Month: August 2012

I spent a lot of time this weekend outside, trying to see the Peresid meteor shower. I was only rewarded with about four sightings, even though I live out in the sticks and can see the Milky Way across the night sky, but one of them looked like it was about to leave a mark. Whew. Exhilarating stuff. Two things brought my meteor-gazing to a halt: the clouds creeping in, and my own Canis Major and Canis Minor deciding that it’s playtime since I was outside.

Many years ago, I wrote and recorded a piece of music that I called Perseids for no readily apparent reason, and I can now report that it fits the experience rather well.

[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/percyy.mp3]

(More sonorous synthesized sounds can be found here.)

Speaking of music, I’ve spent recent weeks delving into the works of Erik Satie. It’s been a while since I “adopted” a classical composer wholesale, but it’s not unknown – in my music directory, Rachmaninoff is right above Radiohead, and Rimsky-Korsakov can be spotted between R.E.M. and the Rolling Stones, probably squirming in his seat the whole time. Actually, what’s happened in the past is that I’ve adopted a lot of Russian composers, totally by coincidence; it wasn’t like I scoured the classical section looking for someone with a vaguely Russian sounding name that I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently I’ve been bumping into Satie for quite a while without realizing it. Contemplative, quitely troubled stuff. That fits the experience of being me rather well at the moment too.… Read more