On the Line: Roden, Yong, Furst

“His way of being in the world was encapsulated in his ‘lower case’ methodology, making for a gently provocative musical legacy that I am sure will undulate tidally into and out of focus over the coming decades.”

The “His” is Steve Roden, the late artist (and a friend of mine), who died earlier this month. The “I” is Lawrence English, writing an appreciation in the Quietus. I fully subscribe to English’s “tidal” prediction — the projected ebb and, especially, the flow.

. . .

“I didn’t find birding so much as it found me.”

That is Ed Yong, author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, in his newsletter.

. . .

“The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.”

That sentence is “recent” only as in the “recent to me” sense. It’s from 1991. It’s from the second novel, Dark Star, of apparently 15 in the Night Soldiers historical spy series by Alan Furst. And for context, the “Zebra” is the nickname of someone the book’s protagonist spends an evening with. The time is just prior to World War II.