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A short corollary to December’s ramble on Apollo: Melville’s “The Ravaged Villa.”
It’s easy to mourn what could have been when Melville took his post-Moby-Dick hiatus from fiction, just as easy as it is to lose sight of what we got when he shifted to poetry. His trajectory from Mardi to Pierre to Confidence-Man is one of the great mystical turns in art.
“I played a solo concert a couple of years ago in Champaign Urbana, Illinois, and after there was discussion with the audience. Somebody asked, why do you play music like that? It wasn’t confrontational; it was simply a question of why. I’d never thought about it, but my answer came very quickly: I do it because I learn. The person then said, what do you learn? I said I didn’t know, but I know I learn something every time. Sometimes it’s about me, sometimes it’s about the music, and sometimes it’s about something else – but it’s always a revelation.”
Joe Giardullo
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