Here is Eric Johnson performing "Cliffs of Dover" on Austin City Limits, 1988.
There are many Eric Johnson performances of this song, my favorite of his, to be found on the intertubes, and I have watched and studied them all, but this one tops my list.
Your pilgrim has studied avidly and practiced the song, of course, and can even imagine putting together a respectable performance, given world enough and time. But: Your pilgrim does not mind telling you: To be able to play this way, so awesomely, I would be *tempted* to make that deal Robert Johnson did, as legend has it, down at the Crossroads.
Also, don't mind tellin ya: Wow. So handsome.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
My interview with the world, which never interviewed me
Q: What three writers from any time or place would you invite for an evening of drink and dinner and conversation?
A: That's easy: Sappho, Elizabeth Bishop and um, hold on, gimme time, and ...
Q: Interesting.
A: Yeah, thanks, sure. Don't feign sincerity and interest with me
Q: You're right. Sorry.
A: And James Joyce and Annie Dillard. And Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Nora Ephron, too, because I so wish they hadn't died. And Mitch Hedberg, because he was so funny and so sweet, and I so wish he hadn't died.
Q: The question was three writers.
A: I know. I changed it.
Q: You can't do that.
A: Yes I can. I'm the one writing the questions, remember?
Q: Oh, right. Carry on then.
A: I shall. Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Keats. And Sappho gets to bring her girlfriends, including Erica Jong.
Q: Girlfriends?
A: Yes. I believe she invented the word, in the sense that women use it today, as in "Girls Night Out," and "The Five Girlfriends Every Woman Must Have ..." It's attested in this quotation, numbered 160 by Lobel-Page. It's basically a usage gloss by the writer Athenaios, who says
Q: Hold on, *You* translate? Like from Greek?
A: Yes, from Greek. Yes I do. Sappho wrote in the dialect known as Aeolic. The translating of her barely surviving ouevre is a big part currently of my life's work. Anyway, I translate the fragment this way:
Q: Barnstone didn't do it that way.
A: No, he didn't. But I did. My rendering is more like Anne Carson (2002). And it follows the word order a bit more closely. Always a hazard because it strains the limits of English syntax, which relies more on word order than does Greek, an inflected language.
Q: OK. But back to your guest list. So it's a party, then.
A: Yes it is, yes it is. But if Joyce gets too plastered, I'm cuttin' him off.
Q: Your list has more women than men. Why?
A: Easy: I like women more than men.
Q: I see.
A: Hey! Warned you about faking. Anyways, I included Joyce, despite my concern that he might be a bit too abrasive, too unmodernly un-reconstructed for the 21st century. Mitch, however, I'd expect to be a perfect polite unthreatening non-creepy gentleman, and that all the women at the table would love him, as I do.
Q: Wait. You *love* Mitch Hedberg?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: But, he's like, a guy.
A: So?
Q: What about Joyce?
A: Love only his work.
Q: Any other loves to profess?
A: Certainly. Thanks for asking.
Q: Hey! Self-congratulating, are we?
A: You're right. So, carrying on: I love Sappho and all her girlfriends, and Ms Bishop and Ms Dillard. Don't know Ms Plath and Ms Sexton well enough, so not sure yet. But knowing me, as the evening concludes and everyone gathers coats and belongings and checks purses to make sure they have cab fare, plus tip, back to the afterlife, I'd be gushing to both of them: I love you.
Q: Well then, let's end it here.
A: No, let's not. We'll keep it going, and post another day.
A: That's easy: Sappho, Elizabeth Bishop and um, hold on, gimme time, and ...
Q: Interesting.
A: Yeah, thanks, sure. Don't feign sincerity and interest with me
Q: You're right. Sorry.
A: And James Joyce and Annie Dillard. And Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Nora Ephron, too, because I so wish they hadn't died. And Mitch Hedberg, because he was so funny and so sweet, and I so wish he hadn't died.
Q: The question was three writers.
A: I know. I changed it.
Q: You can't do that.
A: Yes I can. I'm the one writing the questions, remember?
Q: Oh, right. Carry on then.
A: I shall. Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Keats. And Sappho gets to bring her girlfriends, including Erica Jong.
Q: Girlfriends?
A: Yes. I believe she invented the word, in the sense that women use it today, as in "Girls Night Out," and "The Five Girlfriends Every Woman Must Have ..." It's attested in this quotation, numbered 160 by Lobel-Page. It's basically a usage gloss by the writer Athenaios, who says
And now freeborn women and virgins call their intimate friends *hetairai* as Sappho does in this passage:Athenaios then quotes Sappho, which I translate this way ...
Q: Hold on, *You* translate? Like from Greek?
A: Yes, from Greek. Yes I do. Sappho wrote in the dialect known as Aeolic. The translating of her barely surviving ouevre is a big part currently of my life's work. Anyway, I translate the fragment this way:
Of these things now, for my girlfriends dear, of delight beautifully I shall sing.
Q: Barnstone didn't do it that way.
A: No, he didn't. But I did. My rendering is more like Anne Carson (2002). And it follows the word order a bit more closely. Always a hazard because it strains the limits of English syntax, which relies more on word order than does Greek, an inflected language.
Q: OK. But back to your guest list. So it's a party, then.
A: Yes it is, yes it is. But if Joyce gets too plastered, I'm cuttin' him off.
Q: Your list has more women than men. Why?
A: Easy: I like women more than men.
Q: I see.
A: Hey! Warned you about faking. Anyways, I included Joyce, despite my concern that he might be a bit too abrasive, too unmodernly un-reconstructed for the 21st century. Mitch, however, I'd expect to be a perfect polite unthreatening non-creepy gentleman, and that all the women at the table would love him, as I do.
Q: Wait. You *love* Mitch Hedberg?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: But, he's like, a guy.
A: So?
Q: What about Joyce?
A: Love only his work.
Q: Any other loves to profess?
A: Certainly. Thanks for asking.
Q: Hey! Self-congratulating, are we?
A: You're right. So, carrying on: I love Sappho and all her girlfriends, and Ms Bishop and Ms Dillard. Don't know Ms Plath and Ms Sexton well enough, so not sure yet. But knowing me, as the evening concludes and everyone gathers coats and belongings and checks purses to make sure they have cab fare, plus tip, back to the afterlife, I'd be gushing to both of them: I love you.
Q: Well then, let's end it here.
A: No, let's not. We'll keep it going, and post another day.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Quotes from the Blessed Matron Saint of Your Pilgrim's Blog
Emphasis added, by your Pilgrim blogger:
I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine. -- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim (1974) 1998, 134.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Happy happy joy joy, Love My Neighborhood Here
It's got Chinese food, 'natch, carry-out and nearby too, because we gots yr Regular Civilization Here. You just like call, and they tell you "Ten minutes," and it's like, for realz, ready for you in ten.
Walked there, less than two blocks from "chez de la casa hut" of Your Pilgrim, in flip-flops, because October and barely three blocks in total steps traversed, and also, Your Pilgrim made: A Promise, To God, last year. For reals.
Lovely sweet man there at the Chinese restaurant place knows me, always remembers my order (Szechuan Chicken) just by looking at Caller ID! Always smiles so slight and brightly, sometimes gives me a half-pint of Hot 'n Sour soup when my customary whole pint is not this time on my order, and never says anything when I use my credit card to pay for an order that is below the "$10 minimum, please."
In the first year of Your Pilgrim's third mission here (August 2010-present), I would go there Every Tuesday of the World.
Love.
Also, the streets here, in Your Pilgrim's 'hood, they (Ack! Double Nomative!) are always lovely brimming full of Happy People, and Gay People too. And on Fridays, 'specially, the female people: They're dressed like: Wow.
Love.
Also, on Fridays 'specially, and as it gets later, even more 'specially, I hear on P Street, nine floors below, the pleasing spoken noise of many happy people, engaged earnestly in rituals both complicated delicately dancing and so very basic foolproof certain too: Hoping To Get Laid. The happy in their noise is soothing and contagious. I wish them well, I do. Bon chance! y'all.
Love.
Anyways, whole lotta happy here, y'all, Whole Lotta Love. And takeout Chinese.
Oh, and: Good shabbos, y'all.
Walked there, less than two blocks from "chez de la casa hut" of Your Pilgrim, in flip-flops, because October and barely three blocks in total steps traversed, and also, Your Pilgrim made: A Promise, To God, last year. For reals.
Lovely sweet man there at the Chinese restaurant place knows me, always remembers my order (Szechuan Chicken) just by looking at Caller ID! Always smiles so slight and brightly, sometimes gives me a half-pint of Hot 'n Sour soup when my customary whole pint is not this time on my order, and never says anything when I use my credit card to pay for an order that is below the "$10 minimum, please."
In the first year of Your Pilgrim's third mission here (August 2010-present), I would go there Every Tuesday of the World.
Love.
Also, the streets here, in Your Pilgrim's 'hood, they (Ack! Double Nomative!) are always lovely brimming full of Happy People, and Gay People too. And on Fridays, 'specially, the female people: They're dressed like: Wow.
Love.
Also, on Fridays 'specially, and as it gets later, even more 'specially, I hear on P Street, nine floors below, the pleasing spoken noise of many happy people, engaged earnestly in rituals both complicated delicately dancing and so very basic foolproof certain too: Hoping To Get Laid. The happy in their noise is soothing and contagious. I wish them well, I do. Bon chance! y'all.
Love.
Anyways, whole lotta happy here, y'all, Whole Lotta Love. And takeout Chinese.
Oh, and: Good shabbos, y'all.
I Biked Home in a Torrent
Since I was wearing jeans, like I do every day that ends in Y, and since proper jeans are made of that thick, shamelessly flagrantly water-lovin' cotton (a well-known paraphilia in the fabric world: "hydrophilic," the other fabrics say with barely veiled disdain), I weighed like 20 extra pounds by the time I got home and it had stopped raining and I could see the waning crescent moon in the now clear non-drenching sky and the only water-drips I detected whilst crossing P Street after buying two Guinness singles at my favorite liquor store were coming from my head and my fleece (its valiantly hydrophobic fibers overtaxed and defeated, succumbing at last to sogginess) and my bike gloves and I could see the planes up there passing by the aforementioned waning crescent moon, on final approach to Reagan National, they were.
My sudden weight gain? Temporary. Just "water weight." So, no worries. I changed pants, then ate an entire pan of brownies, right out of the pan, which was shaped more like the mixing bowl, actually, because I kinda skipped the part on the box that sez "Bake 40 minutes in preheated oven at 350 degrees."
I don't have / that kind o time. Besides, I Just Lost: 20 pounds! Celebrate! Fudgy Chocolate Kegger! (Slathered and dunked to a heavy drooling drip with a ... refined butter frosting, accented with a hint of almond extract, garnished with lively fresh spearmint sprigs, and locally grown strawberries sliced with a microtome.)
(Your pilgrim, will always, Tell Y'all: The Truth. Except: when making shit up is way more funnies.)
But back to your pilgrim's arrival, via bicycle, in the rain, which came in torrent(s), at home here at Rock Creek & P.
My Converse Chucks (same slutty water-lovin cotton canvas, with sole cushions made outta SpongeBob SquareTrousers' dead, probably synthetic, relatives that, hey! they probably never were in the actual Ocean, let alone On The Show ... "No porifera were harmed in the making of this popular retro footwear that lotsa olds probably wore in the 60s, when they were younger than you, mofos.")
[hold on. too long an interpolation there to properly lead in to the next bit. pick up again at:]
My Converse Chucks were
You know what? You know what else? Everything inside me Timbuk2 messenger bag (my most constant companion) was all like, cozy comfy dry.
The End.
My sudden weight gain? Temporary. Just "water weight." So, no worries. I changed pants, then ate an entire pan of brownies, right out of the pan, which was shaped more like the mixing bowl, actually, because I kinda skipped the part on the box that sez "Bake 40 minutes in preheated oven at 350 degrees."
I don't have / that kind o time. Besides, I Just Lost: 20 pounds! Celebrate! Fudgy Chocolate Kegger! (Slathered and dunked to a heavy drooling drip with a ... refined butter frosting, accented with a hint of almond extract, garnished with lively fresh spearmint sprigs, and locally grown strawberries sliced with a microtome.)
(Your pilgrim, will always, Tell Y'all: The Truth. Except: when making shit up is way more funnies.)
But back to your pilgrim's arrival, via bicycle, in the rain, which came in torrent(s), at home here at Rock Creek & P.
My Converse Chucks (same slutty water-lovin cotton canvas, with sole cushions made outta SpongeBob SquareTrousers' dead, probably synthetic, relatives that, hey! they probably never were in the actual Ocean, let alone On The Show ... "No porifera were harmed in the making of this popular retro footwear that lotsa olds probably wore in the 60s, when they were younger than you, mofos.")
[hold on. too long an interpolation there to properly lead in to the next bit. pick up again at:]
My Converse Chucks were
Squishing to the rhythm that my footsteps made ... [and, um]You know what else? My sodden underwear is now dyed with a light indigo wash, even lighter than the kind of jeans Old Guys Buy.
People passing by they would stop and say
Oh my that little country boy could play
Go go
Go Johnny go . . .
You know what? You know what else? Everything inside me Timbuk2 messenger bag (my most constant companion) was all like, cozy comfy dry.
The End.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
"Txts from Hilz" does #bindersfullofwomen
It's "Texts From Hillary," The Next Generation. Thank.The.Gods.
These are good, y’all. My fave:
The Linky? Clicky. textsfromhillary.com
Discovered via Andrew Sullivan today.
These are good, y’all. My fave:
[The Hilz:] Where’s my binder?
[The Prez:] You’re flying in it.
The Linky? Clicky. textsfromhillary.com
Discovered via Andrew Sullivan today.
Happy-happy, joy-joy, gay-day
Ding, dong, the DOMA might soon be dead. Second Circuit totally smacked its unconstitutional shit right down. Read it and weep your tears of gratitude, ye children of the light. The best read is Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan, of course.
Today, a Federal Appeals Court in New York ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act — which defines marriage on the federal level as the union between one man and one woman — is unconstitutional on the grounds that DUH, LEGALLY ENSHRINED DISCRIMINATION AGAINST GAY PEOPLE IS NOT OKAY. I'm paraphrasing here.Ms Ryan has more, so clicky the linky, y'all.
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