un regard oblique

29.4.07

...in a very mean lodging in Gunpowder Alley, near Shoe Lane.

28.4.07

The LoC has music and film to rival the depth and historical complexity of its image archives:

Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier is a field collection of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed. Browse it by Musical Genres for tunes that evoke the history and spirit of Virginia's Appalachian frontier. Some strains lay dormant, in the repertory of a few elder musicians, until they are rediscovered by the next generation and pass back into wider circulation. Hear, for example, Reed's version of "Salt River," a tune recorded by Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys in 1964 under the title "Salt Creek," and the piece "Breakdown in A" which joined the modern bluegrass repertory after Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it as "Clinch Mountain Backstep."
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Cameraman G.W. "Billy" Bitzer filmed Professor Leonidas and his troupe of dogs and cats in the film short Stealing a Dinner on April 28, 1899. The film was shot at the Biograph studio at 841 Broadway in New York City. The film is described in the 1902 Biograph catalog:
One of the dogs is shown stealing his dinner from the table in the master's absence. In order to cover his own crime, the dog places a cat on the table, where she is found when the master comes in. The master shoots the cat, and is promptly arrested by a large dog dressed in policeman's clothes.
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Both selections from Today in History: April 28

26.4.07

Dorothy Canfield
at wikipedia
Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award
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James T. Farrell
James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan was the first adult book that brought me all the way into another world and held me there for all the time I was reading it. I picked it up at a friend of mine's house, his older brother had it, when I was around 10 or 11.
Me and this guy had a talk once about that experience, and his magnum opus Ringolevio was maybe in part at least a regurgitification of Farrell's gritty compassion, so amply employed.

24.4.07

Happy Birthday Library!

22.4.07

Happy Birthday April I never forget but things are so crazy I often neglect to mention it.

Bend down and cup your hands and look again
what is it down there
white
and not too far away

motel de moka has an mp3 from Warsaw Village Band, among many others from many more

the figures seem to point to other important geographical features or major cultural sites, and possibly to patterns in the stars

20.4.07

gonkulator

"A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware."

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from here > to here > to here

19.4.07

women were excluded from shaping the paradigm they are now being paradoxically judged within

18.4.07

Christian Patterson on the LoC P&P

17.4.07

at after Momus (whose Bonsai Tree is still echoing through here)

"Luckily language is never in the exclusive control of scholars; it does not belong to them alone, as they are often inclined to believe; it belongs to all who have it as a mother-tongue. It is governed not by elected representatives but by a direct democracy, by the people as a whole assembled in town-meeting."
Brander Matthews, Essays in English 8-9 (1922)

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day

16.4.07

Fifty Years in Chains or The Life of an American Slave
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from the archives:

a piece of the slave ship Clothilde
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Melungeons
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Portraits of African American ex-slaves
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Bell Rack

An even more learned equivalent is "fugacious," which is a literary word as well as a botanical term describing plants that wither or drop their leaves early.

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day

15.4.07

Inconstant Star

13.4.07

seven people stopped what they were doing

We are here on Earth to fart around

12.4.07

The word guitar is a Persian loanword to Iberian Arabic
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A Russian seven string is tuned differently from the Spanish guitar. It is tuned in thirds instead of fourths, resulting in a G major chord as follows: D', G', B, D, g, b, d'. This tuning is thought to have derived from that of the torban, a Ukrainian variety of theorbo, as one of its tunings was also based on major triads.
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L'Arpeggiata downloads
L'Arpeggiata - Los Impossibles
Christina Pluhar – harpe baroque, théorbe, direction
Marcello Vitale – chitarra battente, guitare baroque
see esp. videos
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Alfio is Sicilian, and has mastered an extremely complex art. His music-making is part of the polyrhythmic art that Sicilians know backwards and forwards.