Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1708232251580.10175@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: the BIG AMERICAN guitar *
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 22:53:12 -0400 (EDT)
the BIG AMERICAN guitar * http://www.alansondheim.org/twodaysago.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/bigamerican.mp3 *made in Indonesia with the big american steel strings; I have troubles playing this instrument (owned by Azure's father); I'm for quick playing, light touch, but here, my hands give out and the music is strange and kind of wonderful, never mind the nails are the worst for it. these guitars are louder than the nylon/ nylgut/gut-stringed instruments; they don't have the twang of course, that slow dying-out sound of the prairie wind for example. they resonate with the hollows of thunder in the canyons; they're a message of arrival and departure, the sound of the iron steel train on the iron steel tracks, the Whitman; at Dickinson's brother's house, there was a 19th-century gut- string banjo on the fireplace mantle, nothing like this (but she might have played both today, or none at all, or did she then?); here is the sound of delicate fingers and their exercising, the frustration of wanting to do with the strings what others might do, of the daytime nighttime bigamerican guitar, irresolute in my hands, I wanted this