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Sunday, January 31st, 2010
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
The transition from étude to song seems to have a lot to do with rhythm -- when I am playing a tune for practice I am very focussed on playing it straight, with beats falling at the correct place and durations of notes accurate, etc. When I am playing a song there is more room for syncopation and swinging.
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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Saturday, January 30th, 2010
If nothing else, La sombra del viento is certainly broadening my understanding of Spanish tenses. For instance, I did not know there was a present continuous in Spanish -- and it does not seem to be very common, certainly not as ubiquitous as in English, but occasionally a character will say something like "¡Lo está inventando!" ("You're making that up!")* -- Daniel said this to FermÃn a few chapters ago, I've forgotten just what the context was. And today I see for the first time something that looks a lot like the English future progressive** ("going to ...") when FermÃn says "Me parece que va siendo hora de que nos dejemos de remilgos y de picar al portal como si pidiésemos limosna. En este asunto hay que entrar por la puerta de atrás." -- which I am reading as, "It seems to me that there's going to come a time when we will need to leave aside our squeamishness and stop knocking on the door as if we were begging for alms. In this matter it's necessary to enter through the back door." And a little later, he says "Pues vaya desempolvando el disfraz de monaguillo" -- something like "Then go dust off your altar-boy disguise" but expressed with that same combination of ir + -ndo, "You are going to dust off." In English you can say "You are going to" do something in an imperative voice, maybe that's what is going on here.
In general FermÃn's language is a lot more flowery than that of the other characters, and harder to read without a dictionary. I believe Daniel remarked on this at some point right around the time FermÃn was first introduced. I'm thinking FermÃn is Ruiz Zafón's nod to Picaresque literature, he is intended as an archaism.
 * More precisely, "¡Todo esto se lo está inventando usted!" -- the context is that FermÃn is telling him the indigent hospital's hearse wagon had been donated "by a company from Hospitalet de Llobregat specializing in butcher products, of dubious reputation, which years later was involved in a scandal." FermÃn replies in turn that his "gifts of imagination do not extend so far." ** Is this the correct name for what I'm talking about?
posted morning of January 30th, 2010: 2 responses
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Friday, January 29th, 2010
John and I had a good time practicing tonight -- we will be playing at the open mic at Menzel Violins on Thursday, the songs we play will most likely be "Man of Constant Sorrow", "Meet Me in the Morning", and "Walk Right In" -- here is a recording we cut of "Walk Right In". Sound quality is still pretty ragged but it is nonetheless, I think, a fun song to listen to. (And to play, of course.)
Another song we played that was a lot of fun, was "The Battleship of Maine," by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers. Same tune as "Up on Blueridge Mountain," this is an anti-war song from the '20's.
posted evening of January 29th, 2010: Respond
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At The Millions, Garth Hallberg discusses Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor -- the "Difficult Book par excellence"; in the course of this discussion he describes the experience of reading difficult books with marvelous concision: "A willingness to let things wash over you can be the difference between sublimity and seasickness." Yes! I love this; I am adding it to my list of epigraphs for the site. (via Conversational Reading.)
posted evening of January 29th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, January 28th, 2010
 What do I have to say about Salinger? Not much really -- I loved reading his books as a young man, they have not stayed with me very much though, except for a couple of his short stories. A great writer certainly, but not someone I have spent very much time thinking about in my adult life. I don't want to let the occasion of his passing go unmentioned though -- the books felt extremely important at the time I was reading them, and they definitely played a role in my growing up as a reader. So I'll link to a couple of other bloggers who have more to say about him than I.
- Alvy Singer looks forward to "the upcoming war between New York publishers over thousands of unpublished items for the pleasure of completists (us)."
- Manosuelta recalls reading "The Laughing Man".
- SEK draws some parallels between reading Salinger and reading Zinn. (...And Hilobrow imagines the History of the United States told by Holden C.)
- Michael Sweeney reprints a piece he wrote last year, thanking J.D. for his books.
Also, the New Yorker's archivist John Michaud posts links to every story Salinger published in the magazine. (The stories themselves are, however, only available to subscribers.) And the best obituary comes (of course) from The Onion.
posted evening of January 28th, 2010: Respond
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| At The Great Whatsit today, I read S. Godfrey's photoessay about his friend Finley decorating garbage cans with wallpaper, with a link to an NY Times article about it. What a great idea! Finley has a gorgeous web site of her own, natch, where you can see some more of her junk-themed art. |  |
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posted evening of January 28th, 2010: Respond
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 The Saramago Foundation announces that a new edition of The Stone Raft will be published, with all profits given to the Red Cross's relief efforts in Haïti.
Update: no, I misread that. The foundation is not donating all profits to the Red Cross, but rather "the entire 15€ purchase price of the book" -- rather more substantial a commitment.
posted morning of January 28th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Today at Paul Habeeb's Latest Research, I find a link to the site of Jim Kazanjian -- whose otherworldly photography makes me think of nothing so much as of Escher, as if Escher had come back to life and gotten himself a digital camera and a graphics workstation...
So, wow; that is nice to know about. But on a whim I follow Mr. Habeeb's via link, to Christopher Higgs' journal bright stupid confetti -- and find myself overwhelmed by the insane quantity of beautiful, interesting pictures -- paintings, photography, posters... surrealistic videos... lectures on poetry (in English) by Borges... I'm pretty much blown away by this site.
 Update: More info about Jim Kazanjian at artistaday.com, where he was profiled last month.
posted evening of January 27th, 2010: 2 responses
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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
From Sundance 2010: In this short doc, T.G. Herrington follows "Mr. Okra" around New Orleans selling vegetables from his truck. Ain't no use in cookin if yo ain't gonna cook wi' fresh food. (I'm never quite sure how I feel about subtitles for English dialect -- on the one hand they can be really useful, but they can also be distracting and seem patronizing.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January 24th, 2010
In emails last week, John and I have been talking about how to approach our weekly rehearsals, with the thought in mind that we'd like to have a good enough sound to play some shows before too long, and make recordings. What we eventually came up with was a two-pronged approach: if we start with a small group of songs that we think of as our book, and spend some time on those songs every week trying to get them to sound really polished, then we can also spend some time each week playing new songs, songs we haven't tried and are thinking about, or songs we enjoy that occur to one of us on the spur of the moment... So that's how we did it on Saturday and it worked out pretty well. The songs we are beginning with as our book are:
- Jockey Full of Bourbon
- Bonaparte medley
- Louisville Burglar
- Man of Constant Sorrow
- California Stars
- Meet Me in the Morning
- Walk Right In
- St. James Infirmary
- Angel From Montgomery
This is a nice mix of musical styles and of songs he sings with songs I sing. We played every one of these (except St. James I think) on Saturday, and they are in general really starting to come together. And we had time left over to fool around -- we did a couple of Dylan songs, one by George Harrison, one or two by Neil Young; also "Praying Mantis" by Don Dixon, which we've done before and which might be a candidate for the "book" list...
posted evening of January 24th, 2010: Respond
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