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Thursday, March 20th, 2008
I heard a segment about Parsi New Year (which is today! Happy New Year!) on NPR this morning. (Chuckled a little when Freddy Mercury was mentioned as a famous Parsi.) It made me think, how many cultures with different New Year's days are there? Presently active and celebrating, it can't be that many -- less than 20 I would think offhand -- but historically there must be hundreds. So possibly every day of the calendar could be named as the New Year's day of some culture.
 (Thinking further: boy, the vernal equinox is an excellent day to celebrate the New Year.)
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
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We're playing tonight at Tierney's, in Montclair -- if you're in the neighborhood, come listen!
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Listening to "Sweet to Mama" in the car today, and then replaying it in my head all day at my desk. And thinking, that's really a song I could play pretty well on my violin. I came up with a nice-sounding rhythm part consisting of an eigth-note rest followed by a triplet of sixteenths followed by eighths -- it sounds catchy and unusual. So when I got home I tried playing it on my violin -- and was a bit disappointed in the sound. Put it down, and an hour or so later I wanted to try it again, but only the viola was handy -- so I picked it up and was amazed by how natural it sounded. The key is G minor, which I think fits just as well to a violin as a viola; but something about the lower register is just fantastic for this song.
Update: Well, tonight I tried it on the violin in D minor and it sounded just as good -- so it was a matter of finger positions rather than register. Unfortunately it seems pretty hard for me to sing it in either G or D, I'm going to need to work out fingerings for it in some other key.
posted evening of March 18th, 2008: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Songs
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Handy to know: if you write to stderr from a CGI application (note: when I say "CGI application", I don't actually know what that means -- what I mean is, an application invoked by the http server in response to a GET or POST request and which uses environment variables to get information about the request), the output will go into the http server's log file. At least it will if the http server is Apache.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
New York Magazine reprints a hot, filthy poem attributed to W.H. Auden.... A little searching online makes the attribution appear to be correct -- although Auden denied authorship, this page says "a copy of it in Auden's own hand showed up among the papers of Christopher Isherwood. Kenneth Rexroth said 'Wysten told me that he had learned more about writing poetry from writing the Platonic Blow than from anything he had ever written.'"
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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This evening and yesterday evening, I am (amazingly) starting to see progress towards a clean basement -- much of the sawdust is swept or vacuumed up, my bench is clear of tools and I'm reasonably clear on where the tools are located; I found a couple of tools that I've been wondering where they were; I'm just about ready to start work on the repeatedly delayed fence for the front yard. I've built it in my head enough times now, it should be fairly straightforward getting it into physical existence.
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Carpentry
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So Bear Stearns is done for. (I did a fair amount of work for them in my first job.) Good analysis from John Quiggin.... More from Jared Bernstein. Nouriel Roubini asserts that it is not in the Fed's power to be of much help here.
posted morning of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, March 16th, 2008
...this eye was there to ease my passage into this "metaphysical experiment", which I would later decide bore the hallmarks of a dream; it was there, above all, to be my guide.Utter silence. I knew at once that the experiment on which I was about to embark had something to do with that thing my profession had taken away from me and everything to do with that emptiness I felt inside me. A man's nightmares are never so real as when he's starved of sleep! But this was not a nightmare; it was sharper, clearer, almost mathematical in its precision. I know I'm empty inside. This was what I was thinking... the thought lingered. Inside it was an open door; I walked toward it, and like the English girl who followed a rabbit through a gap in the hedge, I soon found myself falling into a new world.
... What I created first was not the eye, first I created Him, the man I wished to be. It was He -- the man I wished to be -- who stepped back to cast His stifling and terrifying gaze upon me.
I am wondering about Celâl. At first The Black Book seemed to be mainly about Galip, with Celâl a minor side character, present (or "not present") for comic effect. But his essays are really starting to resonate.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Black Book
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That fantastic epigraph I quoted, that Pamuk uses for the head of Chapter 1 of The Black Book, turns out to come from inside the book, from a column of Celâl's (specifically, Chapter 8, "The Three Musketeers"). Oops -- now I feel a little embarrassed about searching for the source of this marvelous line. Pamuk has been playing tricks on me again! I don't think I have seen this from any other author, the way he uses epigraphs and even dedications that are internal to the book. Kind of makes my head spin.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
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Sylvia's dance teacher invited us to a rehearsal of the show her troupe is working on currently. Wow! I am excited now about going to the performance. Lovely bodies in motion -- though we were so close to the dancers I had a bit of a hard time seeing the whole group of them as a unit -- I was just focusing in on individuals. Listening to the music of the first few dances, I was thinking "These are fantastic Dylan songs! How come I've never heard them? I gotta find out what album they're from." But turns out they are not by Dylan at all, but by Ray LaMontagne.
posted evening of March 16th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
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