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Greetings! (July 15, 2007)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.

Daryl Gregory


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Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

🦋 I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me...

But, but, so, what if they could listen, could talk back? Bartholo­mäus Traubeck of Linz has created an experiment treating a tree's rings as the groove of a record. You can read about it and listen to the music he played at TNW. (Thanks for the link, Knight!)

posted morning of January 22nd, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Music

Friday, January 20th, 2012

🦋 The bottom strings

I was once again unable to resist cutting up my fiddle, though I think with potentially better results (cf.) this time. I bought a new C string -- a Super Sensitive Red Label from Musician's Friend -- and found it a huge improvement on the string that had come with the instrument. Suddenly I wanted to play on the bottom strings which made me notice a problem with the bridge; namely, when I cut grooves for the strings I did not make enough space to accomodate the width of the C string. So I cut a little more away and have been playing almost exclusively for the past couple of practice sessions on the bottom 3 strings. See whatcha think of this recording I made of "Walkin After Midnight" : After Midnight by The Modesto Kid

posted evening of January 20th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

🦋 Hurrying back

Dora was hurrying now and wanting her lunch. She looked at her watch and found it was tea-time. She remembered that she had been wondering what to do; but now, without her thinking about it, it had become obvious. She must go back to Imber at once. Her real life, her real problems, were at Imber, and since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion. She bought a sandwich and took a taxi back to Paddington.
Reading Murdoch's The Bell lately, I have been conflicted as to how I feel about the characters. I identify with them at points; but they have an air of falseness around them, the characters and plot elements seem almost like scenery for Murdoch's philosophizing and fable-telling. Not sure I mean this as a point against the book -- I am liking the book a lot -- but it does seem like an important stylistic element.

Then again I got a similar vibe from The Little Stranger, which was pretty clearly not written for philosophical argument.

posted evening of January 19th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Iris Murdoch

🦋 Bridge Building

My 5th- and 6th-grade teacher (Jeanne Pollard, of Fremont Open Plan in Modesto) posted a photo of me with my bridge building team.

(I'm the one with the black hair.)

posted morning of January 19th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about the Family Album

Monday, January 16th, 2012

🦋 Let's Listen to

the Grateful Dead:

franklins tower 3-22-93

You're welcome (and thanks for the link, Jimmy!)

posted evening of January 16th, 2012: 1 response

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

🦋 Tescucho, Italy

I rode my bike down Muntaner to Diagonal. Parked it in front of the Dau al set gallery and rang Valerie's doorbell.

—When you come to the door, so you won't have to tell me who it is, ring three times in a row: ta, ta, ta. That way I'll know it's you. —that's what she had told me, the first day.

The door opened and I went upstairs. Valerie went over to the sofa with me as soon as I came in, she was moving her hands slowly in front of me, telling me her mother had been in the hospital since that afternoon, she feared the worst, that she had only come away from there to meet me, so that I would not come to an empty apartment and be scared.

She gave me a kiss on the cheek, paid me, and we left the apartment. Of course I didn't tell her any of what I'd been thinking about. I wasn't going to be seeing her anymore, surely; but I had left the mobile -- the lizards, the Gaudi mobile, on her sofa.

I have made a couple of revisions and have submitted the story to Words Without Borders. The biographical note I submitted:

Jeremy Osner is a computer programmer living in New Jersey. He came to Spanish translation late in life and has been learning the language as he learns the voices of the authors he has translated. Notable among these is Venezuelan Slavko Zupcic, a psychiatrist now living in Valencia, Spain, whose stories examine the gaps in understanding at the borders between people.

This story is from Mr. Zupcic's recently published collection, Médicos Taxistas.

posted evening of January 15th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Slavko Zupcic

🦋 Zupcic podcast

I have been struggling for a couple of weeks with translating a trilogy of stories by Zupcic about his character Vinko Spolovtiva... took a break from that to work on "Tescucho, Italia" from his new book Médicos taxistas and I was able in just a few days to get a working version together that I think reads quite well. You can listen to me reading it if you like; and hopefully soon you will be able to read it published somewhere!

posted afternoon of January 15th, 2012: 1 response
➳ More posts about Readings

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

🦋 Want

Zoe Leonard's political wishes (found at towleroad.com, and thanks for the link, ragebunny!):

I want a dyke for president. I want a person
with aids for president and I want a fag for
vice president and I want someone with no
health insurance and I want someone who grew
up in a place where the earth is so saturated
with toxic waste that they didn't have a
choice about getting leukemia. I want a
president that had an abortion at sixteen and
I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two
evils and I want a president who lost their
last lover to aids, who still sees that in
their eyes every time they lay down torest,
who held their lover in their arms and knew
they were dying. I want a president with no
airconditioning, a president who has stood on
line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare
office and has been unemployed and layed off and
sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported.
I want someone who has spent the night in the
tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and
survived rape. I want someone who has been in
love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has
made mistakes and learned from them. I want a
black woman for president. I want someone with
bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has
eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who
crossdresses and has done drugs and been in
therapy. I want someone who has committed
civil disobedience. And I want to know why this
isn't possible. I want to know why we started
learning somewhere down the line that a president
is always a clown: always a john and never
a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker,
always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

(Check out this group reading of the piece, in English and in Danish!)

posted afternoon of January 14th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Politics

🦋 Poem and Image

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

William Carlos Williams

posted morning of January 14th, 2012: 6 responses
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures

🦋 Rag Mama Rag -- Kweskin, Muldaur, Helm

Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band is the group that got me listening to old-time music. Not the first old-time I listened to, certainly; but when I heard Maria d'Amato (who would marry the group's banjo player and become one of the great popular music voices of the 60's and 70's as Maria Muldaur) sing "Richland Woman Blues" -- this was in the late 90's sometime, after I had come home from a Christmas visit to my parents with a cassette dub of two records, Jug Band Music and See Reverse Side for Title -- was a signal moment for me, it was when I knew what kind of music I wanted to play, what I wanted to sound like.

It was fun to happen on that Wyos cover of "Rag Mama Rag" last night -- that was one of the first songs I learned to play when I was taking lessons in finger-style guitar from Eric Frandsen. I've added a couple of tracks to the end of my You Ain't Goin Nowhere playlist, ending up with The Band's song "Rag Mama Rag". And re. The Band, exciting news! Ellen and I are going to see Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble at the Wellmont Theater on Friday the 10th.

Update: Midnight Ramble show in Montclair is postponed until April.

posted morning of January 14th, 2012: 1 response
➳ More posts about Cover Versions

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