We caught two great live shows in the area this month: Roy Book Binder in Canajoharie and Bruce Molsky in Amsterdam. Both shows were free, acoustic and al fresco: it doesn't get any better. Below I have pasted a video clip of Bruce and a still shot of Roy.
Bruce Molsky playing "Wandering Boy"
Roy Book Binder cracking joke after joke (and occasionally playing some sweet blues guitar).
With the master's thesis behind me, I'm moving on to the next project: Moving. We closed on the new house Friday and will be making the big haul across town tomorrow.
Here are a few shots of the upstairs as it looked earlier this year: First February and then March and early April. That's my brother-in-law Chris in the gas mask. Our contractors, John Duesler (walls and trim) and Steve Maxson (electrical) and Jeff Shaver (floors), did great and fast work. Stay tuned for current photos of the new, improved 7 Prindle Ave.
After about a year (on and off, mostly on) of intense intellectual and creative labor, I submitted my master's thesis on Monday. Three days later, it still hasn't sunk in that I'm done. Maybe that's because I'm still working full-time as a newspaper editor as well as teaching journalism two nights a week ... perhaps I need a full weekend to unwind.
One of the first things I did after turning in the manuscript (88 pages, but who's counting?) was to go to the library and return a crate full of books I had been using for my research and inspiration. Of course I couldn't leave the library empty-handed, so I grabbed a small stack of new books. It's great to be able to read purely for pleasure again. I suspect, however, that my idea of "pleasure reading" has evolved a bit over the last three years. I picked up books of essays by Andrei Codrescu, poems by Gerald Stern, illustrated fiction by Charles Bukowski with R. Crumb, and a novel by Johnathan Lethem. I selected them based on how little they resembled the material I was reading for the thesis ...
Folks are always asking what my thesis was about, and I'm tired of trying to explain it in 50 words or fewer, so here is an excerpt from the abstract that sums it up as briefly as possible:
In her essay "On Place in Fiction," the Southern writer and photographer Eudora Welty wrote, "It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction. Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer – it is to be discovered … Discovery does not imply that the place is new, only that we are."
Knowing Home: Short Fiction from Fulton County, N.Y. is a collection of five short stories set in the writer's home region, which straddles the Mohawk Valley and Adirondack Foothills of New York State. The collection isintroduced with a critical essay that combines personal narrative and scholarship about the ways location interacts with culture, economics and identity, and how these interactions apply to the writer's own fiction and modern American realistic fiction in general.
The essay also briefly investigates how these interactions are eminent in "Mohawk," the first published novel by Richard Russo. The novel's setting is a nominally fictionalized town resembling Gloversville, N.Y., which was Russo's "first and primary proving ground" and is immediately adjacent to this writer's hometown, Johnstown.
How's this for a strange coincidence: Tonight I returned to the Johnstown Public Library an audio collection of short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut. Some of the stories were classics that I had read before, inlcuding "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House." But many of the others were new to me, such as "A Deer in the Works," and I enjoyed them immensely as I listened to them in the car over the course of the last two weeks. When I got home from the library, I surfed the news sites on the Web to learn that Vonnegut died today. Hmmm ...
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=580066
I will be playing informally and quite unplugged for the grand opening of my brother-in-law's new business. Here are the details:
Touch Therapies of Saratoga, 8 Butler Place, will host a grand opening reception to introduce its staff and services to the community.
The public is welcome to attend the grand opening, which will take place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12. Free chair massages will be offered, and the event will feature live acoustic music, refreshments and information about the aromatherapy products available from Victoria's Essentials.
Touch Therapies' practitioners offer techniques ranging from Swedish-style relaxation massage to Shiatsu and Reiki as well as hot-stone massage. Custom massage therapy is available for clients who prefer a personalized approach.
For more information about Touch Therapies of Saratoga, call (518) 580-8501 or visit www.ttofsaratoga.com.
