belgianwaffle

(new totem animal)

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

Creative filing

Creative arranging

as poetics

as technique

as joyous creation

(Joseph Cornell)

"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)

There were things under things, as well as things inside things.

(H.D. Tribute to Freud)

found collage 1

found collage 2

found collage 3

found collage 4

found collage 5

found collage 6

found collage 7

"demon-strations of the hermetic critique lockt up in Art"

Jess (quoted by Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History)

"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)

"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)

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' ".

applemint for new potatoes

spearmint for cooking

peppermint for tea

winter savoury

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.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

(from 'Please', Robert Creeley)

"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)

Now, divine air! now is his soul ravished! Is it

not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out

of men's bodies?

(Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing)

Sister. Rosetta. Tharpe.

PAUSE AND ANNUNCIATE

(typed in red at the head of the student's Invocation script)

"The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you're told, with no courage for your own life."

(Joseph Campbell)

"Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... Nobody's going to hurt it. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player."

(Dylan quoted in Invisible Republic)