It started out wet this morning, but it looks nice now. My older one reminded me around 10:00AM, that we’d decided that today would be the day we voted. She was up “early” for the event. My dad had reported that the early polling place in our town had intolerably long line there on Saturday, the first day things began. I checked and the voting didn’t start till noon today, so we waited till a call I was on was done and we drove over. There, ten minutes before the voting would begin, the line was probably a quarter mile long, and even with social distancing making the snake of people longer, you could tell that this would be a long slog. Some people were sitting in chairs. Others were reading. I had a book. But I did not have a coat and with my daughter’s class starting in an hour, I was highly suspicious that we’d make it time. We will return, certainly.
Four squirrels and a blue jay out on the lawn, eating up all the sunflower seeds I’d tossed out this morning. They eat, gaze around, eat some more and if anyone gets too close to anyone else, they chase each other off, but it never last for more than a moment. No one ever seems to learn a thing concerning territorial claims. The suet feeder was ransacked last night by the raccoons. I was lulled into complacency when, by 11:00PM last night, they hadn’t shown up. You gotta wonder what two pounds of suet does to a raccoons belly. I’m sure it tastes great going down, but . . . that’s gotta leave you feeling unsettled the next day.
I’m bogged down in my novel “Warlock” by Oakley Hall. The miners had one of their own killed and they are running roughshod through the town, demanding a lynching. The deputies struggle with self-preservation and upholding the law. Some two-hundred and fifty pages in though, I’m not really invested in any of the characters, save the sheriff, Blaisedell, and he’s gone quiet, though he surely will return. Flopping around early in the morning, I turned instead to my third collection of ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’, which is essentially a Tokugawa-era “western,” and considered two episodes of the assassin’s hard, unforgiving code, not so dissimilar to that of Wyatt Earp.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was born in Florida. Born in 1939, she’s next up on my chronological progression through the wiki list of American composers. I have on “Rituals 1” an orchestral piece of hers that seems to have incorporated the Chinese chao gong cymbal. Enjoying her style which has been described as neo-romantic. But I have enjoyed listening to some of her experimental peers, Gloria Coates or Jon Appleton more. It was sunny when I started writing this entry, not long ago. Come to look up and find it's all clouded over now and suddenly her music sounds different.
I’ve become distracted and have looked up a song I heard on WFMU the other morning, returning from having dropped my daughter off, which I surmised must be Korean but was notably, wonderfully odd. Indeed “Crying Softshell Turtle” is by Leenalchi and they are a phenomenon whose album is already up on Spotify. I suspect I’m gonna crank this tomorrow in the car, when it’s my turn on the ride to school.
Tuesday, 10/27/20
No comments:
Post a Comment