why there's a cat?

The last day of 2009 finds me at the top of the country, two miles west of Copper Harbor, MI, spending a few days with N. at an incredible house filled with antique dolls and taxidermied animals. Our cell phones are useless up here, but the internet connection's dependable. We've spent hours and hours in pajamas, tying up loose ends with work and projects.

In between chunks of online time we've been snowshoeing, dashing out to the sauna and back, drinking tea, snacking on leftover Christmas cookies and plowing through season 5 of LOST. Not a bad way to transition into the new year.

My favorite NY greeting this year came from pals over in Moscow, whose Podstansiya website/ podcast is a totally singular - and important - destination for independent Russian radio/audio work, and public forums about media, the arts, and culture. The greeting is a short essay/poem by a young father, inspired by questions from his son and scored with rowdy electric guitar. And I'm happily taking the liberty to pass it along to you.

Now it's time to hit the snowshoe trails. All good things in 2010, to everyone!

The Words of Sounds (2) - Dybek

Earlier this year I posted a paragraph from a novel that explored the sound of a scene so beautifully I thought it was worth sharing. Here's another bunch of words you can practically hear. It's text from a "A Minor Mood," a short story by Stuart Dybek from his outstanding collection I Sailed With Magellan. There's music and noise and sound throughout this book (and all of SD's work) but something about this scene really stands out for me.

Here's the set-up: An aged and worn-down character Lefty is remembering back to the times when his Grandmother ("Lefty's Gran") would nurse him back to health from the croup, and other bronchial tube-challenged conditions. Imagine a room in an old Chicago apartment building on the South Side, full of pots and pans balancing on radiators, steam pouring forth, the smell of Vicks Vaporub hanging in the air.

"She taught Lefty to play the measuring spoons like castanets in accompaniment to her gypsylike singing. She was playing the radiators with a ladle as if they were marimbas. Lefty was up, out of bed, flushed, but feeling great, and in steam that was fading to wisps he was dancing with his gran. Her girlish curls tossed as around and around the room they whirled, both of them singing, and on or the other dizzily breaking off the dance in order to beat or plunk or blow some instrument they'd just invented: Lefty strumming the egg slicer, Lefty's Gran oompahing an empty half gallon of Dad's old-fashioned root beer; Lefty bugling "Sunshine" through the cardboard clarion at the center of a toilet-paper roll, Lefty's Gran chiming a closet of empty coat hangers; Lefty shake-rattle-and-rolling the silverware drawer; Lefty's Gran Spike Jonesing the vacuum cleaner; Lefty, surrounded by pots and lids, drum-soloing with wooden spoons; while Lefty's Gran, conducting with a potato masher, yelled "Go, Krupa, go!"

According to Blogger.com's spell check, "oompahing" is misspelled. But Dybek knows better.

P.S. Read this one outloud, if you will.