The day after

Today, the day after the massacre and bombing in Norway, I wonder why I and other people I know tend to feel less anguished about similarly horrific events in, say, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Mumbai, Pakistan, Darfur, and Mexico. Are Norwegians less the Other than the others? I wonder what my Somali neighbors are talking about this morning.

Jim W. took his own life last week

A puddle of water on the black iron skillet begins to sizzle, then when the pan is lifted off the burner and turned sideways, begins to creep to the center, shrinking as it goes until it sizzles one last time and disappears. Is that what it’s like, he asked?

Fred Scherer and Walter Wiley departed at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 3, 1913 from Manhattan at the corner of Murray Street and Broadway, hoping to make San Francisco in 48 days. To pay for the project, they will sell post cards along the route. Poughkeepsie is their first stop, Schenectady the following night. They hope to average 70 miles a day, arrive in San Francisco on June 20. Whether or not they made it to San Francisco or even Poughkeepsie is not known.

Three girl singers

1. All for You, Diana Krall, vocals and piano; trio of bass, guitar, and percussion (1996)
2. s'Gershwin, Prudence Johnson, vocals; Dan Chouinard, piano (2003)
3. Surrender, Jane Monheit, vocals; orchestra {2007)

Chose these three CD's from the local library yesterday because jazz has been bulked up in recent years by an upsurge of women singers and I haven't paid much attention to them. My taste had been formed by Billy Holiday, Carmen McRae, Abby Lincoln, Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Sloane, Nina Simone, and others of my generation and earlier. The best of the three is the Krall recording, followed by Johnson. Monheit has the chops but this is an overproduced outing.

Finally, I begin The Journalist and the Murderer

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity,ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns--when the article or book appears--his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living."
The first paragraph of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer