Occasionally few lines of a book can turn one back from leaping into a self annihilating abyss, i.e., words can be a sheild. Most recently (wasn't it last night?), he was saved from the suicidal fever bird singing harshly in his brain on reading Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno, which describes how in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, all suicides are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees that are only able to speak when a branch is broken, and how they are torn at by the Harpies. Also since they are unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs.

Since this terrible fate had been revealed to him, he made a choice to climb back to, and then make an attempt to enter the castle in the First Circle (Limbo) of Hell, the residence of the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans known for their wisdom and reason, including the poets Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, as described in Canto IV.

Pedro Almadovar picks some great music to populate his movies, which I think are one large extended conversation about conversation in what is a dysotpian (i.e., nearly real) world. This being so, "Hable con Ella" (Talk To Her), in my opinion, is certainly his finest movie. And Alberto Iglesias, his composer of choice for his movies, certainly adds quite a bit to the mood of this movie that essentially is an interrogation of the nature of love. Here are some tracks from this movie:

A section of the title track Hable con Ella
Cucurrucucu Paloma
Por Toda A Minha Vida

....

I have previously written about Arvo Pärt, and my discovery of his powerful music. His music is intensely spiritual, with parallels drawn to J.S. Bach, and seems to lead the listener into a kind of silence that follows a late night rainstorm. You can listen to one of his signature albums Fratres over at Rhapsody. For a taste, these are some clips from his other important work, Tabula Rasa:

Tabula Rasa: I. Ludus - Con Moto Tabula Rasa: II. Silentium - Senza Moto

This seems to be an intro to an Arvo's concert.

There are few musicians who can't be approached, i.e., described, via words. Bob Dylan is one of them. And lord only knows how many pages have been devoted to the Man, and the music (or should we better call all of it prophesy?) he has unleashed upon the world. Besides Dylan himself has begun writing, in a superb idiosyncratic fashion, about his life in what is supposed to be many part autobiography titled "Chronicles". I have already raved about this first part of these "Chronicles", especially his love of trains.

However I was unware of Dylan's exsistance, much less his music, until I received a recieved a letter for my 22nd birthday from this girl I know (she made me turn to writing fiction, for the first tiime; this I tired by very thinly disgusing her - it turned out that her younger sister had precisely the same name as the disguise I chose for her!) with the lyrics of the following song written out. I was hunting for that letter this evening as I was feeling a bit down and out, and came up empty in the whirlwind of paper this room has become. Anyways, the more important thing is this song, and the neural operations it can perform on my soul; so here is "Forever Young":

Also this is an interesting article on photographing Dylan published in Granta.