Battle of the Decades

Mariah a strong finish, picking up two votes at the end to finish with three, not quite enough to catch the dead-heated Maria, Kenny and Gopher. Sam with two votes, and my one lonely pick of Enrique,

This time around:

40s on 4
Teddy Wilson v/Billie Holiday
My Man
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/2009/04/little-billie-holiday.html

50s on 5
Bobby Rydell
Sway


60s on 6
The Zombies
She's Not There


70s on 7
Spinners
Could It Be I'm Falling


80s on 8
Cutting Crew
I've Been In Love Before


90s on 9
Nirvana
All Apologies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTRXzkRis-s



Easy to knock the first one out this time. Bobby Rydell, reminding us that the decade that brought us rock and roll also brought us some of the sappiest performers ever. I had actually never heard Bobby Rydell do this song before -- only Dean Martin, and it was bearable when Dino did it, but not by much.

Nirvana, Cutting Crew and the Spinners are all real professionals, even though Nirvana were supposed to be the anti-professionals, and they all made really tight records. Nirvana was the best of the three, but the Spinners had the coolest outfits.

Speaking of cutting crews, could it be possible for anyone to cut the crew of Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson? The Zombies give them a good fight. They didn't have as many great songs as the Beatles, the Stones, or the Kinks, but the ones they had were marvels -- tight writing, tight harmonies, songs taken in surprising directions that had the inevitability of greatness. And Peter Jones points out that in spite of Teddy, this is not Billie's best take of "My Man." But it's still Billie for me.

A little Billie Holiday

...and Teddy Wilson.

Listen here.

New Examiner Post

Great Beginnings Monday: T. S. Eliot

History and Preservation Plan for Opus 40

Kim Barker's Master's thesis, Harvey Fite's Sculptural Landscape Opus 40: A History and Preservation Plan, is now up on our Opus 40 website.

For Opening Day

I Still Love Baseball



Bring the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn

New Examiner Post: Data rot

Is anything secure?

Death of poetry? Again?

Why are fewer people reading poetry? Newsweek poses the question -- is poetry on the way out?

A few thoughts: Newsweek says

the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry's readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

Sixteen years isn't a hugely long time. Who was all that popular back in 1993? Someone, I guess. In any case, if these figures are right, they're indicative of a cycle more than anything else.

Newsweek goes on to say:

Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of the Office of Research and Analysis, says the agency can't answer with certainty why fewer adults are reading poetry. He and others believed the opposite would be true, largely because of poetry's expansion onto the Internet. "In fact," he says, "part of our surmise as to why fiction reading rates seem to be up might be due to greater opportunities through online reading. But we don't know why with poetry that's not the case."

Here's a thought -- sometimes when figures are counterintuitive, it means they're wrong. And I have a hard time believing these figures, precisely because of online reading. I know that sites like Pedestal and Cortland Review and Poetry Daily and Verse Daily get a lot more hits per day than any print literary review ever has. Why are these not showing up on the NEA's survey? I don't know. I don't create surveys. I know that when Laurie Ylvisaker ran the Woodstock Poetry Festival for three years in the early 2000s, it was one of the town's best tourist attractions. Woodstock filled up, all the major events (Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Philip Levine, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.) sold out, and the smaller events did well too.

The article ends by quoting Donald Hall, whose book of elegies for his late wife Jane Kenyon made best-seller lists in 1999 (as did Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters in 2002):

"I'm 80 years old," he says. "[For] 60 years I've been reading about poetry losing its audience."

Examiner -- Baseball,Journalism, doing your job

The baseball writer who hates baseball.

Examiner - Nicholas Hughes, Suicide, Poets and Perception

Some thoughts occasioned by the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Leda and the Swan

A statue by Harvey Fite.

New Examiner Posts

What do you do with that manuscript?

Opus 40 in AALS Newsletter

What kind of inspiration can Opus 40 be to law professors? Louis J. Sirico writes about it in the newsletter of Association of American Law Schools -- a lovely appreciation, worth the reading.

The story of Opus 40 is a metaphor for what we do as
law professors. Just as Harvey Fite used his hands to build
his amazing sculpture rock-by-rock, we work day-by-day,
paper-by-paper, class-by-class, and student-by-student to
shape our legacy—capable, ethical lawyers and a forwardlooking
profession. Although we sometimes forget our
ultimate goals, the days when we remember them are often
good days.

Thinking about mentors

A series about the great editor Bob Abel, with a digression. At my Examiner column.

Salt River Review

Salt River Review, a first-rate Internet literary journal which has honored me with inclusion a few times, is up with its spring issue, which I'm not featured in, but a lot of excellent poets are, including Laura Jensen. Check it out.

You'll laugh!
You'll cry!

And after that, if you have nothing better to do,
you'll head for the Wednesday Night Poetry Series
at Molten Java Coffee Roasters,
Greenwood Ave., Bethel CT

featured poet
Tad Richards

"The Tom Waits of contemporary poetry" -- Nancy Willard
7:30 PM -- open mike followed by feature reading
for more info check the Wednesday Poetry Series website

10 lines that stay with me across time

From David Graham -- 10 lines from poems or songs that stay with me across time.

I had to do two lists, because there are too many songs in my head crowding out almost everything else.

So I'll start with the poems.

Men at forty
learn to close slowly
the doors to rooms they
will not be coming back to.
-- Donald Justice


A terrible beauty is born.
-- W. B. Yeats

[Time] will pardon Paul Claudel
Pardon him for writing well.
-- W. H. Auden

She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die
-- John Keats

as if words were the burden
he’d been bearing, all his life.
-- Donald Finkel


Now you invent the boat of your flesh
-- Mark Strand

'Don't, don't, don't, don't,' she cried.
-- Robert Frost

Owls were bearing the farm away.
-- Dylan Thomas

Goodnight to the old lady whispering "hush."
-- Margaret Wise Brown

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke



and ten lines from songs


Open up honey, it's your lover boy, me, that's knockin!
--Jerry Lee Lewis

She was with Big Jim, but she was leaning toward the Jack of Hearts.
-- Bob Dylan

Forever for Jennifer Johnson and me.
--Fred Koller

Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
-- Lennon - McCartney

Old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder ev'ry day.
--John Prine

Yes, it's me, and I'm in love again.
--Fats Domino

He saw Aunt Mary coming and he ducked back in the alley.
--Little Richard

I believe a change is gonna come.
--Sam Cooke

Never hit seventeen when you play against the dealer.
--Ian Tyson

If dogs run free, why not me?
--Bob Dylan

Opus 40 in Geology News

Geology News, an informative online geology blog, now has an Opus 40 link (linking to the excellent Hope Farms Opus 40 page).

A couple of Goodreads reviews

Beatlesongs by William J. Dowlding

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
How do books like this get published? It's a clip job, no new material, no original research, and not even a very good clip job.


Jazz in the Movies by David Meeker

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Now, this is some nice research -- if it's not every movie, video or DVD with jazz in it, including a description of the scenes with jazz, the players, the players playing for actors, then it's damn close. It's from da Capo, which never fails to publish the best books on music. The Beatle book was put out by Fireside, which once published my country music book that I put real work into.


View all my reviews.


Jazz on Film: The Complete Story of the Musicians and Music Onscreen by Scott Yanow

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm sure the da Capo book is excellent, because it's from da Capo, but this is the one I actually read. So see my other review.


View all my reviews.

William Empson meets Little Richard -- or, Seven Types of All Rootie

Rhythm allows one, by playing off the possible prose rhythms against the super-imposed verse rhythms, to combine a variety of statements in one order. Its direct effect seems a matter for physiology; in particular, a rhythmic beat taken faster than the pulse seems controllable, exhilarating, and not to demand intimate sympathy; a rhythmic beat almost synchronous with the pulse seems sincere and to demand intimate sympathy; while a rhythmic beat slower than the pulse, like a funeral bell, seems portentous and uncontrollable.

-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

I wonder how this might apply to music. Well, first, I wonder what it means. But I’m taking the pulse to mean the beat that the drummer – or more likely, for a singer, the bass player – lays down, and the rhythmic beat being the beat that the singer creates. And what does it mean to be exhilarating yet controllable, and not demanding of intimate sympathy? That seems a tricky concept – I wonder if Empson knew what it meant.

Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday famously sang behind the beat, and they did pull the listener in emotionally. Nobody created the illusion of a heart out of control better than Lady did, and Sinatra at his best, before the tough veneer enclosed him completely, projected allowed a glimpse into a core of emotional vulnerability. Rock and roll may be the music of orgiastic hedonism, but there’s more emotional nakedness in jazz.

Chuck Berry sang right on the beat, and he placed his lyrics right on the beat. And who sang ahead of the beat? Peter Jones reminds me that if you listen to Little Richard, you hear the great drummer Earl Palmer actually playing behind the beat, so that Richard is singing ahead of it. That’s part of what gives him that frantic urgency.

Does Little Richard demand less intimate sympathy than Chuck Berry? I wonder…but maybe he does. We don’t ever really care what Richard is singing about. Not even that he still loves Lucille, even though she’s run away and married. Not about the girl who says she loves him but she can’t come in. Not about Uncle John’s predicament at almost being caught by Aunt Mary. But exhilarated? Oh, my, yes.

Be Your Own Rock Star

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the VERY LAST quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.