Can Hold My Body Down

I have been a busy bee lately, taking two classes, one of which requires me to learn a dead form of the English language and translate and act out plays, teaching one on the apocalypse, and preparing for an eight-hour exam on every possible topic in literature and literary criticism to get my Masters this semester. So, not much writing or internet dilly-dallying. If you have read Le Morte D'Arthur or John Bale's early sixteenth century morality-history play King John, you may be interested in the pieces that I wrote over at blogspot's competitor, WordPress, at Never Drab: Blogging the Sixteenth Century.

My friend Dan started up a new blog about fashion in London and New York, called Smoke + Rain; he did a profile of me in the Other Voices section. I also wrote a longish, intellectual piece about the concept of self-fashioning and the roles clothes play in that for him, but I do not know if he will be posting it.

Life has been good for me recently. I bought myself Johnny Cash's final (?) album American VI: Ain't No Grave on my birthday, 2-20, when it is supposed to come out on Johnny Cash's birthday, 2-26. The first two tracks are hair-raisingly amazing. After the power of the first two songs, the rest of the album feels a little weak and meandering on first listen, but I have been listening to it all week and it has grown on me a lot. I love it. With Johnny Cash, you have to be thankful for whatever remains. I remember trying to listen to American V: A Hundred Highways after he died and thinking he just sounded so frail, as if he was on his deathbed, and I found it unpleasant to the point where I did not want the album. While he is certainly weathered on Ain't No Grave, his voice is still full, deep, and rich, with that commanding presence no one else quite has. It has caused me to go back and listen to as many of the American Recordings as I can, as well as some earlier stuff. I finally came across a solid edition of all the Sun Records 45s in approximate order, and have been enjoying that greatly, although some of those songs are truly better live, such as on Folsom Prison and San Quentin, the first two Johnny Cash albums I owned. As far as what I have heard of his eighties stuff...well, almost everyone suffered in the eighties. So I might write more about the newest Cash album or his legacy or something later. But for now, it's back to work for me.

Let the Bells Ring...