The recent passing of David Sanborn (it happened back in May) recently got me thinking about the TV show he cohosted with Jools Holland back when I was a teenager. It was called Night Music. Well, apparently, the show was originally titled Sunday Night, and I’m not sure when the name changed, or whether I caught any episodes of it back when it was called that. I do vividly remember tuning in to watch Night Music, though.
A Positive Change
There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these kinds of modals a lot is when we are giving advice, since of course using the imperative is less polite and bears a higher chance of offending the recipient of the advice. So I’ve devised this “Dear Abby” type exercise. Students choose one of five letters requesting advice. The situations are all different: Someone is feeling depressed in general and burnt out from work After months …
Remembering Susannah McCorkle
Today 23 years ago, Susannah McCorkle passed. It was a suicide, after years of struggling with depression, like so many (most?) suicides are. You can read about her life a lot of places, but I liked this profile best. I only saw McCorkle perform once: that was almost a decade before she passed, back when the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival was a bigger event, and more big-name acts from around the world stopped by while crossing Canada. McCorkle was charismatic and luminous, her performance fascinating. Her “vocalise” performances of several famous jazz solos set to lyrics of her own devising mesmerized …
Something Tookish!
I’ve just realized that I never posted about a game I published on itch.io last year. The game is called Something Tookish! It’s not a wholly original game design, but rather a hack of the popular Brindlewood Bay RPG. The elevator pitch for Brindlewood Bay could be summed up as Golden Girls meets Murder She Wrote with a streak of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Well, as soon as I read through the rules, I immediately started thinking about the cozy halfling game that was going with my Sunday night RPG group.
April Reading (2024)
This is the fourth in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024.
14 April–27 April (Sunday–Saturday, 2 weeks running)
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. This update is a little behind: I’ve been mired in preparing and grading exams and gotten less practice done than I’d like, so there’s been little to report. (I even considered doing three weeks in this summary, though I decided against it.) I’m still working on “Four”—trying to get used to playing at at higher tempos—but I’m now also working on “But …
Practice Log: 31 March–13 April (Two weeks, Sunday–Saturday)
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. I’m still working on “Four” but I’m pretty much happy with my progress on “Skylark.” I’ll be choosing another tune this week. (The second week covered in this post, for reasons covered below.) Below, you can see a log of my practice sessions for the week.
March Reads (2024)
This is the third in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024, covering the month of March. As always, the beginning of semester is a busy time and I get less reading done, but even more, I started some books that I’m still working on finishing in April… but I prefer to only mention books when I finish them, so they won’t get blogged about till the end of this month (at the soonest).
Practice Log: 24–30 March (Sunday–Saturday)
This is my regularly updated practice log, mostly for accountability with my saxophone practice. Below you can see my practice for the week. If you’d like to check it out, here’s my goal list of tunes for the year. I’m still working on “Four” and “Skylark” for this week. I know the form of “Four” but actually navigating it in real time—especially at the popular tempo—is tough! Below, you can see a log of my practice sessions for the week.
Looking Back on #dungeon23
There is a post that has sat unpublished in the queue on this blog for almost a year: the last installment I started on last year’s #dungeon23 experiment. I got as far as July 8th before throwing in the towel. Why only till July 8th? Well, a couple of things: July means summer class. I teach intensive writing courses in the summer and winter break, and the workload can be pretty full-on. I don’t perfectly remember, but I have to assume that was part of it. I hit a wall, not of creativity so much as of the limitations of …