“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”: A Prosody of Jazz
Sometimes you start to write something and it grows out of control, like this essay. Still, I know there is something to it because poetry and music share genetics. The music notation images are kind of blucky on the Web, but if you are researching this topic, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the originals.
Drummers and poets are used like ashtrays YES
–Howard Hart
The Engineer as Catalyst: Billy Klüver on Working with Artists
This article first appeared in the July 1998 issue of “IEEE Spectrum Magazine.” It was a real privilege to interview Billy and to see his passion for work and his delight that people were still interested in what he had done. He died in 2004.
The Lepidopterist
At 35, or what she reckoned to be precisely middle age, Elaine decided to get an intimate tattoo. She reached this decision quite emphatically one night, sitting alone in her darkened, corner office. She ditched Marc for good, her third long-term relationship with a man who had tolerated her for a few years and then demanded commitment. She finally realized that it would be impossible to find a man unthreatened by her success, one who didn’t require the same level of attention as her career. Given this fate, she decided the time had come for her to live her personal life like her professional life. It’s all business, she reasoned. The business of me.
I See You
Driving to the hospital I think about the fishing trip. Not the one I took last spring with the old man, the morning of his stroke, but an earlier one. I might have been ten or eleven years old. On that trip, I remember, Dad spied this big rainbow trout behind a water-worn rock in the middle of the stream, right where he thought he’d be. He’d caught fish in that hole before-mostly eight-to-ten inchers treading water headlong against the current, waiting for food to drift downstream. The trout sat in the eddy just behind the rock, close enough to ease their struggle against the current but far enough back to dart left or right when something edible hit the rock and was driven by the current to one side or the other. The trick, Dad explained, was to land the fly in the center of the current so it would drift naturally to the boulder and trail left or right around it. When presented correctly, Dad said, no self-respecting fish could resist.