I do not yet have the essay I’d scheduled to publish today.
I have 3,500 words which are neither revised nor complete. It has been that kind of month.
And so, I’ll share some of the images from our recent trip to Boone, North Carolina. For literary, health, and sanity purposes, I’m talking my wife into seeing these old, old Appalachians in all four of their seasons. So far, we’ve been there at the beginnings of winter and spring.
In time, I plan to write for y’all at least one travel piece on this area, its environmental history, its culture, and its pantheon of impressions. With luck and diligence it could be one of several reported pieces based on western North Carolina: I’ve interviewed a wildlife patrolman from the 1970s’ bear sanctuaries, along with “an old hillbilly” conservation activist from the same period.
Speaking with these two men has so far been novelistic inspiration. But they could also be journalistic local history (the best form of history, in my amateur’s opinion).
Existential Music for the Sacred and the Despairing
Because I write while listening to instrumental music, I come easily under the spell of classical European composers. Since January, my guiding Virgil has been Franz Liszt. Since Holy Week, my lodestar has been his “Sacred Choral Music,” courtesy of the Choir of the Swiss Radio in 1997:
English words are sometimes weak gruel for overpowering praise, compared to inscrutable Latin in the multitude.
And let the gauntlet be thrown down—I’ll tempt being called a one-trick The Veils music critic. The band whose 2016 album enthralled me in the worst ways returned on March 3, 2023, with …And Out of the Void Came Love.
The album is Ecclesiastes for the materialist mind seeking invisible things and their God of nowhere. Add in the well-dusted texture of the Western cowboy, the mournful scent of decaying poinsettias, and the glimmer of a pearl on the sea floor, and you have bereaved philosophy of sound.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch next Thursday with my monstrous study of Lolita and the transgressions of St. Paul.
I love Boone! Thanks for sharing!