Ghost Music has a face!

Here is the front cover of Ghost Music. The image is a detail (one panel) from a 16-panel painting by Maria Parrella-Ilaria.

The book should be ready to roll by mid-September. Check the "Readings and Concerts" window to the right for events.

Books

This is one of the reasons I love William Carlos Williams, from “The Library,” Book 3 of Paterson:

For there is a wind, or ghost of a wind

in all books echoing the life

there, a high wind that fills the tubes

of the ear until we hear a wind,

actual .

to lead the mind away

Ebooks and Used Books

A very thoughtful article from The Sault Star quotes yours truly and a couple other local booksellers. The writer even mentions our beloved cat, "The Pooch," who left us earlier this year. I am glad to know he is remembered.
Article link: "Technology & Books" by Jeffrey Ougler, The Sault Star, Saturday August 14th

Neighbours

"Neighbours," a reading from Ghost Music.

Coltrane

In response to Gary Barwin's "On Listening to Coleman Hawkins," I offer the less elegant offering below:


A Love Supreme

To describe Coltrane's reed squall
we refer to animals in nature
as depicted in storybook recordings:
elephant, walrus, a lion under fire.

We look to the machine world:
to trains, factories, to scrap yards.

And in locked-up places,
the determined hinge tearing --

but find only
more Coltrane.

from Ghost Music (BuschekBooks, 2010), coming soon

Another One Bites the Dust

My hometown is notorious for allowing its old buildings to be torn down. A few years back, a beautiful building, formerly a bank, from the early 20^th century was razed to make way for a Tim Hortons fishbowl.

There have been many more to meet the wrecking ball. Today, a splendidly spooky old building, formerly a hotel and known as The Cornwall Building, is going down. Now, I know the building was in bad shape. It needed serious work and care. For years, it had been rented out to nonprofits and artists' groups, neither of which demographic can contribute much in the way of restoration costs. In fact, my wife and I had a studio/office space on the third floor for years.

Inside, a wide spiral staircase, all extinct wood, with ornate wood banister, ran from roof to basement. On the third floor, just beside our old space, an immense walk-in safe, as big as a very large bedroom, in which I dreamed of recording an album, was a reminder of the position the building once held in the community. Its ceilings were at least 15 feet. Its frame old timber and solid brick painted a powder blue. My guess is that it was built in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

And, in other day, it will be gone. Private investors bought the building and are planning to replace it with a modern office building. Glass for brick. Of course, I can’t blame the city for having a short memory and a lack of loyalty, can I? With the right amount of coin, one could buy just about any old building and tear it down.

I hope, at least, the new building is an eco-design. However, in a place where things tend to be done on the cheap, I have my doubts.

Ideally, it would be great to see effort going into preservation and upgrading rather than demolition.(To see the building, pan right -- its the big blue baby).

View Larger Map

Drones and Blogs

The twenty-four hour news cycle has been blamed for promoting worthless, mundane nonstories as earth-shattering “Breaking News.” With so much time to fill, networks allow windy anchors to blather on about nothing; much like a blog, I guess. But the twenty-four hour broadcast day also allows networks to bury stories. Many important bits of news are lost in the barrage of vacuous coverage.

 

Even with the thousands of bloggers and news sites out there, many stories are simply missed or intentionally overlooked. I think there are more worthy stories than there are people and resources to disseminate the news. What we need are Robojournalists, News Drones, that can fly about recording human experience and uploading it to the web. Surely, the technology is capable. If the US war machine can pick a target in a desert, fly with a remotely controlled device, and sometimes even destroy the intended target (with a few weddings, nurseries, and picnics mistakenly bombed), certainly they can build News Drones to document every facet of humanity.

 

For more on remote warfare, check out Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It was prescient.

 

“Poetry is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading.