesus makes for some very interesting rooms, but then hasn't most of her career?

Later tonight, the New Yorker, in a collective review of several of the anti-religion books that have appeared recently, discusses the Scot philosopher David Hume, who -- though at least a skeptic and most likely an atheist himself -- in his writings "had a horror of zealotry" and "(in) his writings on religion (had) a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work." Different times.

And finally a New Yorker critic very perceptive on Edward Hopper, in the context of his show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Hopper's "preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture." Here comes the knockout --"Imputations, to them, of "loneliness" are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder." And this stunning final half-paragraph about "New York Movie"-- "I comprehend the picture's economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that...assaults the usherette's unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness."

Or as the great Zevon put it -- "Time marches on/Time stands still.../We contemplate eternity /Beneath the vast indifference of Heaven."