"Fringed with Ducks"

At the FT, Edward Posnett's prizewinning essay on the eiderdown in Iceland (site registration required).

Composition

Great interview with Sam Amidon (and check out this link for a taste of his genius):

You know, I’m not a folk-song expert. If we were sitting around and people started singing ballads and songs, I could do the songs from my albums, but I couldn’t sing you a stock of amazing old ballads. I’m not a “folk singer” in that sense. I’m learning these songs as part of my own compositional process. I’m a fiddle player — if we sat down at an Irish session, I could play you a thousand Irish tunes. I could sit here and play you Irish tunes all day. But I’m definitely not an expert in ballads or folk singing, and I’m not a folklorist. I love this world, but I listen to old ballads as an outsider. I listen to it the same way I listen to Miles Davis or something like that — it’s a deep listening experience, but it’s not something that I know a lot about.

The Western tradition

Ah, it is such a luxury to be starting my morning with coffee and wireless internet! I forgot to write yesterday about what was probably the most interesting book I've read recently, William Gibson's Zero History, which I enjoyed very much but found not up to the standard of Pattern Recognition. Also enjoyed Andre Agassi's autobiography - both part of a book splurge at McNally Robinson last week. I finally have my Kindle in my hands, but have not yet opened the box and set it up - must do that before my Maine trip tomorrow...

Last night I had the perfect New York evening - my brother turned up at the loft where I'm staying (he is working as a carpenter on the Men in Black III production in Williamsburg, and the commute from Philadelphia means getting up at 4am and not getting home till 8pm, so he is going to try and ease things up by staying one or two nights a week in New York), we hung out for an hour, then G. and I went to see the very funny and apt Office Hours by A. R. Gurney at what is rapidly becoming my favorite small theater in Manhattan, The Flea. Young company The Bats are superb, and though the play is slight, I thought it was very well done; also, of course, as someone who has taught in Columbia's Literature Humanities program, I must be pretty much the exact/ideal target audience...

(And a delicious dinner afterwards at Petrarca: we shared piatto rustico to start [G.: "I never remember the food we eat, but I remember we had that before and how good it was!"], then I had a pizza with capers, anchovies and black olives and a specialty dessert of vanilla gelato with amarena cherries.)

Tonight I'm speaking on Clarissa and counterfactuals at the Fordham eighteenth-century seminar: should be fun...

The liberated lamb

Nathan Englander's life has turned Talmudic.