A Small Coin

Was pleasantly struck by the following passage in Peter Matthiessen´s phenomenal travel-meets-Zen book The Snow Leopard today. "It is related that Sakyamuni once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin..."

Neil Young - Cripple Creek Ferry MP3

Delmore Brothers - Brown´s Ferry Blues MP3

Bum - Your Disciple MP3

Cuban Heels - Walk On Water MP3

The Hunter And The Hunted

"Get in here captain." Mister Watson´s voice was so low and hard that Henrietta clapped her mouth, her big eyes round. Had that man heard us? As Tant says, mister Ed J. Watson could hear a frog fart in a hurricane. That don´t come so much from hunting as from being hunted.

Nice quote, huh? Comes from the novel I´m reading at the moment: Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessens´s latest. Actually a rewrite of his own Watson trilogy, it tells the story of a Florida sugar planter and notorious outlaw at the turn of the twentieth century. Extremely well written, it´s one of these rare books that can easily be added to that small but illustrious list of great American novels.

Now I´ve long admired the travel writings of Matthiessen, who´s also well known as a naturalist and environmentalist, and I regularly reread such classics as The Snow Leopard, The Cloud Forest and Under The Mountain Wall. Good thing I finally found out that his fiction is equally good. It may take me a while to finish it though, as Shadow Country´s a 900 page monster.

As a soundtrack, here are the marvellous Marvelettes with one of their timeless Motown classics. ´What's this whole world coming to, things just ain't the same...´

The Marvelettes - The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game MP3