three things

1. a little talkie-talk
i feel like my posts have been pretty vacuous lately. they have been something like extended twitter updates or facebook status messages -- little snippets of what's going on in my head at any given moment in time (and even at some undisclosed moment in time in the past, via my "found entry" posts). perhaps it is the case that extended narrative of what's going on with me seems even more self-indulgent than posting little thoughts or curiosities. but i should just give that up because having a blog is pretty freaking self-indulgent. and who is out there reading my blog? (interpret that as your chance to leave me a comment on this post.) you are surely a small voyeuristic bunch. but please don't get me wrong, i like it that you are reading these words. it validates this self-indulgent off-and-on habit of mine.

2. music
on a completely different note, next week i'm going to see antony and the johnsons. i'm excited about it. i hope that they will play a version of beyonce's 'crazy in love'. i can't get enough of their rendition of this song today.
here is a clip of them doing it:



he ends the song by saying, "who says that i'm not a teenage girl?"

3. knitting
and yeah, i'm still knitting, there's just no real photographic evidence of it.
i received a lovely knitted gift for christmas. here is a strange picture of me wearing the shawl/scarf that e made for me out of local handspun yarn:















she also gifted me some of her own handspun. i made a cowl (or neck gaiter) out of it. i just have to sew in the ends on that one and i can start wearing it. maybe a picture of that will be posted here some time in the future. or maybe not.

found entry 2

"did i ever tell you that i once got a job in moldova? well, i did. but i didn't take it. i didn't move to moldova. i guess you probably know that, right? sometimes i wonder what my life would have been like if i had moved there for a few years. did you know that the capital of moldova is kishinev (or chisinau, depending upon how you spell it)? that's where i was supposed to live. and there would have been electricity outages and rabid dogs and all sorts of exciting things happening in russian that i wouldn't have understood for a while. things would have been really different if i had moved there... do you think it would be possible to go back and do it all differently?"

this reminds me of a dream i had...

bodies of water

something i read

Originally uploaded by BIFRÖST

"science is founded on the conviction that experience,
effort and reason are valid -- magic on the belief that
hope cannot fail nor desire deceive."
-- bronislaw malinowski

music and myth

i don't know why i keep thinking about that claude levi-strauss book "myth and meaning". i'm still processing it. and although i found a lot of it interesting, for some reason the final chapter on music keeps coming back in my head... when he talks about music taking over the structure and function of mythology. the example he discusses is the recurring theme of the renunciation of love in wagner and that the only way to understand the recurrence of the theme throughout this long story is to try to see if the events which represent that theme are one and the same... okay, you get it, right? if not, just read the last chapter of his book because what i really wanted to talk about is something different. namely, reading about wagner got me thinking about country music, and i mean music like maybe what george jones made popular... country music with a narrative, frequently an autobiographical one. so i thought, that would be a fun project -- looking at the narrative constructed in country music or american folk music and see how the structure and function is comparable to mythology, as discussed by CLS. in my quick search for such studies, i found this book.














looks cool. it's on the 'to read' list... like so many other books.

in the meantime, i can't stop listening to this song by band of annuals... it's a little bit country and little bit folksy.

ineffable

so what is the order of operations?

-- see something
-- have an emotional response
-- can't describe that emotion with any words

hmmm?

photo by BIFRÖST

vampires and zombies

this post is for bryan and his funny story about vampires.

this is the zombie part:


i really like the sound effects in that video... it was found via something JD told me to look at. he's been doing work for long now and told me to look at this interesting piece from will wright and brian eno. but to be honest with you, i haven't finished watching the wright/eno thing. some day.