Let’s see if this tradition lasts: each Monday morning I’ll post an mp3 or I’ll post a link to an mp3 out there on the web. The stuff that I probably shouldn’t be posting will be removed after 24 hours. I’ll focus on independent music, stuff you’re less likely to hear through the mainstream media. This morning there’s a bumper crop.

• Richard Buckner, “Pull” (mp3, 3M) from Devotion & Doubt.
  • Allmusic Guide entry
  • Buckner’s current record label page
  • Official website
• Chuck notes that you can download the original music from the film Tarnation for free.
• Drag City is offering a couple of free downloads right now:

• “Home,” by Six Organs of Admittance
• “My Home is the Sea (live acoustic),” by Bonny Billy and Matt Sweeney

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Through this site, I’m trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know. Availability is limited.

A field of study popped up on my radar screen recently: soundscape studies. I’m not exactly sure how or if this field might be relevant to my work on orality and literacy, but I’m going to investigate. I heard the term while attending a great panel in Philadelphia at MLA 2004:

Sounds in the Eighteenth-Century City

1. ìMother Shipton Speaks: Sounding Oracles in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,î Laura E. McGrane, Haverford Coll.
2. ìPope, Print, and the ëWondírous Powír of Noise,íî Paula J. McDowell, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
3. ìSounds in the Theater,î Paula R. Backscheider, Auburn Univ., Auburn

All three papers were great but the one by Paula McDowell was particularly interesting to me. (Full disclosure: McDowell was on my dissertation committee.) If I followed her talk correctly, her current book project, Fugitive Voices: Literature and Oral Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, traces attitudes towards oral traditions from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century in England. While we find a skeptical, or even antagonistic, attitude towards oral traditions in earlier writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, there is a more nostalgic view in place by the time we get to James MacPherson and William Wordsworth. In short, McDowell is researching the ways in which our current attitudes towards orality and literacy developed, including the invention of such concepts as “oral tradition” and “oral culture.” This is, it seems to me, extremely important work that is not only carefully researched and deeply historicized but understandable by the layperson.

Too bad some reporters cannot be persuaded to leave the confines of the newsroom in order to actually see what’s going on at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, offering their readers instead a tired retread of stereotypes and uninformed sniping.

I love you. Really. But one resolution I’m making for 2005 is to do less late night blog reading and more late night book reading.

May 2005 be better than 2004 for all of us.

Last night we enjoyed a dinner of Thai food, then some tea at a friend’s apartment, then home for a quiet midnight and a glass of 18-year-old, single malt Scotch.

My most memorable new year’s eve was in Naples, Italy in the late 1980s. I was home from college and my family went to a party at a house that overlooked the Mediterranean. To welcome the new at midnight, the Neapolitans threw out the old…literally. Glasses, dishes, chairs, couches, dishwashers, unwanted grandmothers(*): they all went flying out of windows as fireworks flew into the air in long arcs that ended on rooftops, setting the city on fire.

Driving home was like driving through a war zone. It remains one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

* not really

So the blog is now called “Thanks for not being a Zombie,” and my name is no longer so prominently displayed. Please, dear reader, change your links so they say something like “Thanks…Zombie,” instead of my name. I’m not going to be overly concerned about concealing who I am, but I’m going to be harder to google. I have an inclination to talk about some things that, while not scandalous, are perhaps a bit impolite.

It remains to be seen if I will act upon those inclinations. Don’t worry: if I know you, the chances are very slim that I plan to write about you.

We’re running the latest version of MovableType, now. If you run into any problems, please let me know.