Last night I dreamed it was nighttime and I was walking through my parents’ neighborhood. A small boy had found a green caterpillar. He turned it over and showed me the gooey underside and said “That’s where I come from.” At another point I was eating some dark chocolate as I wandered around and I thought, damn, this is some good chocolate.
I learned this morning as I was driving through Arlington and listening to some podcasts I downloaded that Paul Muldoon is now poetry editor of the New Yorker. That strikes me as promising. Muldoon is a poet of eclectic style and tastes, and I can imagine he would shake things up a bit at the New Yorker. I heard a former poetry editor of the New Yorker speak years ago when I was at Wake Forest, and I got the impression that she didn’t think about poetry in a terribly original way. She spoke as if she’d downloaded her view of poetry direct from the Establishment. So I was enjoying listening to Muldoon discuss his views of poetry. You can download the podcast here.
I’m sitting in my butt-cold bedroom with Bernard on my lap and the space heater blowing on me, drying me out and making me thirsty, and I’m listening to Bill Frisell’s East/West.
I was buying a six-pack of Green Flash West Coast IPA at a beer and wine shop on U Street Saturday night. The cashier was listening to something — I didn’t know what it was, but I heard the unmistakable sound of cheesy synths pitched to an Ethiopian scale. Music to my ears! “What is that?” I asked the cashier. “It’s a song. From Ethiopia,” she said. “Is that the radio?” I asked, because all I could see behind the counter was a little clock radio. And yes, it was, 1390 AM, she said. They play Ethiopian music on the weekends, she said. DCRTV sez that’s an station in Arlington. (Since when does DCRTV charge for some stuff? Man.) Maybe I’ll have to venture over to the AM dial more often, though, sarcasm aside, I’m not really into the more contemporary Ethiopian music I’ve come across (mostly at Ethiopian restaurants). I can only take so much cheesy synth. Catherine thinks that even the synths on the older stuff that I love so much sound cheesy, but not I. Maybe listening to Stereolab inoculated me?
Posted by nedlog at February 11, 2008 10:48 PM | TrackBackGreat discoveries on Muldoon and on the radio. Was Muldoon the one to whom I said, "You're a star!" Or was that Cairan Carson?
Posted by: Douglas on April 1, 2008 1:50 PMNot sure, but I do think it was Muldoon to whom you and I said, in unison, "We're doing an anthology!" So ridiculous -- so much clowning around in those days. Fun to think about.
Posted by: Mike on April 1, 2008 4:27 PM