Here are 10 TikToks to amuse you for a few precious moments. Some people love them.

1. Painting invisibility.

2. What the hell is the internet?

3. One by one, he's eliminating the least popular state and merging it with a neighboring state.

4. One by one, they're replacing family photos with photos of Danny DeVito until Mom notices.

5. The man deserves a medal for all the years he's patiently listened to his wife tell stories like this.

6. Chef Reactions judges the French grandfather's making of lunch.

7. "Have you ever wondered what items in your place just give men 'ick'?"

8. "We're going to go look at wedding dresses."

9. My favorite music-and-the-child video of all time.

10. Finally, the dolls.

"After a brief moment of silence, a child in the audience exclaimed, ‘Wow!’. The awe in his voice made the whole audience and ensemble erupt into laughter and applause..."

"... with the orchestra’s CEO David Snead describing it as 'one of the most wonderful moments I’ve experienced in the concert hall."



"After the concert, the orchestra began looking for the child – and now, the boy’s grandfather has got in touch. Nine-year-old Ronan is a huge music fan, says his grandfather, Stephen Mattin. Mattin, who took his grandson to the concert, said he 'talked about nothing else for weeks.' Ronan didn’t mean to be disruptive, he told WGBH, explaining that his grandson is on the autism spectrum, and expresses himself in a different way to other people. 'I can count on one hand the number of times that [he’s] spontaneously ever come out with some expression of how he’s feeling,' Mattin said. Mattin reached out to the orchestra after his sister-in-law saw on television that the Handel and Haydn Society was looking for the 'wow kid.'... 'You know, everybody’s different. Everybody has different ways of expressing themselves,' he said. 'I think people in general, society’s becoming more tolerant or understanding of the differences between people.'"

"... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music..."

Wrote Ezra Pound in "ABC of Reading":

I was talking about Ezra Pound and "ABC of Reading" in connection with Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Some people had been saying songs are not "literature," and I was looking at the etymology of the word "literature" and ran into another quote from Ezra Pound. (It was: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.")

In the comments, Jeff Gee got me pointed to the quote clipped out above.

What's that Latin? It's Horace, saying:

Now drink
Now with loose feet
Beat the earth 

Pulsanda! I love that word. I need another rat just so I can call her Pulsanda.

Here:



Pulsanda.

"I almost feel sorry for the people in that black-and-white 1951 video who needed to sit through all that..."

"... instead of being able to live in the present, when you can go through a bunch of different versions on your computer and choose to listen to your favorite one."

"We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965."

Wrote my son John, yesterday, April 8th:

Nirvana released only three proper studio albums. In an interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He was disappointed that the band up to that point had emphasized the heavy side of that formula instead of a poppier, Beatley side.... They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge. Nirvana was to grunge rock as the Beatles were to '60s rock, or as Mozart was to the Classical style, or as Bach was to Baroque. They didn't invent their style. They perfected it. Cobain was the first to admit that he mostly ripped off a lot of other bands to make Nirvana's music. I'm so glad he did.

I appreciated that John was commemorating the date we learned that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, his body having lain dead, undiscovered, for 3 days. As I wrote over there, the date we heard the news matters deeply:

To me, it's the effect on people like you that is so significant. For the music that you and other young people loved to have suddenly taken on the meaning of the rejection of life -- that was terrible thing (in addition to the loss that you describe, to know that you would never hear more, never have the experience of hearing what would have evolved from what you already had made part of your mind and your life through love and attention).

John was 13 at this point, and he recounts hearing the news that day on MTV, in a report that used the phrase "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." He turned to me for an explanation, and I said "That means he killed himself."

Pianist Maria João Pires horrified, frozen, as the orchestra begins a Mozart concerto other than the Mozart concerto she prepared.

Watch her dismay, and watch the conductor, Riccardo Chailly, push her to go ahead and play the concerto she didn't expect to be playing that night. Watch her regain her composure and play.



And if you're in the mood for more emotion and music, here's a baby listening to her mother sing and displaying an unearthly profundity of response:

David Foster Wallace's essays "could have done with a little judicious pruning."

I laugh out loud at that notion, expressed by Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the new collection "Both Flesh and Not."

Meade asks me what's so funny, I explain, and he cites "too many notes":



"Just cut a few, and it'll be perfect!"

Back to "Both Flesh and Not" — which I just downloaded into my Kindle app. The title seems to grind into our heads that Wallace is not flesh anymore, having hung himself. Anticipating the first or second comment to this post will point that out, I'm pointing it out along with all the references to suicide that appear in the book. There are 4:

1. "What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting? Is this thought experiment monstrous?"

2. "It’s not just that there are [in 'Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession'] long and irrelevant footnotes on, e.g., Gödel’s method of suicide, Poincaré’s theory of the unconscious, or the novel properties of the number 1,729.25." [Gödel’s method was refusing all food for a month, under the delusion his doctors were trying to poison him, which doesn't really sound like suicide, unless you believe "suicide" does not mean self-murder. ]

3 & 4. "... [Edwin] Williamson sometimes presents Borges’s stories and poems as 'evidence' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson’s claim, for instance, that in 1934, 'after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges… came to the brink of killing himself' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason — was the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary eo ipso suicidal?— but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges’s interior life: '"The Cyclical Night," which he published in La Nación on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of an acute personal crisis'; 'In the extracts from this unfinished poem… we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.' Bluck."

ADDDED; I only searched for "suicide," and, reading the book, I encounter "suicidally" -- a self-regarding "suicidally" -- and the premise of my 4-point list, above, is radically undermined.

Proto-blogging in 1816.

From "The Last Novel," by David Markson:

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did look into Chapman's Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.

You read something quickly. It inspires you to write something quickly and then to get it out instantly to be read. That is blogging, and Keats got as close to that as one could in 1816. But he was reading George Chapman's translation of Homer and writing a sonnet that people will read as long as there are people who can read. That's all very grand, compared to blogging. To counterbalance, the blogger gets the instant writing out to thousands, and Keats only got his poem out instantly to one person.

But would Keats have read Homer and written a timeless sonnet if he could have blogged?

***

I read the first 82 pages of Markson's book out loud as Meade drove the TT up to Fish Creek, Wisconsin and back — via Whitefish Dunes — Thursday and Friday. I stopped reading at page 82 last night at about 9 when the last of the daylight failed. The book is composed entirely of snippets like the one quoted above, and if I'd gotten to the next snippet, it would have been:

Fish feel pain.

Ah! The fish theme! How apt!

Actually, I'm lying. Lying out of love of aptness. For your sake, dear Reader. That fish snippet is at the very bottom of page 82. It was the second to the next one. The next one was really:

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

There's another Mozart one that led to some laughter and conversation. On page 21:

I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed.

Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.

***

Let me get the jump on the comments and say yes, I know that Kurt Cobain sang "It's okay to eat fish/'Cause they don't have any feelings." And yes, these days, on hearing "Homer," one doesn't think of the Greek poet anymore, one thinks of "The Simpsons." That's what TV and blogging and everything modern has done to us. 

"Everyone around the world come on!"

Editor & Publisher found out Condoleezza Rice's musical top ten:

1. Mozart --Piano Concerto in D minor ...

2. Cream -- 'Sunshine of Your Love' ...

3. Aretha Franklin -- 'Respect'

4. Kool and the Gang -- 'Celebration' ...

5. Brahms -- Piano Concerto No 2

6 Brahms -- Piano Quintet in F minor

7. U2 -- Anything ...

8. Elton John -- 'Rocket Man' ...

9. Beethoven -- Symphony No 7 ...

10. Mussorgsky -- Boris Godunov

If you're a big Condi Rice fan and are thinking of putting that in your iPod and listening in that order... well, I think you're going to find it a little annoying.

I'm annoyed by the failure to identify an individual U2 song. If you can pick "Sunshine of Your Love" out of all the acid rock you "loved ... in college," you can pick one U2 song.

I note that "Rocket Man" is about being separated from your loved one for a "long, long time," while stranded in outer space, and "Sunshine of Your Love" is also about being separated from your loved one and "waiting so long" -- also set in an astronomical context ("I'll be with you when the stars start falling").

Finally, "Celebration" is an excellent Secretary of State song: "It's time to come together, it's up to you/What's your pleasure/Everyone around the world come on!" So's "Respect" for that matter: "I'm about to give you all of my money/And all I'm askin' in return, honey..."