Doing a Google search on "improvised instruments" led me to a whole bunch of pages, none which especially struck my fancy. But I compiled this list of instruments referred to on the various pages.

• washboard
  
• washtub
  
• tea-chest bass
  
• comb and paper
  
• cigar-box fiddle
  
• a drum made from a calabash
  
• a cow's horn
  
• a piece of iron
  
• frying pans
  
• pots and pans, with a wooden spoon as mallet
  
• bells
  
• jugs
  
• bicycle horns
  
• wheel rims
  
• whistles
  
• glass lemon juice bottles
  
• tea container (?) filled with pennies and couscous
  
• fire-hose nozzle ("an amazingly mellow tone," says this Backwoods Home article)
  
• saw
  
• spoons
  
• kettle
  
• tin cans
  
• "rum bottle horns"
  
• garbage cans
  
• an array of empty wine or schnapps bottles
  
• the "ping pong," a small zinc pan
  
• biscuit drum
  
• plastic containers
  
• pieces of wood
  
• strings, reeds, horns, and percussion constructed from discarded gas tanks
  

Labels: artifacts, crafts, lists

5:32 PM
0 comments

I am still on the "one new recipe a week" New Year's resolution, and so far it has been great: after two months I can sense a distinct difference in my relationship to food. But as my semester gets busier, the new recipes I'm trying get simpler. I have student conferences all this week, which more-or-less quadruples my time spent on campus, so tonight I will be making this extraordinarily basic Easy Tuna Casserole. Hey: I ain't too proud to fall back on a classic.

Labels: recipes

Monday, February 25, 2002
1:37 PM
0 comments

I don't really like any of the sounds that come with Windows XP. They affect a sort of clear placidity, and the very contrivance of it leaves me feeling vaguely unsettled. Which leaves me on the hunt for short bursts of interesting sonic matter. This is one of those "e-mail me" things. (Thanks, by the way, to people who wrote in with mail client suggestions.)

Perhaps I should pick up this album Ringtones, on the experimental UK label TOUCH. 99 tracks from some of today's most interesting electronic musicians, each around the length of a cellular phone's ringtone.

"They are in one way or another intended to be experienced as isolated, personal interventions: low-res loops, creature calls, in low-res environments... In whichever form you find them here, do sample remodel and employ these humble suggestions..."

Sounds promising, but my budget is awfully tight right now, and I'm generally spending my CD money on albums that give me more than just "humble suggestions." The new Town and Country release is a particularly sweet, warm album...

Labels: music, music_commentary, sound

Saturday, February 23, 2002
1:32 PM
0 comments

From the Chicago Imagebase; found through photography arts weblog Consumptive.org.

Labels: image_matter

Friday, February 22, 2002
11:18 AM
0 comments

I've been thinking a lot lately about literary realism, and whether it's a good thing or not.

Many of my favorite twentieth-century writers (Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) consciously and deliberately violated the tenets of literary realism in their fiction. You could argue that the textual experiments of Burroughs or Barthelme (or, more recently, those of Ben Marcus) constitute a kind of higher order of "realism"—we live in a world densely webbed with discourse networks, and the work of those authors reflects that reality in a way that you could technically call mimetic. The experience of reading these stories matches our experience elsewhere, yes, but the characters—if there even are characters—resemble us only indirectly.

I think that there is a value to the act of telling stories about experiences that resemble our own. We can see this by looking at the last thrity years of American literary fiction, which is characterized by an explosion of women's writing, minority writing, and gay writing. The people who ran the women's presses and women's bookstores that sprang up in the 1970s understood that realistic storytelling was not only pleasurable but also political: the terrain of representation was contested terrain, on which battles could be fought and won. The early gay and minority presses had this same sense of awareness and enjoyed similar success.

I like reading fiction that evokes the fragmentation and density of our contemporary world, but I think fiction can do more than just that: it can tell a story about that world, and how people—people we recognize as being like us—negotiate it. This is something that I try to do in my own work. For my money, the only writer out there who is really doing this with regularity is Don DeLillo. This probably explains why I like DeLillo so much.

(Backstory: I've been thinking about this stuff because a while ago, The Magnificent Melting Object recommended Nathalie Sarraute. I checked out her book Tropisms / The Age of Suspicion. It's a weird hybrid—half of the book is a collection of strange microfictions, the other half is a set of four pieces of literary criticism— but the literary criticism half deals a lot with the question of realism (particularly psychological realism) in twentieth-century fiction.)

(Wishlist: I need to find people in Chicago who I can sit down and talk about books with.)

Labels: book_commentary, narrative, writing

Thursday, February 21, 2002
9:38 PM
0 comments

Does anyone have 20,000 yen I can borrow? Because I'd really like a copy of this 10-CD set of improvised music from Japan. Check through this track listing and look at some of the inspiring combinations of instruments: I'd love to hear Ryoji Hojito's piece for grand piano, marbles, wooden blocks and battery-powered toothbrush, or Yashuhiro Otani's piece for fifty iMacs. I've already heard and enjoyed the strange, harsh minimalism of Toshimaru Nakamura's mixing-board experiments (you can hear a clip from one of his collaborations with sampler nihilist Sachiko M on this page, over at Erstwhile Records).

Labels: music_commentary

Wednesday, February 20, 2002
9:59 AM
0 comments

The "Narrative as Landscape" article I linked to from Narrative Technologies today has a brief bit on the art of memory in the middle of it.

And my notes on love and compromise were inspired by Rich's Valentine's Day State of My Heart Address, and my response is being discussed over there.

I have a new desktop computer, and am seeking a mail client. I've taken both Outlook Express 6 and Netscape Mail 6.2 for a spin over the past week, and have found that both of them have quirks that annoy me. (Netscape Mail 6.2 seems particularly gIitchy, whereas I was completely satisfied with Netscape Communicator 4.7; maybe they shouldn't have tried to rewrite all their code from scratch.)

Q: Does Opera have a mail client? A: yes. Hmmmmmmmmm.

And now, back to student drafts.

Labels: narrative, personal

Monday, February 18, 2002
8:04 PM
0 comments

Labels: taxonomies

Sunday, February 17, 2002
9:12 PM
0 comments

I screened Night of the Living Dead for my students this week, and finally got around to watching Day of the Dead, the final installment of George Romero's trilogy. (The middle entry is Dawn of the Dead.)

Ambling, flesh-eating ghouls give me as much of a frisson as they give anyone (the visceral Tom Savini effects on the second and third films don't hurt). But, taken collectively, these films are about more than zombies: they are about how human beings function in the face of fear, the interpersonal dynamics of power (and race), the social bond and the consequences of its disintegration. The dramatic unit that recurs most frequently in these films is not a scene of zombie attacks, but rather one of flawed, conflicted humans, with diverging sets of desires, in a room, interacting. And if that's not the fundamental core of all good drama, then I don't know what is.

Further reading: Brainstorming at Zombie City Hall.

Labels: horror, media commentary

Saturday, February 16, 2002
12:09 AM
0 comments

I do not really observe Valentine's Day. I exchange a box of chocolates with my mom and that's about it. Tonight I will be getting together with Chris to make music, and I do not predict that it will be any more romantic than usual.

But I have been thinking, today, about love. In particular, I am considering the network of relationships between love and compromise.

Should we be willing to compromise ourselves in order to find love? If you suffer difficulty in finding love, and you think you can link that difficulty to a particular set of your traits, would it be wise to try to eliminate those traits (or refine them, or smooth them out)? Or would it be better to seek, perhaps in vain, for someone who will accept you, warts and all? Is there a way to safely make the call about which traits are crucial to your identity, and which could conceivably be sacrificed in order to increase your "loveability"? Or is thinking that way just going to lead you to trouble, leave you with a calculated "committee self," pleasing to no one?

On one hand I think any compromise of the self in order to win love is a bad idea, and on the other hand I think that disregarding self-improvement—and just allowing the self to randomly develop as it may—takes the ideology of individualism to its solipsistic extreme.

I'm not really looking for answers to these questions. Each of us comes up with our own answers to them, and each answer is "right" in its own way. Or "wrong" in its own way, depending on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist.

Anyway. Happy Valentine's Day to you, dear reader.

Labels: relationships

Thursday, February 14, 2002
7:00 PM
0 comments

Contemplating memory palaces Judith posts an extended meditation about memory and loss, plus another bevy of memory arts links, including one to this dissertation on Renaissance mnemonics and hypertext composition.

And our man from Idiopathic sends in book recommendations: Frances Yates' The Art of Memory and, tangentially, Johanna Drucker's The Alphabetic Labyrinth.

Labels: hypertext, memory

Wednesday, February 13, 2002
12:00 PM
0 comments

The newest Imaginary Year entry is about memory, sort of.

Browsing for inspiration this morning, I did some Googling on the "art of memory." The practice strikes me as so completely from another time that I have not yet fully wrapped my mind around it.

Fortunately, others have, and they have come up with promising applications of the art in our contemporary time. For instance, here's an interesting-looking abstract focusing on the art of memory as a model for digital archives.

"[This talk will] look at fundamental ideas from the ars memoria -- architectural image placement, the book as nonlinear theatre, encyclopedic culture, the author as technologist-magus -- and then map some of these ideas onto the emerging landscape of the 'global digital archive.'"

Following the abstract is a rather fruitful-looking set of annotated links. And there's these, too.

Labels: indexing, memory

Monday, February 11, 2002
11:03 PM
0 comments

This just in:

Holding a vibrator to an acoustic guitar sting creates a sweet array of unholy droning noise. Especially when the vibrator in question is this Hello Kitty vibrator: its plastic head has an irregular topography, which means more ways that it can be productively touched against the guitar.

Speaking of drones, I can't seem to find a good drone music discography on the Web. The FAQ for the DroneOn mailing list has two lists worth examining, one of current practicioners of drone music and one of "ancestors". But because both of these lists stick closely to the rock pantheon, they neglect to mention the many drones created by both composers of "new music" (La Monte Young and Phill Niblock are both conspicuously absent) and electronic musicians (those of you seeking the latter may wish to check out this Needle Drops column).

I am half-tempted to create my own web resource on the topic. I'll put that in the If I Had Limitless Time file.

Further listening: D. Bauler, of The Journal of Speculative Disease, has some "drone sickness" loops available here.

Labels: music, number_none

Saturday, February 09, 2002
6:22 PM
0 comments

new narrative

Eclogues makes me a happy boy this week by drawing my attention back to Narrativity, a San Francisco critical journal (and also for linking to this apple soup recipe, which sounds delicious and is likely be my new-recipe-of-the-week this week).

I've only begun to poke around the Narrativity site: there's a lot there and much of it is heady. But this piece, "Long Note on New Narrative," by Robert Glück, grabbed me right away with its engaging memoirish tone. It's a piece about Bay Area writing in the 70's and 80's, and, most particularly, about how a pair of author/publishers (Glück & Bruce Boone) hammered out a genre within which they could write what they wanted to.

"I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche."

Lots of ideas which resonate with me here. For instance:

"We brought gossip and anecdote to our writing because they contain speaker and audience, establish the parameters of community and trumpet their 'unfair' points of view. ... as a collagist I had an infinite field. I could use the lives we endlessly described to each other as 'found material' which complicates storytelling because the material also exists on the same plane as the reader's life. Found materials have a kind of radiance, the truth of the already-known."

The piece provides avenues for further exploration by referencing perhaps a dozen relevant thinkers (both critics and poets) who helped Glück & Boone formulate their conception of "new narrative," and several writers who are practicioners of the form, all of whom are unknown to me.

Further reading: this hypertextual interview with Glück.

Also the newest Imaginary Year entry, on the role of poets in the military-industrial complex.

Enough stalling—time to grade some student drafts.

Labels: narrative, recipes, writing

Friday, February 08, 2002
2:23 PM
0 comments

For Xmas, K. got me the new issue of Ploughshares, which features Jorie Graham as guest poetry editor.

I've been slowly (over breakfasts) reading the poems she's selected. They are strange, and good, like much of her own poetry.

In her introduction to the issue, she sets down some of her thoughts about poetry in general, and it is worthy reading.

"I like ... to render the process of 'reading' as some version of 'being allowed and enabled by the craft of the poet to do the emotional and intellectual work the poem is asking me to do.' If there are images being used, for example—not just objects or pictures, but those mysterious chambers of deepening emotive resonance, those meaning-charged clusters that, if undertaken by the senses of the reader, do yield sensorial 'content'—for example—then I want to be made able, by the formal virtues of the poem, to undergo them. If I find myself unable to do the work the poet asks for, I can’t proceed with the poem, and it will remain private to the poet. The same applies to the whole rest of the palate of available actions in the poem: the architecture of rhetoric, the ideas, the musical modulation that invokes story, the turns of mind, the acoustic activity—how it generates its own chambers of echoing meaning—and so on. I love poems where I can do what the poet asks. Doing what I am asked to do is deeply different from interpreting what the poet means."

Six of the poems that Graham has written for Ploughshares, dating from 1979 to 1995, are linked at this archive.

Labels: poetics, poetry_commentary

Wednesday, February 06, 2002
11:11 AM
0 comments

tales of nevèrÿon

I spent some time this weekend reading Tales of Nevèrÿon, one of the books in Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon series.

Delaney populates this book with by fantasy-character archetypes (the hulking slave, the child empress, the old woman of the village), but then proceeds to focus more on the invisible flows that surround them (power, language, capital). A handful of allusions to critical theory are sprinkled in for flavor. So far, it's brilliant: like leaving Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and some Foucault book out on your radiator all night only to wake up in the morning and find that they've melted together into a single text.

For a while, it seemed like Wesleyan University Press was keeping this and the other books in print, although it doesn't appear on their most recent list.

Further reading: poking around online reveals some science-fiction novels and stories that incorporate linguistics. (And any time I think of Delany I am reminded that I should read more Bellona Times.)

Labels: book_commentary, science_fiction

Monday, February 04, 2002
12:49 PM
0 comments

I've been busy tinkering with other spots on the web.

I've written new notes on information space over at Narrative Technologies, and a new Imaginary Year entry.

Also, I've completed preliminary design on the "dreamlog community" that I'm administrating, Like Sand Like Leaves. It looks better now (and works better, too).

Check out this dream about a nonexistent album, Insect Penis.

Labels: projects

Friday, February 01, 2002
2:35 PM
0 comments