Slow hot wind

I am spending my morning in the Bronx, surrounded by a few of my fans - a Vornado, an SMC, and a Holmes - and am ensorcelled by heat and the magic of moving air. The Vornado is a terrific fan that keeps the air swirling throughout the whole room without blasting straight at you. This makes it easier to reread Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, because the pages aren't turning themselves in a gale. The Holmes window fan is doing a remarkable job of pulling cooler air in from outside even when there isn't actually any cooler air out there. The SMC is not in the same league as the other two, which I knew last year when I left it up at Ashokan "by mistake", but had forgotten when I found it still there and brought it back home. It makes all the same noises as the other two, but it's an ill wind and doesn't blow too good (sorry, Will).

That's the only let-down from camp, though. Everything else I brought home - memories, new songs, new ideas, and the sense of being part of a community - is rich and rewarding and works really well.

Comments

[Stuart]

Is there still good well water in upstate New York?

"It makes all the same noises as the other two, but it's an ill wind and doesn't blow too good (sorry, Will)."

Oh, Laurel! You conjure up The Cotton Club movie!

And of course 'well' would undermine and ruin your own artfully layered metaphoric analogy and how you've turned the allusion.

Incidentally, Ben Jonson (Will's contemporary) said that Shakespeare "wanted art"; Jonson was a very very strict Miss Thistlebottom grammarian of his time, yet also a great writer nonetheless.

I'm trying to point up a contrapuntal irony there, perhaps in the way that Lew Soloff's trumpet suggested its own irony in that song in The Cotton Club.

P.s.: Before Dr. Flannigan began the 'formal' part of our seminar in Milton's poetry, which he held in his home, he'd play something from the new Beatles album, or something from Beggar's Banquet. He told us he'd heard that Eric Clapton played the guitar solo and wahwah parts on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. When spring was almost summer, the Army National Guard encamped at the university. The following year, a student strike shut it down in April. By then I was gone, so I don't know if any professor pointed out that Paul didn't write Golden Slumbers.

Have you performed Ill Wind? I'm imagining...

[Sverre Johan Svendsen]

Dear Laurel
Even in the Bronx you are probably more surrounded by fans than you realize...

[Laurel Massé]

Thank you, Sverre.