Wednesday, May 15, 2013

What happens when you start writing a blog,

even if noone's reading it, is you start to get ideas about what you want to do with it, and where you want it to go. I think about a lot of things so I don't want to restrict myself to anything, but anyway here comes a series.

I'm a professional amateur - actually a dropout, if you want to get technical. Didn't finish Eagle Scout, high school or college. Got what I wanted out of all of them, but no official declaration that I'm competent to do anything. I scoff at most people's credentials, and dream of a world where authority is granted by the rightness of a person's actions, rather than fancy papers. I've been an antiquarian bookseller for years, and that's an impressive title for someone who can't officially understand or do anything (8 syllables, yo! Mo' money!), but like anything else, it's all about learning the jargon, then deciding whether to be honest or not.

I'm amused that the word 'amateur' means Lover, while the word 'professional' means Pretender. That arrangement suits me fine. Soon I'll be writing a post about the monkey in the lab suit, and the chicken in the thunderbird costume.

But for now I just want to announce that I'm doing a series on Amateur Musical Analysis: cause I'm pretty good at it if I do say so myself. AMA #1 will be a study of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, with some Al Green and Joni Mitchell thrown in.  Down the road we'll get into a study of musical tempests, from Vivaldi to Yes, and somewhere along the line a comparison of Died Pretty's A State of Graceful Mourning with Gustav Holst's Venus.

Seeya soon's I get sumpn writ
Yr Huckleberry Friend

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