Contemporary Music

Stumbled across a new Web site when looking for information about Elliott Carter's solo guitar piece, "Changes": Art of the States which, whatever else it may be, is an online anthology of 20th and 21st century American music.

Favorites so far include "Becoming Becoming" by Linda Dusman, "In the Name of the Holocaust" by John Cage, and, of course, "Changes".

It's an amazing site. How they got permissions for all of these things, I have no idea. We're not talking about excerpts—you hear the whole composition.

Library of Congress

The Edge of the American West has an interesting short history of the Library of Congress.

One Number Says It All: 600

That's the percentage increase since Bush took office in what the government spends on paper shredding. Summary, and details and more details.

We're All Looking for Kindness

Then there's the email forwarded by the dating service so filled with longing and despair that you know something is broken inside her, that it's nothing you can fix, that it's so broken it would be dangerous to reply.

Love and Anger

A Kate Bush video I'd not seen before, from The Sensual World (1989) — the first of her albums I bought. It introduced me to the pleasure of discovering her earlier work and the pain of waiting four years for The Red Shoes (1993). Which was nothing like waiting the twelve years for Aerial (2005).

Non-Reading Group

Three of us from my old writing group meet (usually for drinks) as a non-reading group. We've been assiduously not reading Don Quixote for the last two years.

One of our number has branched out and joined a Reading Non-Group. Everyone is reading War and Peace, but they will never meet to discuss it.

What are you not reading or not meeting about?

Sometimes You're Special...

...and sometimes you're not.

The on-line dating service I've subscribed to has a quick "hey, I noticed you" feature. I got one today where the criterion for who she wanted to meet was a man between 3' and 8' in height. Period.

At 6' I just barely made the cut....

Umm, Maybe I Should Rephrase That...

It occurred to me—a split-second before I pressed ENTER—that maybe I didn't want to use "aleatoric" and "Oulipian" in my personal profile on a nationwide dating service.

Sweet jeebus, I'm bad at this stuff.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

MAL     You are very much lacking in imagination.
ZOË     I imagine that's so, sir.

— Out of Gas

The Mercy of the Fallen

This is my mood tonight. What's yours?

There's the wind and the rain
And the mercy of the fallen
Who say they have no claim to know what's right.
There's the weak and the strong
And the beds that have no answer
And that's where I may rest my head tonight.