December 01, 2020

The series in PDF

My dear friend Ralf Sauter surprised me this week with what turned out to be, inadvertently, an early birthday gift: the complete Grain Sparrow series in beautifully formatted, delightfully readable, search function-ready PDF!

Scrolling through it, I was alarmed to see how many typos Id failed to notice back when I was posting my write-ups daily, but thats all right. The only real howler Ive spotted is in the When He Returns write-up, where I call the song that opens Big Bloods wondrous album Operate Spaceship Earth Properly  "Where We Were Young" instead of its true name, When I Was Young. Other typos generally seem to be the comprehensible kind.

For anybody who would like Ralf’s PDF for their records, here is a download link:


Today, December the 1st, I turn 31. I woke up at 6:30 in the morning with Joni Mitchell in my headCold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire.

4 comments:

  1. Great, I've just downloaded my copy! This was a fantastic series, Sigismund - do you think you'll write more about Bob in the future?

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    1. Thank you for the note, Tim! I'm really pleased that my series prompted you to start your own blog. I like your posts a lot; they're interesting, clear, well-organized, and don't just repeat the same stuff ad nauseum, like 99% of the online Dylan writing I've seen.

      I hadn't been planning to do any more Bob writing -- I sort of, what's that crude expression, blew my load with this 100 favorites series. But as I was thinking about your comment yesterday, it occurred to me that it might be fun down the line to do a more modest Nuggets of Bob sort of thing, in which I might write about some of the many wonderful songs that didn't squeeze into my top 100.

      The plan for 2021, though, is a series of Leonard Cohen appreciations! These'll be "dialogues" based on email exchanges with a close friend who's been listening to Cohen since the 1970s. It won't be rigorous or ranked like the Bob series was, just gushings about/considerations of songs that both he and I love.

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    2. That sounds fantastic - I'm a big Cohen fan, so I'd definitely enjoy reading that. And thanks for the kind words about my blog!

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    3. Oh, good! It's terrific to know there'll be at least one interested reader. My friend and I are only just getting started, but I'll let you know later this year when it's launched.

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Translation: The Kittens of the Apple Forest (Mari Iijima)

Back when I was translating a Matsumoto song or two a day, 1983 felt like a wasteland, and wound up making me feel pretty discouraged. ...