At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Check it out. Here are a couple of recordings I've done in the past few weeks, 3 songs and a couple of Hobo Nickel plugs -- Electric Ragtime!
Syncopations are no indication of
light or trashy music, and to shy
bricks at "hateful ragtime" no longer
passes for musical culture. To
assist amateurs in in giving the
"Joplin Rags" that weird and
intoxicating effect intended by the
composer is the object of this
work.
Scott Joplin School of Ragtime, 1908
posted morning of August 9th, 2015: 1 response ➳ More posts about Guitar
So I've been mentioning it for a while now... At last Hobo Nickel is a physical object! Check it out:
Hobo Nickel by The Modesto Kid can be got from CDBaby! Getting good feedback so far locally. I'm sending out a couple of review copies, ever hopeful... :)
It is a mistake when finger picking to hold your right wrist in place relative to the strings. When you do that -- I have even gone as far as to hold my forearm against the face of the guitar to anchor my wrist -- all of the force for your fingers and thumb striking the strings will come from the muscles of your palm and fingers. If instead you incorporate motion of your wrist and forearm, you will bring the muscles of your arm into play -- and simultaneously bring into play the mass of your hand and wrist, increasing the momentum of the picking digit. All this translates into speed and power. The trade-off at first is your playing can get sloppy, you will need time to adjust and relearn the muscle memory of the strings' positions. But that does come with time.
!
