(new totem animal)
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Ear education:
major listening programme going on as 'research' on Greil Marcus & Harry Smith with potential extension into teaching next year (or is it just a good excuse to go out & buy CDs?)
(further suggestions and recommendations gratefully received)
Bob Dylan
- Blonde on Blonde
- World Gone Wrong
- Modern Times
- Nashville Skyline
- John Wesley Harding
- Self Portrait
Howlin' Wolf Moanin' the Blues
Robert Johnson The Complete Recordings
Sister Rosetta Tharpe Complete Recorded Works 1938-44
Frank Hutchison Volume I 1926-29
Kurt Weill - Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Happy End, (all with Lotte Lenya) plus a Harmonia Mundi recording of the Berliner Requiem
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Creative filing
Creative arranging
as poetics
as technique
as joyous creation
(Joseph Cornell)
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"Now it would be astonishing if what I've just described were on Dylan's mind when he wrote the song. That's not the point. The point is that Dylan's songs can serve as metaphors, enriching our lives, giving us random insight into the myths we carry and the present we live, intensifying what we've known and leading us toward what we never looked for, while at the same time enforcing an emotional strength upon those perceptions by the power of the music that moves with the words. Weberman's way of hearing, or rather seeing, is more logical, more linear, and perhaps even more correct, but it's sterile. Mine is not an answer but a possibility, and I think Dylan's music is about possibilities rather than facts, like a statue that is not an expenditure of city funds but a gateway to a vision."
(from 'Breath Control, 1970-1974', Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus)
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There were things under things, as well as things inside things.
(H.D. Tribute to Freud)
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found collage 1
found collage 2
found collage 3
found collage 4
found collage 5
found collage 6
found collage 7
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"demon-strations of the hermetic critique lockt up in Art"
Jess (quoted by Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History)
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"intersignes, (as Massignon calls them), unusual warnings, coincidences (as historians call them, to avoid them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, constellations latent in the sky of thought."
(Marcus quoting Robert Cantwell, as above)
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"Sit in a room and read - and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done . Don't say, "Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did" - and don't bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view..."
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
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All the tired horses in the sun
How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done?
Hmm
(Bob Dylan, off Self Portrait)
I listened to this today for the first time - hearing "writing" for "ridin' ".
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applemint for new potatoes
spearmint for cooking
peppermint for tea
winter savoury
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practising the pronunciation of the students' names for Graduation - some have seven, even eight, others a mere fore- and family name. The names are drawn from a variety of languages - French, Italian, English ... making each an exercise in performance & proununciation - a micro poem of sorts.
A geography of the mouth.
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Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
(from 'Please', Robert Creeley)
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"There are certain basic resonances (like in Buddhism) that can be accented - that's what a mantra does: each syllable penetrates a different realm of existence. It's pretty evident in Dylan's work, particularly in concert, that there are held vowels; and the purpose of the intentional holds or holding patterns must be to "hit the pitch co-ordinate" (that's Duncan again). I hear that a lot in Dylan's work - where he finds the word, then begins to bend the vowel until it hits the pitch, until it rings."
(Lisa Jarnot in The Verse Book of Interviews)
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(Joseph Campbell)
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"He might have been talking Greek. The beautiful tone of his voice had a way of taking an English phrase or sentence out of its context (out of the associated context, you might say, of the whole language) so that, although he was speaking English without a perceptible trace of accent, yet he was speaking a foreign language. The tone of his voice, the singing quality that so subtly permeated the texture of the spoken word, made that spoken word live in another dimension, or take on another colour, as if he had dipped the grey web of conventionally woven thought and with it, conventionally spoken thought, into a vat of brewing - or held a strip of that thought, ripped from the monotonous faded and outworn texture of the language itself, into the bubbling cauldron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed blue or scarlet, a new colour to the old grey mesh, a scrap of thought, even a cast-off rag, that would become hereafter a pennant, a standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering aloft on a pole, to lead an army." °
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