E-mails: Three written today in Alameda

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:50:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:Thomas Stearns
To: "Grace Marlier" <__________@hotmail.com>

"By this grace dissolved in place" -T.S.

"There is a time for Thomas Stearns Eliot / & a time for my middle name" -J.H.

"Don't talk like a book, Dad." -Dolores Haze to Humbert Humbert.

Grace,

I saw the tallest lifeform on earth, the tallest tree, "Giant Tree" in the Humboldt Redwoods. It made me think of Melville. We're trying to find a place to live, in the "bay area".

Did you know that Liam & Virtue are in Brasil! Did you know it's winter down there, but not the white kind. Jenny just told me: "you should write her back like you're a black person, too." I suggest that your entire nice, despite street-wise, e-mail to me was a formality to get Liam's information! Well it didn't work, my liege! Except that I think he does now possess an electronic mail address, including all of his middle names, ljowg at yahoo dot com. He refuses to answer my inquiries regarding the dubya. Thomas Fucking Stearns! Bah! Joanne Kathleen? I love her. L.J. Olaf W.G. contacted me trying to find postcard locations for Ben, Hannah, Melinda, Rachel, of which I had none, only e-mails for two. He falls off the face of the planet & then expects everyone to resubmerge from Atlantis when he's lonely in Latin Land? The scoundrel!

I'm house-sitting for my sister in Alameda, a carefully preserved mid-century community (tupperware & nuke scare) sausaged between "The City" & "The East Bay". We plan to use this old house as a haven while we do our reconnaissence into scary Berkeley, our perhaps new hood. Everyone has a different idea for me. All I want to do is stay in the mountains & live the life of the idle rich. Cosmic forces conspire to move me to urban Dis. Count me momentarily 'in' on B.A., despite the rigamarole which will keep me from you.

Peace & Robert Allen Zimmerman,
J.H.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:16:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <________@yahoo.com>

Subject: Le
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <____________@gmail.com>

Bonnie Anne,

First, some initial thoughts about the Jabberwock:

I recommend immediately securing a copy of Martin Gardiner's amazing "The Annotated Alice" which contains the most thoro introduction & footnotes to both Alice Books. The section on the Jabberwocky is pages of footnotes, definitions, & translations. I just found the wikipedia entry, which also has definitions & more translations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

It also has a long section on pronunciation, which you may want to study! before pronouncing it "wrong" for a bunch of nubiles.

The French:

Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux
Et le mômerade horsgrave.

Several suggestions for other things you can do or add to the play:
I would recommend using the Humpty-Dumpty dialog as a framework, because it's hilarious & explains the idea of a portmanteaux. Perhaps you could make a humpty-dumpty costume into an instrument!

Look into Joyce's Finnegans Wake - it quotes the Jabberwock repeatedly, & the whole book is inspired by Carroll's innovation of the portmanteaux. If you were interested in quoting other nonsense besides the Jabberwock, perhaps you could sing the quotes from FW. (I'll look them up for you). The major themes of the Joyce are the toppling of the tower of babble-babel-baba, i.e. the nonsensization of language, & it is overlapped with the fall of Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, & fall of drunk Tim Finnegan from the old Irish song. (Finnegan falls off a ladder & wakes up at his own wake, i.e. Jesus. The whole nonsense novel is supposed to be his dream-death-drunk.) Look for references to Humpty-Dumpty on the first page!

If you're interested in other nonsense verse, there's a good dover edition of Carroll's complete poetry. You might want to include the "Mad Gardner's Song" to your act, always a favorite. Edward Lear is the other famous nonsense poet. I also love Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, & I was going to send you this poem I recently found:

Ye gallants bright,
I rede you right,
Beware o' Bonnie Ann;
Her comely face sae fu' o' grace,
Your heart she will trepan:
Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
Her skin is like the swan;
Sae jimply lac'd her genty waist,
That sweetly ye might span.

Youth, grace, and love attendant move,
And pleasure leads the van:
In a' their charms, and conquering arms,
They wait on Bonnie Ann.
The captive bands may chain the hands,
But love enslaves the man:
Ye gallants braw, I rede you a',
Beware o' Bonnie Ann!


Secondly, our party:
It was mostly people from my work, afterall, plus James Quill & Darren Southworth, my only old friends who made the journey. Three of my ex-coworkers got into a dramatic threesome, rife with yelling & crying, which complicated my simple festivisties. Jenny & I are looking for a place to live in the bay area, house-sitting for my sister in Alameda this week. We were just up in Ashland, Oregon, seeing Shakespeare's King John, & then camping in the redwoods. We saw the tallest tree in the world, the tallest life-form on eath, "Giant Tree", a humbling experience; then drove down the coast, beautiful! I'm reading Nabokov. More later - stay in touch - I have help my sister with the newest baby, one month old, baby Will, already twelve pounds.

Love,
James Henry

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________


Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>
Subject: P.S.
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <__________@gmail.com>

I found the great lecture I saw, where I was first introduced to the Carroll-Joyce connection:

http://www.lewiscarroll.org/bander.html

Scroll down to the section called "Joyce Carroll Notes" for the quotes.

But, if you have time, that whole essay might give you a lot of inspiration & suggestions. Also, I can put you in touch with Mark Burstein if you want to ask him for ideas. There's already been a lot of music/theater/addition writing about the Jabberwocky, & I'm sure he knows everything inside out. There's also a movie based on it from the 70s, directed by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python / Brazil).

Too much information?

James

Music Review: 10 Suggestions for Summer Listening! Part I

Here I present five of ten albums in various genres, hand-picked from the very favorites of my music collection. Some of the hyperlinks are audio samples, powered by Amazon.com.

CLASSICAL

Musica Antiqua Köln (directed by Reinhard Goebel) – Musica Baltica (1999)

This could become an essential album to anyone whose music collection lacks obscure composers of the Baltic Mid-Baroque (late 17th Century). It is also, hands down, the finest early music violin playing I have ever encountered, led by savant-genius Reinhard Goebel. He guides his ensemble thru the frolicsome flares necessary to any well-researched project of period-instrument Baroque performance, but one never feels bogged down in the mordents. He has also introduced me to some of the most haunting & unusual music. It is a long album, but don’t miss the final tracks, with two by Johann Valentin Meder, the controversial Danzig Kapellmeister. The Sonata di Battaglia begins with triumphant C-major chord which saws away for a solid two minutes before changing! Also, the regal trumpets & bassoons on Vincenzo Albrici’s Sonata a 5 continue to move me, after years of repeated listenings, to minuetting around the room.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dawn Upshaw – Osvaldo Golijov: Ayre, Luciano Berio: Folk Songs (2005)

Stand up for the Crossover disc of the decade! The pairing of Berio's 1960's take on combining world folk genres with contemporary classical innovations, with Golijov's 21st Century attempt, leaves a lot to think about. Golijov is the Jewish-Argentinian-American who did all of those amazing, yet popularly denounced, arrangements for Kronos Quartet's Caravan (gypsy) & Nuevo (latin) crossover experiments. (Kronos fan-purists would prefer them to keep with the heady academic program, but really they're just keeping up with more realistic trends & innovations - their newest album is all from Bollywood soundtracks.) Golijov's own music, for instance in Ayre, has a ton of integrity whilst dipping into every imaginative world idiom. Clearly, if the 21st century offers any direction, it's welcoming inspiration from the sheer bulk of recorded music available, & relishing in its ability to be blended in the genre of notated concert music. Berio's Folk Songs have been recorded dozens of times, but this ensemble is especially tight, & the piece has really worn well during its transition from contemporary classic to over-preformed classic-proper. Dawn Upshaw, I think, is one of the most amazing vocalists alive. She can keep her day job at the conservative Metropolitan Opera while preforming the classiest new music & anything else she wants to: Weill, Bernstein, Ives, Berg, Adams, Purcell, Stravinsky, &c. Her voice is really just an instrument of her intelligence, tastely borrowing slides from jazz, an occasional hugeness from Wagner, & deepening it with her own gravity or lightening it with her wit. Golijov's music allows her to showcase a new breadth, replete with sufi trills, or whatever the music calls for. As for Berio, "I wonder as I wander" has never sounded so beautiful.

_________________________________________________________________________________


Kevin Volans - White Man Sleeps (1990)

1980s British Minimalism is one of the sadly neglected genres of 20th Century Music. Graham Fitkin, for instance, perhaps suffers from a contemporary embarrasment for cheezy synthesizers. His seminal Cud (1988) perhaps sounds a bit too much like The Muppets Take Manhatten. Many recordings by Fitkin have not been reissued - (Look for Argos CDs in used record stores!) Volans, however is the opposite in aestetic - his music is extremely earthy. A white South African native who moved to Dublin, several of the pieces on this album are for two harpsichords tuned liked African thumb pianos (a compositional risk, I assume, severely limiting performance possibilities). Kronos Quartet has recorded the string quartet version of White Man Sleeps, an arrangement of the version on this album for two harpsichords, viola da gamba, & percussion. The Smith Quartet preformance on this album, I cannot emphasize enough, rocks so much harder than Kronos. Really, man, this is some of my favorite music. Like Steve Reich, it clearly links '70s-'80s Minimalist form to traditional African counterpoint, written for early Western instruments, & performed with a lot of heart.

______________________________________________________________________________

Steve Reich - You Are (Variations) (2005)

I am curious how Reich-virgins might approach this music, because, more than ever, he is building on a career's-worth of innovations. It has the form of Tehillim - (two two-part movements, lots of soprano-cannon-lines sung in hebrew, third movement slow). It has the thick piano writing of several earlier pieces, but his dissonence has deepened, like in Four Quartets. It has similar repetitive-philisophical-text-setting as The Desert Music & Proverb. Melodically, the second movement of You Are starts with a jumpy-hebraic melody reminiscient of Tehillim, which gets dissected in a way similar to The Desert Music, so that the words are slowed down into luscious chords, amidst thick pulsing pianos & percussion. I feel that Reich has yet to really disapoint, nor are developments of previous ideas ever boring (or, like Glass, pathetic.) This piece, despite borrowing from an entire career, feels fresh, original, & even a tad rebelious. His mystic-contemplative side is as deep as ever, his harmonies as luscious - everything - his pace, ochestration, drama, everything that makes music good, is of the finest quality. I guess one should consider this an excellent piece of music grown from a carefully developed style, which has evolved over four decades. Also, on the same album, is Maya Beiser's performance of his latest Counterpoint, Cello Counterpoint, a series of pieces where one instrumentalist plays on top of herself twelve-or-so times. This has by far the fastest changing structure & some of the richest harmonies of any of them. It's beautiful, recorded with gorgeous production.

_____________________________________________________________________________


ROCK / COUNTRY

Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball (1995)

In September, we'll be celebrating the 11th anniversary of this seminal album. What links it to 90's country music, or 90's rock? I don't know. It sounds more to me like someone has stuck this album in a future capsule from 2050, where Emmylou's plastic head has been preserved in a laboratory. Her voice is both alien & earthy. It aches as Jesus must have, yanked between two universes. The lyrics of the songs she chooses to sing are like a snow plant, organic but a seeming stranger - "And if you were Willie Moore / And I was Barbara Allen / Or Fair Ellen all sad at the cabin door /A-weepin' and a-pinin', for love / A-weepin' and a-pinin', for love." It's really the production that makes this music so special, tho. Daniel Lanois, who has also worked with Bob Dylan, U2, & Peter Gabriel, matches Harris' alien-earthy dichotomy with his own magic. What is the "wrecking ball"? Is it what happened to the rolling stone? A symbol for one generation, which began as aimless, & ended somewhat heartless & destructive? Neil Young sings back-up on his own song, "meet me at the wrecking ball / I'll wear something pretty & white / & we'll go out dancing tonight." Every song carries a subtle mystical overtone, subtle even when she's singing directly to her "savior". Her version of Gillian Welch's "Orphan Girl" is my favorite of this oft-covered song. (I sing it with a ukulele). &, of course, "All My Tears" is one of the most beautiful things ever recorded.