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Well, maybe not “afraid,” but perhaps a little spooked. It’s definitely one for the Coincidence Club.

As mentioned in the preceding post, I have recently finished “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf. Previously, I was merely commenting on an excerpt tangential to the plot, but for this post to make any sense I must offer a brief synopsis.

“Orlando” is an odd story in many ways. The eponymous protaganist starts out as the son of a rich noble some time around 1600. He has many adventures over the years, but a few of the odd things that happen are that when the story ends in 1928 Orlando is 36 years old, and that one morning sometime in the 17th century Orlando turned into a woman. That aside, one recurring theme throughout the book is an oak tree located on his/her estate and the poem she is composing and carries with her through the centuries called “The Oak Tree.”

The other day a friend asked if I had a certain old photo, so I pulled out the several boxes in the store room labelled “Bob’s stuff” and looked for it. No luck there, but I came across several old papers and posters which have not been seen for a decade or two. A couple of things compelled me to keep them out after the rest had been returned to the dusty shelves:some old family photos from my sister in an envelope post-marked in 1997, and a binder of some of my fragmentary scribbles from my younger days entitled “Prose 1979-1984,” which I’m surmising I gathered together in 1985 or so. Anyway, it’s odd that the very first document in the binder is a 3-page hand-written manuscript entitled “An Acorn.” I guess it’s some kind of psychedelic prose poem. It begins:

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A small capsule – smooth and shiny on one end, and covered on the other by a hard, rough, protective cap – fell out of the sky and landed in a vast open field. The planets revolved in their spheres many times and the acorn grew into an oak tree.

I kinda like that sci-fi capsule thingy at the beginning. It goes on to describe the life of the oak tree until:

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Finally the oak itself, perhaps due to the restlessness that develops over the centuries, lept into the sky in a giant spark of lightning, leaving behind a skeleton with foliage blazing in colors brighter than any autumn.

Waxing poetic that. Waxing! It goes on a few sentences after that, but alas, it ends with the totally dismal, “Finally the great oak was forgotten.”

So, an odd coincidence, no?

Recently I finished reading “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf. The following quote is somewhat off the general drift of the book’s theme but is something that keeps coming to mind.

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No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. It is not love of truth, but the desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter. 

This describes so well the root of so many of the problems we face today. I don’t really know how perople can believe so strongly in their creeds which are so obviously filled with contradictions and hypocrisy. And wearily, I quote again:

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But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water. 

Sometimes being the father of an eighth grader can lead to some new insights into familiar subjects. Case in point – the Gettysburg address. What I did not know before is that there are a number of different versions, i.e. five manuscripts with slight variations.
The version carved in stone at the Lincoln Memorial begins

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

and ends with

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… we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is the so-called Bliss version which was a copy Lincoln wrote and gave to a Colonel Bliss in the year after the address was given.

Another version is the so-called Hay draft, which Lincoln gave to his secretary, John Hay (no relation) the day after the speech.

It begins

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

That first comma seems to me to create a very satisfying pause. The Hay draft ends

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…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The most notable difference here is the absence of “under God” – a phrase that was also once absent (until 1954) from the Pledge of Allegiance.

The question came up upon hearing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Did the dormouse really say “Feed your head”? The answer, found here, is “no.”

Also answered is the Mad Hatter’s riddle “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” which I have always wondered about. Actually, Lewis Carroll meant it to have no answer – it was the Mad Hatter after all – but several suggestion have been made. My favorite is “Because Poe wrote on both.”

We made the trek to the ATL on Saturday to see Mission of Burma at the Earl. Vanessa “sat in” with them for one number, Pylon’s “Feast on my Heart.” It was a really good version. Perfect really. Who knows… maybe we’ll get to see a video of it. Sloan was there taping.

For a short history of the recording of Scottish music, read “Beltona Records and their role in recording Scottish music.” It includes such gems as:

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During more than 110 years of existence the British recording industry has recorded thousands of artists performing in a bewildering range of styles and genres. Driven by the profit motive, it actively sought to cater for every market that could be identified; if they could press and sell 200 copies (or fewer) of a record for a profit they would certainly feel it worthwhile to do so. The hope was that customers, having seen a record they would like in a catalogue or supplement, would then buy a gramophone on which to play it, which would in turn, hopefully lead to the sales of more records.

Now that’s a business plan!

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Tom Walker, born in Dundee in 1888, had worked for Murdoch’s since 1914 in the capacity of salesman for the whole of Scotland and so had a thorough knowledge of the Scottish musical scene. It seems highly probable that he was the man who persuaded the Murdoch family to change their marketing strategy from trying to be all things to all people to being a brand that appealed primarily to Scots. In the space of a couple of years (1927-29) the percentage of Scottish repertoire shifted from 23% to 75% and that of native artists from 44% to 92%. In itself this was significant but what was just as important was a move to a more vernacular style.

And a marketing strategy.

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An important session took place in July 1929 when the bothy ballad singer Willie Kemp made his first records. Beltona was the first record company to record this genre and remained so until the post war period. Willie and his cousin George Morris were to remain popular for many years; indeed some of their material was re-issued on LP. Their versions of The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre, The Barnyards of Delgaty, Drumgeldie and many other songs probably helped to keep the tradition alive and perhaps provided the inspiration for many ‘folk’ artists.

Willie Kemp… remember him?

Here’s a long article about Ms. Newsom and Ys. With lots of detail about everything. Especially interesting is a section about rhythm.

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What Stork taught Newsom was rhythm. In particular, she taught her some interlocking figures based on the kora, a stringed lute-like harp-thing made of calabash and cowhide that’s used by the wandering West African bards known as griots. Like nearly all West African music—and like essentially no classical Western music—kora music is largely polymetric, which means that each hand is following a different meter, or rhythmic pattern. The basic pattern that Stork taught Newsom is two (or four) beats against three.

Don’t miss it. This greatest disco song eva. Sally Shapiro’s “Anorak Christmas”. Listen at mySpace or download the gold right here.

Added note: Anorak is not a place as I originally assumed, but another word for parka (hooded jacket). Also, according to wikipedia, it is a slang term for “nerd” – which is also slang.

It was really one of those graphic stock alerts, but the subject line was intriguing. “AV3X is the brainwave technology that is a complete sensory experience.”

Oh wait! The AV3X actually exists. It’s a relaxation DVD.

Free demo here. It’s mostly ambient sounds and flashing lights… like a disco without a beat. “Not for use by seizure prone individuals.”

Whatever the astrological meaning of Pluto is (transformation, death and rebirth), we can all agree that its cultural meaning entails the god of the underworld and death in general. How odd then that in the very year that astronomers down-graded Pluto’s status as a planet, the news for the last week of the year is dominated by funerals (i.e. James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein.)

A. Che Why posted his little song “Galaxy Day” to commemorate the sun’s transit of the galactic center on Dec. 18 and mentioned that “Pluto’s on the same spot. Maybe we’ll see if it matters or not.” It’s hard to say, but coincidence clubbers everywhere can ponder the symbolic situation.

Think about how photography has changed in the digital age. In the film age, the photographer’e eye created well-composed photos. In the digital age, the editor’s eye takes primacy. Look at 100 photos and pick out the good ones.

Awe is a Middle English word with roots in Old Norse. It is interesting to note the difference between its two most common usages today; awesome (the ultimate praise - although it is prone to be used sarcastically) and awful (quite the opposite of praise).

 And then there’s “awww” – the reaction to something overwhelmingly cute, like a fluffy bunny.

An e-mail with the subject “My sweetheart friend…”, in addition to providing a link that will make me the BEST OF THE BEST on xmas night, included this:

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The editor  was a well-read man and  able to make  skilful reference to
the  ancient historians,  such as  the  famous Philo  of Alexandria  and the
brilliantly educated Josephus  Flavius, neither of  whom mentioned a word of
Jesus’ existence. With a display  of solid erudition, Mikhail  Alexandrovich
informed  the  poet  that  incidentally,  the passage  in Chapter  44 of the
fifteenth book of  Tacitus’  Annals, where  he  describes the  execution  of
Jesus, was nothing but a later forgery.
     The poet, for  whom everything  the  editor was  saying was  a novelty,
listened attentively  to  Mikhail  Alexandrovich, fixing him with  his  bold

from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”

Joanna Newsom’s concert at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta was astounding. To see her hands on the harp is like watching someone pull notes out of thin air. (Cell photo of her harp on stage after the show.)

She introduced the fourth song she played as “an old Scottish folksong” and proceeded to sing “Ca’ the yowes” by Robert Burns. (!) Then she played all of her new album “Ys”.

Added: here is a YouTube viddy the song.

In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Outkast’s Andre Benjamin described how he sometimes writes songs by recording himself playing guitar and singing “baby talk”. He later listens to the recording and figures out what words he was saying.

Speaking in tongues is common among Pentacostals, but is apparently frowned upon by Baptists, as shown in this news story: Texas Seminary Bans Promotion of Speaking in Tongues.

Coincidence? You decide.

I heard this song on WUOG and after a little searching found this video on YouTube. It’s call “The Littlest Bird” by The Be Good Tanyas (from Canada I think). The song was released in 2000, but it was the first time I heard it.
Props to Erin at WUOG for playing a bunch of good songs and for actually posting the playlist on their web site.

“Alt-country” isn’t usually my bag, but this just goes to show that the genre doesn’t really mean that much. A good song is a good song.

So here’s a coincidence for the newly reformed Coincidence Club.

Two bizarre flaming crashes, both occuring on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 11, 2006.

1. New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle is killed when his small plane crashed into 40-story apartment building in New York City at 2:45 p.m. AP story here.
2. “WATKINSVILLE – A man rammed his truck into a rural barn Wednesday afternoon and apparently burned to death as flames engulfed the building, the climax to a bizarre series of events that one investigator said was the strangest he’d ever seen… The bizarre series of events began to unfold sometime before 3 p.m. ” First story from the Athens Banner-Herald here.

Maybe someone can crack that one.

The man in the truck was later identified as a retired UGA coaching assistant.

The symbolic situation here can be titled as “crash and burn.”

Here’s some gruesome symbolism: on the previous Saturday – October 7 – the sports teams these men were associated with suffered disasterous defeats. The highly-favored Yankees were eliminated from the American League Championship Series by the Detroit Tigers. And the previously unbeaten Georgia Bulldogs fell 51 to 33 to the Tennessee Volunteers.

An interesting article in the New Yorker about the Mass-Observation movement in England from 1937 to 1945, which I never knew about before (but then there’s a lot I don’t know).

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The first to daydream about an “anthropology of ourselves” was Charles Madge, a young man with a long face, slender fingers, beautiful manners, and a steely will. At Cambridge, he had studied English with I. A. Richards, best known for giving his students unsigned poems to get their unprejudiced responses, and had joined the Communist Party. After Madge left school, Yeats put two of his poems in the “Oxford Book of Modern Verse,” and Eliot arranged a day job for him as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. On the night of November 30, 1936, London’s Crystal Palace—the iron-and-glass home of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and a triumph of Victorian capitalism—burned down. Madge, then twenty-four, had been mixing with England’s Surrealists, who, following Freud, saw significance in accidents, and he started to wonder if there could be a meaning in the destruction of such an iconic building. Perhaps, by documenting events that shook public consciousness, one could make society aware of its unexamined myths and fantasies, and thus free to change them. For this kind of liberation, the French Surrealist André Breton had explained, “poetry must be created by everyone.” So Madge had started to plan a movement that he called “Popular Poetry,” to be spread by “Coincidence Clubs” throughout Great Britain. The fire provided a perfect opportunity, particularly since, soon afterward, the news broke that Edward VIII was being forced to choose between his crown and his not yet divorced lover, Wallis Simpson. Coincidence? Now a double omen hung over Britain. The press had delayed reporting the abdication crisis until the last minute—exactly the kind of society-wide repression that the Surrealists wanted to break…

In a letter to the New Statesman published on January 2, 1937, Madge announced that he and his friends intended to crack “the Crystal Palace-Abdication symbolic situation,” and asked for help with the collection of evidence. “Only mass observations can create mass science,” he wrote, and gave his address.

Read the whole thing here.

Robert Burns and Virginia Woolf were born on January 25. Colette and I have January 28. And on January 29 we have Germaine Greer, the controversial feminist.

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Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

as quoted from “The Female Eunuch” in the article Romance in the Information Age.

I’ve always meant to read something by Colette, since she and I share the same birthday, and the other day my eye fell on one of her books while I was browsing at Jackson St. Books so I bought it.
But wouldn’t you know it… just when I decide to post something from it on my neglected blog… thers’s some trouble with the server and it’s down all weekend. I finally got it fixed this morning. So here’s an excerpt from the second page of “The Vagabond” first published in 1910, from the Enid McLeod translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1955. She declares her faith in luck or chance.

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Chance, my master and my friend will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him – and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

Faith, that is what it is, genuine faith, as blind as it sometimes pretends to be, with all the dissembling renunciations of faith, and that obstinacy which makes it continue to hope even at the moment of crying “I am utterly forsaken!” There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.