A Line, a Grave, Voices
F13 (1926) by Wacław Szpakowski, via Miguel Abreu Gallery and BLDGBLOG. That shape is made from a single line.
Julia Blackburn’s new book Time Song: Searching for Doggerland looks to be a stunner. Here’s an excerpt from a passage describing her visit to a museum in Denmark dedicated to a Mesolithic burial site:
But the one who impressed me most was a woman who had been buried with her newborn baby. You saw the tenderness of the two of them lying there together and from the way they had been so carefully placed you could feel that their death had caused much sorrow. She was young, not yet twenty. Her head had been covered by a leather cap decorated with perforated deer teeth and snail shells, but the leather had vanished and all that was left was a scattering of teeth and shell. Her tiny baby was at her right side and her right hand was turned so that her fingers were cupped protectively beneath his feet. His ribs were partly broken and splayed out in a configuration that made them look like a butterfly. A flint knife blade had been placed on his belly, maybe to indicate the hunting he would have done, had he lived to be a man.
What makes you pause and catch your breath, bringing the prickling of tears to your eyes, is the fact that the baby had been placed on the outstretched wing of a swan. The bones of the arch of the upper part of the wing seem to be growing directly out of the woman’s shoulder and although the white feathers vanished long ago, it is not difficult to imagine them softly cradling the little body. I could almost hear the creak of the wing as the bird lifted the child up from its grave and into the element of air.
Oh the power of the written word so beautifully deployed.
As for Doggerland, you can read more about it here.
And if you haven’t heard Marc Martel — who dubbed some of Rami Malek’s vocals in Bohemian Rhapsody — sing, um, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by himself, accompanying himself on piano, in one take, well: here you go.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Looking forward to hosting Ross Douthat tonight at Baylor.
- Music: Of all the great Women of Soul, the most criminally underrated is Gladys Knight. Just listen to her and the Pips sing “Neither One of Us” — and pay attention to the little things, like the way in the last verse she sings the “and” between “pretending” and “convincing.” Lord have mercy, what a singer.
- Reading: Finished The Year of the French — even better than I had remembered — and have begun the next novel in the trilogy, The Tenants of Time (which I haven't yet read).
- Podcasts: Catching up on old episodes of Sticky Notes, which I mentioned last time.
- Food: Oh what a meal I recently had.
- Drink: I have fallen in love with the distinctive and unusual wines the Matthiassons make (see link just above).