Day 384: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedChapter 16:

A BAD thing happened at sunset.

Jim vanished.

Through noon and after noon, they had screamed up half the rides, knocked over dirty milk-bottles, smashed kewpie-doll winning plates, smelling, listening, looking their way through the autumn crowd trampling the leafy sawdust.

And then quite suddenly Jim was gone.

And Will, not asking anyone but himself, absolutely silent certain-sure, walked steadily through the late crowd as the sky was turning plum colored until he came to the maze and paid his dime and stepped up inside and called softly just one time:

“… Jim …?”

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 67). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Yeah. That’s how it’s done.

But the book.

Do it. I’m not kidding.

Day 381: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedQuick excerpt from Chapter 14:

What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child ? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (pp. 58-59). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Still listening to CD 1 from Enrico Caruso: The Complete Recordings.

Day 380: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedThe dark carnival arrives in town, preceded by an unearthly sound that Will and Jim are drawn to.

Chapter 12 contains some of the best writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.

The carnival train thundered the bridge. The calliope wailed.

“There’s no one playing it!” Jim stared up.

“Jim, no jokes!”

“Mother’s honor, look!”

Going away, away, the calliope pipes shimmered with star explosions, but no one sat at the high key-board. The wind, sluicing ice-water air in the pipes, made the music.

The boys ran. The train curved away, gonging its undersea funeral bell, sunk, rusted, green-mossed, tolling, tolling. Then the engine whistle blew a great steam whiff and Will broke out in pearls of ice.

Way late at night Will had heard — how often? — train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains of far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.

Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.

Yet this train’s whistle!

The wails of a lifetime were gathered in it from other nights in other slumbering years; the howl of moon-dreamed dogs, the seep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire sirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighs, burst over the earth!

Tears jumped to Will’s eyes. He lurched. He knelt. He pretended to lace one shoe.

But then he saw Jim’s hands clap his ears, his eyes wet, too. The whistle screamed. Jim screamed against the scream. The whistle shrieked. Will shrieked against the shriek.

Then the billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in a fire storm off the earth.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (pp. 49-50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Go buy the book!

Here.

Or here.

Or at your local book store.

Now, on to the music part of this month’s exploration: Enrico Caruso CD 1.

The booklet that comes with CD 1 tells the story of how this amazing music came to be. It’s a fascinating tale.

Arguably, no artist did more for the early gramophone than Enrico Caruso. Before Caruso first recorded in 1902, the gramophone was an expensive novelty…Enrico Caruso’s voice was the sound that propelled a new industry. He would sell more records than any other opera singer of his time.

In turn, it was the gramophone that made Caruso a household name. Caruso became the first singing star of two mediums: opera and the gramophone.

The process of finding the best recordings from that era and remastering and preparing them for CD was laborious, to say the least.

Buy the Caruso box set here.

Here’s a YouTube clip of Caruso singing “FRANCHETTI: Germania – Studenti, udite.”

That sounds pretty close to what I’m listening to. It’s not the same recording, as far as I can tell. But it’s close.

You get the idea.

Day 379: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedStill reading and totally digging Ray Bradbury’s incomparable book about Halloween, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Chapter Ten begins this way:

JUST AFTER midnight.

Shuffling footsteps.

Along the empty street came the lightning-rod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseball-mitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.

Paper-soft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.

And in the window, like a great coffin boat of star-colored glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant’s ring.

And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.

The lightning-rod salesman’s smile faded.

In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.

She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow’s flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids.

The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 42). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Now, come on. You gotta admit that’s fantastic writing.

This is why I love the book so much, and why I read it every year.

In October.

Do yourself a favor and buy a copy of it here.

Day 378: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedChapter 5 opens with Charles Holloway sensing what Mr. Crosetti did – that something was happening. Nobody yet knows what it is. But they all sense it.

Notice Bradbury’s use of emotion, longing, wistfulness again.

CHARLES HALLOWAY put his hand to the saloon’s double swing doors, hesitant, as if the gray hairs on the back of his hand, like antennae, had felt something beyond slide by in the October night.

…It was a tune from another season, one that never ceased making Charles Halloway sad when he heard it. The song was incongruous for October, but immensely moving, overwhelming, no matter what day or what month it was sung:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play.
And wild and sweet
Their words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Charles Halloway shivered. Suddenly there was the old sense of terrified elation , of wanting to laugh and cry together when he saw the innocents of the earth wandering the snowy streets the day before Christmas among all the tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like small windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (pp. 23-24). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Later, Charles Halloway spots a handbill on which is written Continue reading

Day 377: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedChapter Four opens with a perfect example of why I love Ray Bradbury’s writing: His clever use of verbs, simile, and metaphor.

For example,

The druggist’s fount fizzes “like a nest of snakes.”

Shades “slither.”

Keys “rattled their bones in locks.”

See!

WILL STOPPED. Will looked at the Friday night town.

It seemed when the first stroke of nine banged from the big courthouse clock all the lights were on and business humming in the shops . But by the time the last stroke of nine shook everyone’s fillings in his teeth, the barbers had yanked off the sheets, powdered the customers, trotted them forth; the druggist’s fount had stopped fizzing like a nest of snakes, the insect neons everywhere had ceased buzzing, and the vast guttering acreage of the dime store with its ten billion metal, glass and paper oddments waiting to be fished over, suddenly blacked out. Shades slithered, doors boomed , keys rattled their bones in locks, people fled with hordes of torn newspaper mice nibbling their heels.

Bang! they were gone!

“Boy!” yelled Will. “Folks run like they thought the storm was here!”

“It is!” shouted Jim. “Us!”

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 20). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Plus, there’s so much action in his writing. Lots of exclamation points (which drives some readers nuts, I’ve heard), sure. But a lot of precise Continue reading

Day 376: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedChapter Three touches on what I mentioned yesterday – the aspect of age…specifically the wistfulness of old age looking back on youth.

WATCHING THE boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him.

Yet, strangely, they do run together.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 17). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The chapter ends, as it began – with Charles Holloway pining for Continue reading

Day 375: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedPart of the genius of Something Wicked This Way Comes is the recurring juxtapositions of the universal elements of age.

For example, the age of Will Holloway compared to his father.

The age of Will Holloway compared to Jim Nightshade.

The age of Jim Nightshade compared to how how old he’d like to be.

The age of Charles Holloway compared to how old he’d like to be.

Bradbury expertly captures the wistfulness of old age looking back at youth, and the eager anticipation of youth looking ahead at an older age.

In Chapter Two, Will spots his dad at work in the library.

Will stared.

It was always a surprise — that old man, his work, his name.

That’s Charles William Halloway, thought Will, not grandfather, not far-wandering , ancient uncle, as some might think, but…my father.

So, looking back down the corridor, was Dad shocked to see he owned a son who visited this separate 20,000- fathoms-deep world? Dad always seemed stunned when Will rose up before him, as if they had met a lifetime ago and one had grown old while the other stayed young, and this fact stood between….

Far off, the old man smiled.

They approached each other, carefully.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 14). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Chapter Two ends the way it Continue reading