When I first heard James Brown on the radio when I was in junior high school, he did not, let us say, speak to my sensibilities. The fault was entirely mine, or at least the fault of my experience growing up white in working class Southern California suburbia. I was listening to the Beatles & the Beach Boys. More the former than the latter. And when my friend Orin tried to get me to understand Brown & Otis Redding, I couldn’t hear what he was doing. Too many Protestant hymns at the Grace Brethren Church had dulled my soul. Our version of Gospel music was . . . Never mind, it was just awful & as racist as Al Jolson singing jazz. It was only later, as an adult, after I had come to black music through the blues, that I had ears to hear James Brown. [NPR's story on James Brown; Washington post story by Richard Harrington; more good links via Boing Boing.]
Monthly Archives: December 2006
Poets on Poetry Readings
Dale Hobson of North Country Public Radio interviewed me & several other North County poets on the subject of giving poetry readings. I haven’t actually given a reading in quite a while — the whole ritual is vaguely embarrassing — but I didn’t admit to that. You can download or stream it here.
Baking
Carole is at a holiday party with her girlfriends tonight & while they would have allowed me to be an honorary girl for purposes of the party, I decided to stay home & catch up on work. Except that instead of working on the syllabus for that new course I’m teaching next semester, I’m baking bread. Over the last few years I have developed a fairly reliable recipe for a rustic white bread that uses a sourdough starter. (I keep two different starters stashed at the back of the fridge.) Tonight, though, I’m making a whole wheat bread with sunflower & pumpkin seeds. Festive, no? When I was growing up, Christmas was a time of high anxiety in my family & the whole xmas / holiday thing now leaves me pretty much unmoved. What I do enjoy is the celebration of the hearth & so the solstice — well, the day after — seems an appropriate time to bake bread, which has to be the most fundamental act of domesticity there is.
Saigon Redux
This is what McNamara heard when he went to Saigon for LBJ. Didn’t these sons-of-bitches live through Vietnam? Harkins & then Westmorland always wanted a “surge” in troops. It was what they did. A few more thousand would definitely do the trick. This time. The president is about to escalate himself into a full-scale maelstrom. I’m not letting myself write much about politics on this new incarnation of the blog, but I simply have to record my sense of sickening vertigo at the recent news from Iraq, but even more from Washington, where some bizarre & cancerous delusion has simply fucked up everybody’s heads.
Updating iTunes & Restoring an Old iPod
Dear Apple: Wouldn’t it be easier to just send someone out to my house to poke me repeatedly with a sharp stick?