Monthly Archives: January 2008

one life

I temporarily stopped writing songs in the mid 1980s in order to concentrate on other stuff; it is only recently that I started writing again, and even more recently that I started recording the songs. One Life  was one of the first songs I wrote after such a long hiatus, and I’ve been recording it over and over again for the last several months, trying to get it to sound right. Finally, my last attempt sounded worse than the one before, so I decided to just stop trying, and post the prior attempt: version “2d” (i.e., the fourth iteration of the second trial) rather than version “3a” (the first iteration of the third trial).  It seems like just yesterday that I wrote the song, so I was shocked to realize that it was composed almost five years ago. At this rate, it will take me about 40 more years to put together a 10-song album…

hawaii conference

I just returned from Hawai’i, where I presented a paper at the Hawai’i International Conference on Arts & Humanities. The abstract for the paper was originally targeted for another conference in Washington, D.C., but, having failed to make the cut there, I submitted the abstract to, and it was accepted at, this conference on Waikiki Beach: such are the vicissitudes of academic life. Having arrived in late evening, I took an early morning walk along the beach, waiting for the sun to rise.sun rising over waikiki beach