a conversation i actually heard today in Graham Memorial

Lady: “I’ve been DJ-ing a lot more, lately – you see, we just started this club.”

Guy: “Yeah?”

Lady: “Yeah, when they started it, they wanted to have, well, actual, real, hipsters – not these fake ones.”

Guy: “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

things that will always be

Having listened to so many story-tapes about the lives of die Komponisten, as a child, these two cities will always be

1) Venice, the Queen of the Sea!

and

2) Vienna, City of Music!

with certain associated metrical patterns, of course.

this message, and its remininscense / city-focus, brought to you by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood.

things i’ve been unable to get over / overcome in the past few days.

1) after reading Death in Venice, the need to reread the Phaedrus

2) while working a Klezmer show, the desire to coyly perform agricultural/household chores, some-undefined-where in eastern europe. Galicia, let’s say.

3) out of nowhere, the need to know what hysteron proteron is.

4) embarrassingly, eating almost half of the halloween candy intended for the neighbor-children. (Charge: you’re turning into your mother. Response: no, I’m not! Alternate response: so what. I like my mother.)

5) how intense this painting is:

Salvador Dali – “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”

or maybe it’s just pomegranate season.

writing on the windows on cold mornings is how I learned the alphabet.

it’s a method I still employ when giving myself advice.

you in your autumn sweater

after Mary Weaver’s Mrs. Darcy Cardigan,

in Mission Falls 1824 Wool, on US size 7s.

Textured: Seed Stitch on the borders, Garter on the hems, Twisted Rib on the arms, and Mistake Rib ’round the waist.

and beautiful leather buttons. I’m pleased.

Fall Break

Greyson Highlands

…and a birthday cake shaped like a dragon.

Insert Interrobang Everywhere

I just found out about Tyto pollens, the Bahaman Barn-Owl

- 3 feet tall

- flightless

- lived on the Bahamas

- until the 16th century

A walking 3-foot owl, interacting with Spanish colonists

Everyone in the world needs to know about this

what’s funny

isn’t that the german word for reply is antwort,

but that when you get email replies from Germans, the subject line is prefaced by “AW”

as in, “AW: you’ve got mail!”

so endearing.

Gems.

(The musically unsophisticated can grasp this idea by reflecting that one can set virtually any Dickinson poem to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”)

- Barbara Newman, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard von Bingen and her World

Politics III

listening to Aaron Copeland’s Lincoln Portrait, as performed by the UNC Symphony, last night, was struck by a feeling of American liberty-loving patriotism usually only felt when: watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War, reading Milton’s Areopagitica, or hiking in the Appalachians.

People I’d like to hear performing it:

- James Earl Jones (Mufasa/Darth Vader, as Lincoln? Yes!)

- Paul Newman

- Barack Obama (naturally)

- Dr. Miller