Monday, December 10, 2012

The Metronome As A Place To Switch Off




Over the weekend I said to somebody, “I can’t believe this weather. I’m wearing two shirts, two jackets and a scarf and I’m still shivering.”

She just laughed and said, “You need to move someplace warm, buddy.”




She called me “buddy.” And so—it’s cause-and-effect, for me—I’ve been thinking a lot about the most famous ‘Buddy’ I know, which would be ‘Buddy Glass’ and which would be J. D. Salinger.


Web Gallagher "Buddy" Glass (born 1919): The protagonist in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It is revealed in the latter that he wrote at least two stories collected in Nine Stories: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy." It is also suggested in Seymour that he wrote The Catcher in the Rye. Buddy is often considered to be Salinger's alter ego. He lives in upstate New York and teaches English at a rural women's college. He also volunteers his time to instruct some of the faculty of his college in Mahayana Buddhism. Buddy and Seymour were only two years apart, spent most of their youths living together, and were very close before Seymour's suicide in 1948. Buddy narrates most of the Glass stories.


Glass Family
at Wikipedia


Pumpkin Are Free

No Zen Here

And Salinger has been in the news lately because many US schools will be dropping “Catcher In The Rye” from their reading programs.


I do need to move someplace, but “someplace warm” is only part of what I’m looking for.

Escape From Earth And The Status Cow

A Long Walk



*



I wrote a little song late Sunday night—
I’m thinking of doing a puppet show—
but instead of enjoying the music
I enjoyed time with my technology,
first trying out the song in four-four time
and then playing the same thing in waltz time,
trying to decide which one I liked best.

In the end I switched off the metronome
and just recorded it playing freely
without imposing a time signature,
without imposing even a rhythm,
three phrases fitting themselves together.

Monday morning somehow all by themselves
overnight when I wasn’t even up
in my head the phrases re-worked themselves
into a simple four-four arrangement
that I recorded at my workstation
before I even put on my glasses.

Los Angeles might be the next best thing
to Hyperborea or Atlantis.

But I still haven’t given up all hope
of finding a way to those real places.






. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Impossible Places: Guitars And Flutes

Real Estate Gothic

Dinosaur By Moonlight: A Puppet Show

The Occult Technology Of Lost Songs





















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