READIN

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

🦋 Some new songs -- "the jig is up!"

This weekend I started working on a couple of new songs, some solo fiddle tunes and a blues tune I could play with John.

I thought I would explore the latter half of the alphabet in my music book a little; paging through the R's I found "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" -- well! I've been to Lisdoonvarna -- on a bike trip in western Ireland, with Ellen about 13 years ago -- and remember it fondly, and I have a shortage of jigs in my repertoire; so I thought I'd give it a try. Looked it up on YouTube to get an idea what it sounds like, and I found Ryan and Brennish Thompson playing it along with two other Dorian tunes:

I like all of these songs and have set myself the task of learning them -- they're coming along pretty well, I think. "Lisdoonvarna" and "Swallowtail" are jigs -- i.e. fast tunes in 6/8 time -- and "Drowsy Maggie" is a reel, in 4/4.

Another song I took a look at last night, which I think will be great to play with John, is "If the River Was Whiskey", Charlie Poole's version of "Hesitation Blues." Here are The Dough Rollers playing it:

posted afternoon of February 7th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, February 6th, 2010

🦋 Progress

John and I played for a couple of hours this afternoon -- it seems to me like we're getting better, more in sync with each other, a good deal faster than I expected/hoped we would. Of the songbook tunes we played, every one was just right -- sounded like I hoped it would sound in front of an audience -- except for "California Stars", which was the first song we played and sounded like we had not warmed up yet.

Two songs are ready to upgrade from "songs we're working on" to our songbook, namely "Preying Mantis" and "One of These Days"; and two songs which we played for the first time today -- "Pack up Your Sorrows," by Richard Fariña, and "On My Way Back to the Old Home," by Bill Monroe -- seemed like they could be included in the songbook straight off by virtue of how natural they were for us to play.

We played "Shady Grove" for the second time, and I was happy and excited to realize that this is the source for the melody of my song Fair Elaine -- it has been nagging at me for a couple of years now to figure out where that came from.

posted afternoon of February 6th, 2010: 1 response
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🦋 Pilgrimage

A couple of passages from Diary of a Bad Year, having to do with the relationship between reader and writer. From Chapter 28, "On Tourism":

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were , in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.

Usually the writers... claim that they write to me because my books speak directly to them; but it soon emerges that the books speak only in the way that strangers whispering together might seem to be whispering about one. That is to say, there is an element of the delusional in the claim, and of the paranoid in the mode of reading.

posted morning of February 6th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, February 4th, 2010

🦋 Deformity

More goodness from bright stupid confetti* -- today Mr. Higgs takes us to the site of Ansen Seale, who practices slit-scan photography. His botanical photographs are gorgeous

* And today I discover the site's name is taken from Sylvia Plath's poem Years:

O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

posted evening of February 4th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, February third, 2010

🦋 Political essays again

I'm spending a lot of time going back and forth, as I read Diary of a Bad Year, trying to figure out what Coetzee gains and what he loses, in presenting his essays as part of a novel. The thoughts are being presented as the thoughts of a fictional character -- though the fictional character is clearly the same person as Coetzee the author -- does that give the author less of a stake in the "Strong Opinions"? One of the essays (Chapter 26) makes mention of Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture, and says,

When one speaks in one's own person -- that is, not through one's art -- to denounce some politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest which one is likely to lose because it takes place on ground where one's opponent is far more practised and adept. "Of course Mr Pinter is entitled to his point of view," it will be replied. "After all, he enjoys the freedoms of a democratic society, freedoms which we are this moment endeavouring to protect against extremists."

Clearly Coetzee is thinking about what he's doing in this book as he writes this paragraph. Speaking as Pinter did "takes some gumption," he says -- does it take less gumption to put such words in the mouth of your main character? I sort of think it must not -- at least not in this case, where everything is so clearly delineated to point out that this is Coetzee speaking out against violations of decency by Western (and specifically American) governments. There comes a time, he says, "when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act" -- and possibly he is couching that action in the form of a novel just because that is what he does well, that is how he knows to get his message across.

posted evening of February third, 2010: 4 responses
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Tuesday, February second, 2010

🦋 Political essays

I started reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year last night and am already ready to recommend it -- a bit like Elizabeth Costello but I think much more engaging and immediate; and the funny structure of the book is a real treat to read. A couple of different stories are being interwoven/superimposed on the page -- the top half of the page is the book of political essays that the main character is writing (under the title "Strong Opinions"), the bottom half is his first-person narrative of his life at the time he is writing the book; in some chapters the page is divided into thirds, with the bottom third being the first-person narrative of his neighbor, whom he has hired to type up the manuscript and on whom he has vain designs of seduction. This sounds kind of strange I guess, and like it would be really difficult to maintain; but Coetzee does a fantastic job of keeping the multiple threads running.

It seems pretty clear that the essays are Coetzee's voice; does this make the main character (who is after all the author of the essays) Coetzee? It kind of should, but I think he is intended rather as a fictional character. I'm not sure if this is as complicated semantically as it is seeming right now.* Anyway, the essays frequently tread dangerously close to cynicism; but (so far) they are not falling into the chasm.

As during the time of kings it would have been naïve to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naïve to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. The electorate -- the demos -- believes that its task is to choose the best man, but in truth its task is much simpler: to anoint a man (vox populi vox dei), it does not matter whom. Counting ballots may seem to be a means of finding which is the true (that is, the loudest) vox populi; but the power of the ballot-count formula, like the power of the formula of the firstborn male, lies in the fact that it is objective, unambiguous, outside the field of political contestation. The toss of a coin would be equally objective, equally unambiguous, equally incontestable, and could therefore equally well be claimed (as it has been claimed) to represent vox dei. We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin -- tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling -- but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of the coin?

* As of Chapter 10, it is becoming more clear that the main character is indeed intended to be Coetzee -- the country he is living in is identified as Australia, he refers to himself as a white South African, the neighbor calls him "Señor C."

posted evening of February second, 2010: Respond
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🦋 On my way back to the old home

What!? I sit down today to link to the video David Rawlings and Gillian Welch made for NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, and I discover that I have never written about them here -- or if I did, I did not include any intuitive search terms like "Rawlings" or "Welch".... Anyway: the David Rawlings Machine is a band that I've been loving ever since I heard them last year -- before last year I had a vague impression that Gillian Welch had a good sound and I ought to listen to more, but wasn't getting around to it -- but last summer Dave gave me a ticket to see them at the Beacon, and I fell in love with them instantly.

So anyway, here is a great show, an interesting synthesis of old-time and brand-new.

posted afternoon of February second, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January 31st, 2010

🦋 Vision

Aquella noche Jacinta vio a Zacarías de nuevo en sueños. El ángel ya no vestía en negro. Iba desnudo, y su piel estaba recubierta de escamas. Ya no le acompañaba su gato, sino una serpiente blanca enroscada en el torso. Su cabello había crecido hasta la cintura y su sonrisa, la sonrisa de caramelo que había besado en la catedral de Toledo, aparecía surcada de dientes triangulares y serrados como los que había visto en algunos peces de alta mar agitando la cola en la lonja de pescadores. Años mas tarde, la muchacha describiría esta visión a un Julián Carax de dieciocho años, recordando que el día en que Jacinta iba a dejar la pensión de la Ribera para mudarse al palacete Aldaya, supo que su amiga la Ramoneta había sido asesinada a cuchilladas en el portal aquella misma noche y que su bebé había muerto de frío en brazos del cadáver. Al saberse la noticia, los inquilinos de la pensión se enzarzaron en una pelea a gritos, puñadas y arañozos para disputarse las escasas pertenencias de la muerta. Lo único que dejaron fue el que había sido su tesoro más preciado: un libro. Jacinta lo reconoció, porque muchas noches la Ramoneta le había pedido si podía leerle una o dos páginas. Ella nunca había aprendido a leer.

That night, Jacinta again saw Zacarías in her dreams. The angel was no longer clothed in black. He was nude, and his skin was covered with scales. And he was no longer accompanied by his cat; instead a white serpent twined around his torso. His hair had grown down to his waist, and his smile -- the caramel smile which she had kissed in the cathedral of Toledo -- appeared to be cut through by triangular teeth, serrated like those she had seen in some fish of the high seas, their tails writhing at the fish market. Years later, the girl would describe this vision to a Julián Carax eighteen years old, remembering that on the day when Jacinta was leaving the Ribera boarding house to move to Aldaya's mansion, she learned that her friend Ramoneta had been murdered, stabbed in the doorway that same night, and that her baby had died of exposure in the corpse's arms. On learning the news, the tenants of the boarding house got in a screaming fight, throwing fists and scratching in a row over the dead woman's meager possessions. The only thing left was what had been her most cherished treasure: a book. Jacinta recognized it, for on many nights Ramoneta had asked if she'd read a page or two. Herself, she had never learned to read.

Maybe the most striking thing is, the construction of the book is getting less transparent -- in the first half of the book, it has often been too blindingly obvious, just where Ruiz Zafón is going with each detail of the plot. As Daniel and Fermín move through Santa Lucía and listen to Jacinta's story, it is refreshingly hard to see where they're going.

* Or, well, nix that -- I was reading too much into the ellipses. But they kissed passionately, which for the purposes of this story seems to come to about the same thing.

posted evening of January 31st, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The Boys of Blue Hill

Here is a recording I made of "The Boys of Blue Hill":

Update -- as long as I'm recording some fiddle tunes -- I added a take of "The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman" to this post. And here is a tape of Graham Townsend playing the tune:

posted morning of January 31st, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Étude/Song

I spent a lot of time practicing my fiddle tunes yesterday. These tunes -- generally Irish or Appalachian tunes, mostly in 4/4 time, mostly with two sections of 8 or 16 bars each -- I mostly play as a sort of étude, just getting used to playing the violin fast and clear and with a constant beat; something nice can happen when I have played a tune enough times, become familiar enough with it, that it will metamorphose from a practice tune into an actual song... when this happens it is as if I start hearing actual expressed meaning in the notes rather than just the bouncing melody. That transformation took place yesterday with the Irish song "The Boys of Blue Hill" -- suddenly that song is a part of my consciousness, not just a melody in my ear. Here are the fiddle tunes I feel familiar enough with that I think of them as songs:

• Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine
• Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountain
• Bonaparte's Retreat (almost -- I still don't totally understand the B section)
• Old Joe Clark
• The Irish Washerwoman (the odd man out -- this song is a jig, in 3/4 time)
• The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman
• The Boys of Blue Hill

I am thinking I should try and build a songbook of fiddle tunes, similar to what John and I are doing with our songs. (I am wanting to do recordings of some of these, hopefully before to long I will upload some mp3's.) Below the fold, a list (in no particular order) of songs I am working on, that are getting close to inclusion in the songbook.

• Harvest Home (this works great as a medley with Boys of Blue Hill)
• Whisky Before Breakfast
• Bill Cheatham
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Devil's Dream
• The Girl I Left Behind Me
• Angelina Baker
• The Halting March (another odd man out -- this song is 4/4 but its structure is very different from all the rest of these.)
• Haste to the Wedding (jig)

(The fact that most of these titles are in the first half of the alphabet may give you an idea of how I approach my alphabetically-organized book of fiddle tunes -- generally to sort of let it fall open at random but biased toward the front of the book, and turn pages until I see something that catches my eye.)

↻...done

posted morning of January 31st, 2010: 3 responses
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