Formalities

…on April 21 I submitted to the governor of Kumamoto a detailed protest, in much the same terms as below, and also requested that he promptly relieve me of every main and subsidiary duty pertaining to my office. On June 7, however, this memorial was sent back to me on the grounds that a prefectural office could not concern itself with the matter therein since it was urged in opposition to the law of the land.

Alas, an untutored rustic such as I cannot cope with the formalities of an advances civilization!

Yukio Mishimia, Runaway Horses

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Thought:

“It’s not just about composition. It’s about challenging the musicians. You’ve got to have people in a position where they don’t really know, where they’re a little bit off guard, a little bit off balance, and they can really be spontaneous and extemporaneous… Familiarity makes you kind of absent from really understanding something. So you need musicians to be challenged. You don’t want them to come up and say, ‘Oh, I know what that is’ every time. You’re not going to get anything. You’re not going to get anything fresh out of them. They need to be challenged every time they come up.”

Henry Threadgill