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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
When we moved into this house 5 years ago, I set up my stereo temporarily on the floor in a corner of the living room. And there it has been these 5 years, until yesterday when in a fit of organizing, I moved it into a more permanent-seeming location, on a wire rack in the next room, which I am currently thinking of as the "music room" (before it was the "play room", but Sylvia is doing most of her playing these days in her own room). The problem had always been my perceived lack of a suitable shelf. But Friday night while I was turning over various stuff in my mind, I realized that the wire rack in the garage would be just right. So yesterday morning, I sponged the cobwebs off it, brought it inside, and moved everything around. Well: my records have a home now, on a shelf where you can thumb through them instead of stacked on the floor! You don't have to crouch down to put in a CD or record! I threw out my non-working cassette player! And best of all, the sound is much, much clearer with the speakers off the ground. Spent last night with Bob, listening to old Robyn Hitchcock and older Pink Floyd. (Bob, a longtime Floyd fan, had never heard of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or indeed even known there were any records before Atom Heart Mother -- it was a privilege to introduce him to Syd Barrett's music.)
posted afternoon of October 28th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, October 27th, 2007
A link to Sybil Archibald's blog about her art and the art scene in New Jersey.
posted evening of October 27th, 2007: Respond
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My favorite thing about I Wanna Go Backwards, on first listening, may be the inclusion of "All I wanna do is fall in love" as a bonus track on Black Snake Dîamond Röle. I was not aware of that song before this afternoon but it is now one of my favorite Hitchcock songs. So I was glad to hear it -- all of that record was really nice to hear again, as was Eye (except I remembered how "Queen Elvis" kind of turned me off to that record -- but the good tracks more than make up for that). Also I was happy to see some key tracks from Eaten By Her Own Dinner on the bonus material for BSDR -- including the majestically weird "Happy the Golden Prince". ("So that's who I am!") The record of unreleased demo tapes, While Thatcher Mauled Britain (fantastic title), is going to take a few more listenings before I decide how worthwhile it is to me; most of the versions of songs I knew did not seem as good as the album versions, and I didn't listen that closely to the songs I did not know from elsewhere. But seriously, "All I wanna do is fall in love", what a magnificent song. Other extremely good things about listening to this collection: "Executioner", and multiple versions of "Raining Twilight Coast"....also: remember how I said that "She Doesn't Exist" doesn't do bitter as well as "Positively 4th Street"? "Nowhere Girl" is not aiming for quite the same thing as "4th Street" -- but it sure is bitter, and it sure is a fantastic song.
posted evening of October 27th, 2007: Respond
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This recipe is way better than I could expect it to be based on the amount of effort I put into making it. Specifically the ratio is Extremely good/Minimal effort. Bacon and Parsnip Soup- 2 or 3 yellow onions.
- Several strips of bacon
- A couple of cloves of garlic
- a head of flat leaf parsley chopped roughly
- 1 head fennel
- A half-pound or pound of parsnips
- carrots
Sweat the lightly salted chopped vegetables in the bacon, over low heat, for about 45 minutes. You could also add a bit of spice at this stage -- I used about a teaspoon of fennel seed, allspice or coriander might be good too. Add enough chicken stock to cover. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and let simmer uncovered for an hour and a half or longer. You may need to add more stock (or water, or white wine) while the soup is cooking. If you want to make the effort, it would not hurt to skim off some of the foam that will develop at the top of the soup after it has cooked an hour or so -- I did not, just mixed it back in, and the result tasted great -- the soup has a strong enough, rich enough flavor that the bitterness of that foam does not impact the overall taste of it much.
Update: Leftovers are also very good, though not quite in the league of the first serving.
posted evening of October 27th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 26th, 2007
O happy day! Robyn Hitchcock's box set I Wanna Go Backwards is published and arrives on my doorstep. Looks really good -- tomorrow I am going to spend some time savoring it. There is Black Snake Dîamond Röle, his first solo record, and which was the one album of his I got to know by heart when I was a teenager -- this print also includes nearly a whole nother record's worth of extra tracks, ones I love off of Eaten by her own Dinner, and ones I have never heard of -- I Often Dream of Trains, which a lot of Hitchcock fans seem to list as their favorite record; and Eye, which I love the songs that I'm familiar with but don't really know the record as a whole. Jer told me that when Eye came out he had started getting disillusioned with Robyn and the record reminded him of why he thought Robyn was a great musician. (I wasn't really listening to new records at that time because of not having a CD player.) And, and that's not all -- rounding out the set is a double album of demo tapes from the '80's titled While Thatcher Mauled Britain. Looks like this is going to be my afternoon activity tomorrow -- I had been planning to march against the war, but this fair-weather patriot is put off by forecasts of 100% chance heavy rain.
posted evening of October 26th, 2007: Respond
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I've been thinking a lot lately about translation of poetry and how difficult it is, and whether it is worth doing. I'm glad to say that tonight I read an utterly sublime specimen of the genre. It is Tove Jansson's Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My, translated by Sophie Hannah and Silvester Mazzarella -- it might be better to say something like "translated by Mazzarella and composed by Hannah" -- in any case they have done a phenomenal job. The book was written in 1952 and not translated until 2001. (In any case this version came out in 2001, and no reference is made to any earlier translation.) The text is integrated flawlessly with the illustrations -- whoever did the lettering ought to have been credited -- the result looks sort of like Dr. Seuss, sort of like Walt Kelly, sort of like Edward Gorey, but mostly like Jansson. Many thanks to Redfox for recommending that I check out Jansson's picture books. I had known of their existence for a couple of years but never sought them out.
posted evening of October 26th, 2007: 3 responses
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Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Recently Sylvia has been learning how to play with her second finger in the low position, mostly in the interests of playing songs in the key of G; her orchestra director and I have both been showing her how to play the second octave of the G scale and she's pretty interested in it. Well tonight we were working on "Etude", which I guess is the first song in Suzuki that uses that position, and she was spending a lot of time on getting it to sound right; then she said she wanted to play something for me, and did "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," in A, using a low second finger -- awesome, she just discovered minor keys! So I showed her how to play with a low first finger, and she could do the whole song in A minor.
posted evening of October 24th, 2007: Respond
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I heard this song playing in the restaurant where I was having lunch today and I thought it was fantastic.
posted afternoon of October 24th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, October 22nd, 2007
I was thinking about Romanticism today and what it might mean in the context of Fritz's life, and in the context of Hymns to Night -- Jerry was telling me he thought the poem (of which I had read him about the first paragraph) sounded profoundly connected to being in the world, and I said well, there's a lot of alienation in the poem as well -- I was talking about the suggestions throughout the poem (as much of it as I have read), that the Night and unconsciousness are a higher, more true reality than day, because in sleep the poet can clearly see his beloved free of the trappings of the earthly. This seemed to me like a pretty clear-cut Idealist metaphysics, that the realm of thought is more real than the shadows of the outside world -- I had a go at explaining Plato's allegory of the cave to Jerry -- it's hard for me to see how such a metaphysics could be anything besides alienating of the thinker from the world, which seems like a bad thing to me. And, this ties in with the perception I have that Romantic thinking (on which I have only the vaguest of a grasp) and Idealism are somehow decadent -- which is just something I dimly remember hearing somewhere but has become sort of an article of faith.
(Dumb typo corrected, and it occurs to me that "Allegory of the Café" would be an awesome name for a restaurant.)
posted evening of October 22nd, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, October 21st, 2007
Debate on how to translate the opening line of Hymns to Night is making me wonder if a bit of English grammar was lost (in my idiolect I mean) before I learned the language -- is "wake"/"awake" intransitive and "waken"/"awaken" transitive? That would make sense; but the four verbs seem totally synonymous to my ear -- I can't distinguish between when to use one or another. (Except I guess I would hardly ever use "awake" as a verb -- sounds very archaic -- except in the past tense.)
posted evening of October 21st, 2007: Respond
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