The horror!

For your macabre pleasure on this Friday the 13th, I offer the following x-ray of my collarbone. The broken part (where it's sticking up under my skin) is circled, and the arrow points to what I believe to be a bone fragment. And this was taken a month after the injury ...

A Literary Question

My fiction writing is progressing nicely this fall, but I've been wrestling with the question of whether to set my stories in real places or fictional ones. That is to say, should I use the real names for the places I'm writing about ( in and around Fulton County, N.Y.), or should I make up names to stand in for those actual places?

I've already made my decision, but I'm curious about one thing: Can you think of any cases in which an author has made up a name for a large city, instead of setting his tale in New York or London or Paris or Dublin, etc. I can't think of a single made-up metropolis, other than the Gotham of the DC comic books, and the otherworldly cities of fantasy and science fiction. If you can think of any such made up cities in realistic/naturalistic fiction, please let me know ... smokinbill@aol.com

A Couple of Songs

I've recorded a couple of songs this week, covers of Mississippi John Hurt's "Coffee Blues" and the Carter Family classic "Keep on the Sunny Side." These are no-frills productions, with just a couple of acoustic instruments in the mix. Have a listen:

CoffeeBlues.mp3

KeepOnTheSunnySide.mp3

Recovering from another injury

I had an extremely short fall season with the Saratoga rugby club. Five minutes into my first match, a tackle went badly and I broke my collarbone. (I was the one doing the tackling, hence the "badly.") So I may well be hanging up my spikes and retiring for good. We'll see how I feel about it in the spring after I've mended.

My blogging will be somewhat limited this fall as I work on my thesis, but I seem to be wasting plenty of time over at myspace. Click the image below to see what nonsense I've been up to there:

 

The Boss Goes All Folky Again

Anyone who's heard me perform in the last two or three years has probably heard me sing "Pay Me My Money Down," a tradtional song from the Georgia Sea Islands that I learned from a Dan Zanes CD.

Bruce Springsteen's new album, a Pete Seeger tribute disc, includes of version of that song that's pretty sweet. He adds a verse about Bill Gates, which was cheeky of him.

There's are audio and video files of the Springsteen performance at the following site:

Springsteen Clips

 

Moon & River Gig Photos

A few pictures that Jen shot at the Moon & River Cafe last week. Thanks to Sandy (at left) and Roland (center) for sitting in with me, and megathanks to those who showed up to listen.

P.S. I now have some .mp3s available for free downloading (free is always good!) at www.nowhereradio.com/smokinbill

Cape Cod Trip Pics, and a Song

I've been neglecting my blogging duties lately. The photo gallery at left has some shots from our Cape Cod vacation.

And for your multimedia enjoyment, I've posted a new recording below. It's the old blues favorite "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," on which I play an old nylon string guitar and sing in a slightly nasal voice because I did the recording right in the middle of an allergy attack. 'Tis the season. I recorded it using my wife's iriver .mp3 player, which is pretty cool because it has a built-in microphone and it's smaller than a Zippo lighter.

NobodyKnowsYou.mp3