From The Potato Farm, here are the first four stanzas of “The Sasquatch and the Jackalope.” As astute readers will notice, it’s about photography, and is written in embraced quatrains (ABBA), with the stanzas alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. THE SASQUATCH AND THE JACKALOPE We have a stirring tale to tell, Of how two creatures, […]

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I’m writing some interstitial music for a projected album of readings. I plan to use a variety of instruments when I record it, but I tarried on the way to arrange it for string quartet as well. Here’s the first page:

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My translation of Charles Cros’s prose works, The Science of Love, is now available from Wakefield Press. From the publisher: The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the […]

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I’ll perform some historical musical oddities, drawn from my upcoming book Music from Elsewhere, at the symposium at Lily Dale, NY, July 27-29. The conference is organized by Shannon Taggart, and includes presentations on art, the paranormal, and the history of Spiritualism by Phil Ford, J. F. Martel, Amy Hale, Emily Hanger, Charles and Penelope […]

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For the first issue of Typo, a stereoscopic word ladder.

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This is the centennial of the death of Marcel Proust (November 18, 1922). Here, then, is my version of In Search of Lost Time, from Shorten the Classics. It saves Marcel a lot of work.

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Here’s another study in wet tuning, the practice of slightly detuning two pitches to give a richer sound. It’s often used in accordions. Here, I detune double melody strings on a chord zither. As in the diatonic study, I offer two possibilities.

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Wet tuning is the practice of slightly detuning two pitches to give a richer sound. It’s often used in accordions. Here, I detune double melody strings on a chord zither. And I offer two possibilities.  

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This sad little tale can be found in The Snowman Three Doors Down. The title did, in fact, come from a dream. The constraint (for there is a constraint) is that the text forms an acrostic of the title, and that each sentence contains the number of words corresponding to the initial letter’s place in […]

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“A Slot Machine for Wooden Nickels” is a set of seven pieces for either keyboard or violin and ‘cello. Each is 49 measures long, divided in different ways; the first is 7 x 7, the second 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10, the third 10 + 10 + […]

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