I promised a return of Dave Moore earlier this month, and here he is, presenting a story that frames itself three ways. In today’s piece Dave reads a short passage from Greil Marcus’ 1975 book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music, which in turn includes this story 20th century musician Frank Floyd told … Continue reading The Testimony of Harmonica Frank Floyd
We’re now nearing the top of our look back at the most liked and listened to audio pieces this past fall. Yesterday we used words from a trio of women writers, and today starts off the same way. If you missed the original posts on my encounter with these texts and creating the music for … Continue reading Fall 2019 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 4-2
It’s perhaps my favorite scene in D. A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back. Pennebaker has setup this narrative as Dylan tours England in 1965, introduced with shots of British music newspapers touting the teen-aged Donovan as Dylan’s rival. My well-remembered scene is shot in Dylan’s Savoy hotel room, where boffins can pick out … Continue reading Brancusi’s Golden Bird
I almost feel like I need to place a warning label on today’s piece: Rated RE Strong Romantic Emotional Content. Thanatopsic material. May not be suitable for those who have not sufficiently worked through issues with self-harm or the experience of self-dissolution. Modernism had a strong tendency toward a critique and reaction to romanticism and … Continue reading August Moonrise
William Carlos Williams Kora in Hell is an unusual book. Its subtitle: Improvisations promised me more than it delivered. Improvised or semi-improvised poetry, that true Jazz poetry where the author composes on the spot from themes or from spontaneous inspiration is something I admired and—to a degree—practiced in my youth. The improvisations of Williams’ book … Continue reading An exchange from the Prologue to Kora In Hell
Let me introduce newcomers to one of this project’s “finds,” the little-known early 20th century English poet Charlotte Mew. Of course, I didn’t really find her, some of her English contemporaries did, and they waged an unsuccessful campaign to bring her work to greater attention. Among those who thought she deserved more attention: Thomas Hardy, … Continue reading Not for that City
I indicated when I first presented a poem by Charlotte Mew this month that I’d talk more about her life, but what I know is so limited and sad that I’ll try to condense things. She was born into a family that had more than its share of illness and mortality. Three siblings died in … Continue reading The Trees are Down
Here we go with our quarterly run down of the most liked and listened to audio pieces over the past season. We’ll be counting up to the most listened to piece over the next few days as we approach winter solstice. Who’ll chart? The most famous poets with their best-loved words? The literary poets’ … Continue reading Fall 2018 Parlando Project Top 10 Numbers 10-8
I can’t say what day this happened, but it was sometime in 1916 in Davenport Iowa. A well-off, Harvard-educated man in his mid-thirties named Witter Bynner was visiting a former Harvard classmate Arthur Davison Ficke in the latter’s elegant home. Besides family wealth, both men shared an interest in the arts, and both were published … Continue reading Two men walk into a hotel room, and…
It was an odd summer traffic-wise for the audio pieces of the Parlando Project, with listens quite slow in the first half of the season, and then picking up to the point that August listens were a near record. That increase in traffic (new listeners?) may be why we had no older, pre-summer audio pieces … Continue reading Summer 2018 Parlando Top 10
