Sound Seekers

"I can't do this from a physical level anymore... but I will always be with you." And the music is always with us, resurrecting, inexplicably present in distant earphones, as the universe arriving between piano notes. A pocket passport, with parallel texts in English, German, Croatian, Lithuanian, Bengali, Spanish, Russian. These five jazz pieces in A Meaningful Life 3:1: Sound Seekers, File Under Jazz, originally published en-face, with parallel text in Gobshite Quarterly, are a companion volume, an after-the-fact prequel if you will, to America The Beautiful & Other Indictments: A Meaningful Life 3:0. The Europeans have a word for this sort of thing: feuilleton, which was originally a supplement attached to editorial pages of Belle Epoch French newspapers, and later in German and Middle-European newspapers. They can be anything from political or non-political gossip and news, surreal short-short stories, art criticism, reports on the latest fashions, philosophic epigrams to charades and other literary pieces in the guise of trifles. Practitioners have included George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, Capek, and Kafka. They've been in and out of fashion, going into hiding during the world wars, and coming back out after the treaties settled and the dust signed; in Eastern Europe they're often written to side-step censorship.