ruthcurry:

In the buddhist Bellamy talks about Bessie Smith singing a certain line from St. Louis Blues: my man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea. ”Smith’s very specific abandonment,” she writes, “is a vortex pulling in the viewer’s own sense of abandonment.”

I rarely pay attention when writers quote lyrics or poetry in their work, because I don’t know from — I never recognize this stuff (especially jazz).  This is lazy, I know. However, I was, um, in a place where I do a lot of thinking, and I realized, HEY, I know that song!  

It took some serious mind-Googling to figure out how, because actually what I know is a song that samples that song.  It plays during Kill Bill (2) when the Bride tucks her daughter in bed, the presumed-dead daughter whose existence she *just* discovered, after hours and hours of female violence and suffering and girl-on-girl hate and yes, feminine power/badass-ness.  Compare/contrast: female abandonment and vulnerability.

These juxtapositions can fascinate me for hours.