Jun. 11th, 2003

Ramble

Jun. 11th, 2003 06:27 pm
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Flipping through E's copy of Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, because it was there. (Been ages since I read those, too. And the stack gets bigger.) It occurs to me that this whole Welsh fascination goes back further than Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon cycle, further even than Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. It started with Swiftly Tilting Planet, with the legend of Madoc ap Owain Gwynedd setting sail to the West and eventually coming ashore in America.



Despite my general dislike of Henry David Thoreau, "On Civil Disobedience" isn't bad. 'That government governs best which governs not at all,' indeed. I'm a strong supporter of the idea that the less regulating the government does of my life the better.

But then, I'm a strong supporter of the idea that the less regulating anyone does of my life the better. I've never gotten on well with people who think they know what I should be doing with my time. Even when they're arguably right (such as elementary school).

Are all political arguments the result of people trying to force their own preferences on the rest of the world? This would go a long way towards explaining why there's not been any consensus as to the 'right' way to run a country.



The songs on the 5 Tracks website are actually in mp3 format, they just hide in your cache somewhere. (available in both normal-sized 128 kb/s and modem-friendly 32 kb/s formats) 'Verses' and 'Waiting For Blonde' are my favorites of the five.

And Warren Zevon's final (probably) album will be out the end of August, and Blue Man Group has tour dates for the next leg of their tour posted (relevant to people I know: July 7 at Merriwether Post in MD, July 16 in Boston, July 19 in Chicago, July 31 in St Louis, August 9 in San Diego, August 17 in Houston, August 26 in Raleigh. I'm thinking seriously about the July 7 concert. I'd be leaving here around noon and coming back immediately after the concert, though. (I'd drag E to the one in Raleigh for her birthday, but I've got that whole full-time-classes thing going down.)



Getting email from random people about my journal is pretty cool.



I actually sat down and did the math, and I've got six thousand words to write in the next two weeks. Put like that it doesn't sound like so much, except that half of that is a research paper that I'm not convinced I can get to the requisite length. Means I should stop goofing off and go write some more about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or maybe the genre oddities known as the 'Romances' in the Shakespeare canon.

Or maybe just go to Spiel.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug." --Mark Twain

There was enough lightning and cloudiness out on the way home from Spiel that E suggested we sit out on the back porch for a bit and watch the sky. The storm had mostly passed over; a few raindrops, but basically dry, and what lightning there was danced well over the horizon.
The clouds hung low enough, and were thick enough, that the flashes of lightning diffused a bit. Instead of jagged forks, it was thick fuzzy bright lines. Usually three or four in quick succession. Meanwhile, the lightning bugs played in the field below.
A row of streetlights marked the division between earth and sky. The light fog gave the whole scene an unearthly feel, as though I were looking through into the Otherworld.



Dylan Thomas is a poet I need to look more into; in addition to his innate coolness (from being Welsh), he gives the words a lyric rhythm that I've not found anywhere else. Even Yeats feels ... constrained, both by form and by my inability to give an Irish accent to the voice in my mind. And the imagery... my God, the imagery.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower )

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"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

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