Monthly Archives: April 2007

Joshua Bell plays the Metro

I don’t know how long this Washington Post story will stay accessible, but MAKE time to read it, or at least skim through, before They pull it. Here’s the deal: famous violinist busks in the DC Metro, playing incredible music incredibly well on a damn Strad, and most of Boobus Americanus doesn’t even turn a head, let alone slow down to listen. Tsk.

There’s even a couple minutes of video, in 3 segments.

DON’T miss it. (via waxy.org)

free-form spam subject-line poetry, redux

Gardner’s What poetry form am I? pointer has led me to thinking about realms of the poetic, not generally something I do much of. I discover that I’m beyond simple vexation with spam, on the Other Side of simple vexation, where I start to perceive the glory in the medium of the spam subject line. Nick, over at Voice 0’Reason, has been on this case for a while, and I’ve been inspired (in great admiration for his efforts) to start harvesting the stuff myself. Today’s haul has pushed me over the edge, into what I fear may become a recurring obsession:

To myself watchmen
on epistemology my byroad
was cerebellum many wherein
It everything tutorial
It augment ourselves proviso
shut about-face
Is posterity untill dearth

One could argue for different ordering of the lines, adding punctuation, or executing edits (‘untill’ is just too poeticall, isn’t it?), but I’m for letting it stand as it falls, and Devil take the hindmost. What we have here is a new genre, and it calleth forth Utilities to support its gleaning and promulgation (a metric analyzer, for those who would have anapests and the like; a random combo generator to burrow through the corpus; a grand Corpus for the combo generator to work upon; usw…).

On the epiphanic

I was walking briskly down toward Port Clyde, listening to Chris Lydon talking with Sonny Rollins, and reflecting on reflecting (we seem to be very reflexive today at #312; has to do with reading a few pages of Calvino with the first morning coffee), and the word ‘epiphanic’ slid into the foreground as I was listening to a bit of St. Thomas. Ah, I thought, that’s it, that’s the word that epitomises the frisson of Recognition, the instant of grokkage, one of the states of mind I love most. So first some delicious trivia:

From Greek epiphaneia, manifestation; and from epiphainesthai, to appear.

An epiphany is a sudden shift of perspective or flash of intuition that opens one to a greater or more subtle understanding. “Epiphanic” describes something or somewhere that is full of epiphany.

and from morewords.com:
epiphanic is a valid word in this word list. For a definition, see the external dictionary links below.

The word “epiphanic” uses 9 letters: A C E H I I N P P.

No direct anagrams for epiphanic found in this word list.

Adding one letter to epiphanic does not form any other word in this word list.

Words formed when one letter is changed in epiphanic

No words found when changing letter 1 (E)
No words found when changing letter 2 (P)
No words found when changing letter 3 (I)
No words found when changing letter 4 (P)
No words found when changing letter 5 (H)
No words found when changing letter 6 (A)
No words found when changing letter 7 (N)
No words found when changing letter 8 (I)
No words found when changing letter 9 (C)
Sorry, no words at all (in this word list) can be found by changing one letter in epiphanic.

So ‘epiphanic’ is a lexical dead end, sort of. But the Googly fun doesn’t stop there. I found this lovely wrang-wrang on the subject, at hypermedia joyce studies:

Joyce’s epiphanies and the accounts of the epiphany he stages in his work, lack claritas. They leave us wondering what exactly an epiphany is. While we may be able to separate the epiphany off from the conceptual void or plenitude, and appreciate it as a conceptual complex in itself, its final harmony or whatness eludes us. The set-piece presentations of the theory, in Stephen Hero and Portrait, signally fail to work as epiphanies of the epiphany, while taking their place no doubt in the relation of part to part, in reading as an exercise in consonantia.

Ouch. It goes on from there…

But back to Sonny Rollins, and Chris Lydon. Even when I find the guest(s) annoying (Camille Paglia, or the acolytes of Hannah Arendt for instance), it’s all so conversational and unrehearsed, and there’s a freshness to what Chris is doing. It’s good for me to find out something about stuff that I wasn’t paying attention to, and didn’t know I was interested in. Tubas, for instance.

Here are some especially succulent bits from the Sonny Rollins conversation. You have to slow yourself down a bit to get the full benefit of the wisdom in what Sonny is saying, and not-saying (some stuff is just hard to talk about in words…). The whole interview is really a gem, and these outtakes are just a few that especially grabbed me:

St. Thomas: origins and DRM (1:20)

playing with Bud Powell (1:29)

what do you think about when you solo? (1:11)

all of the above (1:14)

1958: how ironic (1:32)

listening to myself is an ordeal (1:16)

with Sonny Stitt, and about others he’s played with (3:06)

act on it (1:33)

links for 2007-04-08

Irresistable Future

Miranda July’s innovative Web design strategy is completely convincing, and casts interesting lights in all sorts of directions while getting her message across memorably. When I came to it, I hit the “buy” button, figuring that anything that clever has earned a supportive response. Another surprise brought to my attention by if:book, a continuing source of stuff I’m glad I encountered.

Worth the six minutes it’ll take

I love the label “Shift Happens”. Seems so much more positive than without the ‘f’, though I’ve usually read the original bumpersticker with the emphasis on HAPPENS. I’m not so sure about the jiggy Riverdance-y soundtrack, but not sure what I’d substitute to better support the message.

(this arrived virally, via Stephen’s Web, which links The Learned Man, who credits Tata Interactive Systems, who fingers Scott McLeod’s repurposing of Karl Fisch’s Arapahoe High School presentation… what a glorious trail!)