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READIN

Jeremy's journal

Songs are just interesting things to do with the air.

Tom Waits


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Monday, May 7th, 2012

🦋 Pynchon in Public Day

Happy birthday, Mr. P!

posted evening of May 7th, 2012: 1 response
➳ More posts about Birthdays

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

🦋 Punch lines

This weekend I am noticing punch lines in my reading. I read two stories by David Foster Wallace -- "Mister Squishy" which I found to be beautiful, engaging writing but lacking in punch lines, and "The Soul is not a Smithy", which is my new favorite DFW and which abounds in brilliant punch lines; now am reading and enjoying a novel by Julian Barnes called The Sense of an Ending, which actually, coincidentally, has a fair bit in common with "The Soul is not a Smithy", at least on first impressions. I got a good laugh out of this punch line, delivered as Barnes' narrator is recounting his youthful efforts to find a girlfriend:

Some girls allowed more: you heard of those who went in for mutual masturbation, others who permitted "full sex,"as it was known. You couldn't appreciate the gravity of that "full" unless you'd had a lot of the half-empty kind.

posted morning of May 6th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about David Foster Wallace

🦋 Moving patterns

Click through for more. via the House of Substance.

posted morning of May 6th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

🦋 Greens and amber

I got a nice, impressionistic photo in the course of this morning's bike ride (up to West Orange, down to Millburn, up through the Reservation and meet Ellen on top of South Mountain) -- a street light on South Orange Ave. under the cloudy sky.

posted morning of May 5th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Cycling

Monday, April 30th, 2012

🦋 Otra vez publicación

I got word yesterday that Metamorphoses, the journal of literary translation at Smith College, accepted my translation of Slavko Zupcic's story, "Tescucho, Italia" -- nice! This is the first piece that I have had accepted after submitting it to a couple of magazines and being rejected. Glad I kept sending it out. It will appear in the fall 2013 issue of Metamorphoses.

posted evening of April 30th, 2012: 1 response
➳ More posts about Translation

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

🦋 Fiddle Songbook

Latest addition to my repertory is "Billy in the Lowground," which I've been wanting to learn ever since I saw the Ether Frolic Mob playing it. Here are two takes:

Billy in the Lowground

by The Modesto Kid

Billy in the Lowground (alternate take)

by The Modesto Kid

Here, in no particular order, are the songs I know well enough to think of them as my repertory (excluding numerous songs like "Crawdad Hole" and "Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe" which, while I can play a pretty nice instrumental version, I think of as songs to sing. These are just the songs that I identify primarily as fiddle tunes.) Criteria for this list is, I have to know the melody by heart (after maybe a glance at the music) and be able to play it easily with improvisation over the melody and be able to cover up for myself ifwhen I make a mistake.

  • The Red-Haired Boy
  • The Sailor's Hornipe
  • The Devil's Dream
  • Bill Cheetham
  • The Halting March
  • Harvest Home
  • The Boys of Bluehill
  • The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman
  • The Road to Lisdoonvarna
  • The Irish Washerwoman
  • The Swallowtail Jig
  • East Tennessee Blues
  • Billy in the Lowground
  • Soldier's Joy
  • Whiskey Before Breakfast
  • The Modesto Kid
  • Jeremy's Breakdown
  • Drowsy Maggie
  • Bonaparte's Retreate/ Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine/ Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains

Two new songs to learn, that I printed out music for today: "St. Anne's Reel" and "Ragtime Annie".

posted morning of April 29th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling

Friday, April 27th, 2012

🦋 Genre

Let's listen to Anton Barbeau.

You're welcome. Everybody has to go buy this record and listen to it.

posted evening of April 27th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Music

🦋 Central Park South

posted evening of April 27th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about the Family Album

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

🦋 You make it sound so simple.

Martha M.'s video poem "innocent beat" is featured at Moving Poems.

Wheels within wheels! I love the image of words as gears.

posted morning of April 26th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

🦋 Something happens, and the scene is transformed.

The Cat's Table is an odd book. I liked it a lot, but without ever being sure just what I was reading. Most of the book, you do not get the impression that you are reading a story -- just some lovely and fairly disconnected childhood reminiscences. (Ondaatje has a note at the end, which I found gracious and helpful, saying that "although the novel uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat's Table is fictional.") As you come to the end, it turns out you have been meeting the characters and learning the setting for a swashbuckling adventure story -- and then in the final pages it is suddenly not that either, it is something altogether different and touching.

posted evening of April 23rd, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about The Cat's Table

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