America
by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Good summer reading. Neil White's In the Sanctuary of Outcasts was really good. Thanks, Baton Rouge. Some interesting facts in it. A few hundred cases of leprosy still occur each year in the U.S. and all of them are in places where armadillos live. Armadillos and humans are the only animals who get leprosy and 95% of humans are immune. I've also recently read the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy, starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo. Good stuff. Couldn't put them down. Larsson died of a heart attack after finishing the trilogy, but he apparently had done a synopsis for 10 books and I can see that the story of Lisbeth's twin sister was going to take a book to unfold.

On the July mix, it's Ian Sherwood because he spends time in Nashville then goes home to Nova Scotia and does them one better and because I know the hand motions to the song; Jeffrey Foucault because of everyone suddently covering that John Prine song, he puts a different rythmic spin on it; Phoebe Snow from 2007 because I've missed her voice (everything else is hot off the press; that's kind of the point: there's great new music coming out all the time); the National because of the Yeatsian rag and bone reference; Paul Thorn because the band sounds like Little Feat; Gaslight Anthem because in an NPR interview he seemed surprised that someone whould identify Springsteen as an influence; Sarah McLachlan because it's the least weepy overly precious thing on the CD.