So, all that self-help (let’s call it “success literature” — and yes, I do read “success literature”; shut up) says, “Get up early, start your day, blah blah blah.” Well, except for the chosen few which/who say “respect your wiring” (thank God).

When I started to think seriously about finally going freelance, I said to Leland, “Hrm. I keep thinking of Mr. Wood’s routine of bed-by-9-read-for-two-hours. After I quit, I’m going to try to get up early.”

And Leland said, “Haven’t you always stayed up late?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’ve had this engineering job for ten years and nothing ever stays consistent when one is on call, even when one is not on call. So I really can’t remember.”

“Hrm,” he said. “I really hope you’re not a little vampire. Because that would mean that you’re up when I’m in bed and vice versa.”

“Hrm,” I said.

“Because that would kind of suck,” he said.

Today I didn’t really get down to work until about 4 in the afternoon. Currently, it’s after 2 am. I am not in the least bit tired.

And now it all comes flooding back: watching late night cable with Bee, journaling on school nights until Dad would commence to nagging, the sound of his “time for bed, Bethy” guaranteed to make me want to draw blood (confidential to Dad: it was nothing personal), leaving my light on for as long as I could get away with it, books and flashlight under the sheets, playing possum whenever someone cracked the door open and poked their head in.

Hrm.

This could be a problem.

From here:

http://ebroder.net/livejournal-crossposter/

(thanks, Mr. Wood.)

She doesn’t quite work out of the box with my snappy new Wordpress 2.1 install, but she should work now with a minor fix. Let’s see…

(If this works, that’ll be the end of the knob-twiddling until I re-do the site design, but that’s for another day.)

Upgrading Mysql was relatively painless, given that I had to, you know, kill the entire database and restore from backup.

Hooray! Now on to upgrading Wordpress proper.

Actually, waitaminute… looks like Sonicdiary did not escape unscathed. Boo. *ponder*

Tomorrow, I’ve got pretty much one chore and one chore only on the calendar. And that is: upgrade Mysql, the database wot handles the back end for my blog collection.

Should be relatively pain free. Nonetheless, if I f**k up, everything goes away permanently.

So, y’know, jussayin’.

The next page of SCHEHERAZADE went live last night:

You can read the page by clicking above, or you can visit the MARCOS archive page for the entire tale so far.

Sometimes I think of folk songs as these mischievous fae beings, lithesexy watercolor sprites with elf ears and pointy teeth. I say this because they have the power to totally derail any rational but story-obsessed mundane with a rapturous tune, intrigue, and glittering, dreamy promises of a fascinating song lineage just waiting to be uncovered. That is, if one has access to the Internet and a couple of hours to spare.

I don’t speak from experience or anything. No, not at all. What, me waste time?

Time has been so short for me over the last couple of months that I all but forgot about the stacks of folk music that hang on a shelf just above my second writing desk (in the studio proper), probably because I barely lifted my head between August and December. But I do make time for magazines even when I don’t have any (time, that is), so I read the feature on Karen Dalton in the latest BUST, then promptly forgot about it until it was time to download this month’s Emusic tracks. I had to nab her recently re-released IN MY OWN TIME because, yes, my folk-of-the-obscure cred is something that I actively maintain (or at least try to maintain) while at the same time pretending to be all nonchalant about it. And I had never heard of Karen Dalton.

As to the album itself, well, I see why all the boys were into her. For me, the jury’s still out. The voice is really a make-or-break thing for me and I haven’t quite embraced hers, shall we say. And she has some goddess-awful selections on this thing (”How Sweet It Is”? what the fudge?). But she also has some real jems, including an old (and yes, obscure) thing from the Revolution called “Katie Cruel”.

“Katie Cruel” has that thing going on whereby the lyrics really don’t make a ton of sense, yet coupled with the tune, they convey the mood perfectly. The story is only a skeleton, or a frame — not enough to stand on its own, but just seductive enough to get one’s brain itching to fill in the gaps. Also, it’s from the North (the American Heritage Songbook notes a family in Vermont at the turn of the century as its source, though it’s gotta be way older than that if that thing about the Revolutionary War soldiers dancing to it is to be believed). I don’t know (or hear) much about the history of New England folk songs, so that’s kind of a treat.

For some reason, “Katie Cruel” reminds me of “Nottamun Town,” another beautiful, bizarre song, standing proud on mere story bones. Bert Jansch does my favorite version of that one; you can hear it on my folk mixtape if I haven’t taken it down (I can’t remember).

Come to think of it, Jansch does “Katie Cruel” on his very latest CD, called THE BLACK SWAN. It’s a duet with Beth Orton, I think. You can get that on Emusic, too.

Speaking of Endicott, do NOT miss Terri’s post on the BBC Radio Ballads. The spirit of original series of documentaries by Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker lives again!

As if that wasn’t cool enough, Emusic has begun ripping Topic Records’ catalog. This is a “holy sheet!!” moment if ever there was one. Let’s not talk about how I didn’t upgrade my subscription before they changed their pricing model…

One of the things I’m looking forward to as a freelancer is having a snidge more time for things like New York City blogs. I’m probably not going to ever be able to keep up with the posting insanity that is, say, Gothamist, but there are a bunch of others that keep it to a very reasonable one or two posts a day. My latest favorite of these is New York Daily Photo, which is pretty much exactly as it sounds, plus just enough commentary with each photo to send you running to Google.

They recently featured Colossal Media in one of their posts. These folks are keeping the art of ginormous wall murals alive — how cool is that? With so much of New York crumbling or being actively stalked and killed by developers and places like Pottery Barn, it’s nice to see a move in the other direction.

I was in San Francisco this weekend and got to marvel a bit at how that which is old is left alone, at least where I was. Got to stop by City Lights bookstore and the Beat Museum. There was a reading going on at the latter, though I couldn’t see who it was because the reading was in the museum proper and I didn’t have time to make the entrance fee worthwhile. So I bought a book from the sleeping cashier instead. (Or maybe she was just tranced out to the sound of the poet’s voice.)

Speaking of books, I am plotting my Endicott return and have picked up some books for review. Sweet!

I have just a few San Francisco shots in my photostream.

Right?

But the newly launched Terapad is pretty darn cool.

I nabbed my name and have started playing around with it. I think it has the best Web 2.0 integrated feature set I’ve seen yet, including tracking tools and Google Analytics built right in. You can have a forum and a web store, too. And it plays nicely with a host of other Web 2.0 tools, such as del.icio.us, Digg, Meebo, Sonific, Feedburner… I could go on and on. It’s powered by AdSense, but you can get that removed for five bucks per month.

The downsides: it’s still in its infancy, the pre-made CSS layouts and skins are pretty lame (and there’s probably nothing I hate more than messing around with CSS).

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, this site will be getting a facelift in the first part of the year, and that includes the blog. I’m running a creaky, creakyold version of Wordpress. I’d love to go with one of the hosted platforms (like elizabethgenco.wordpress.com) as opposed to hosting it myself because I am incredibly lazy about things like software maintenance when it comes to my own stuff. But I’m also a control freak, too, and I loathe the thought of something happening to all my entries.

Whatever, I’m still playing. Any hosted solution would need to integrate well with the rest of the site.

Anyways! Check out Mr. Wood’s new blog, while you’re at it.

Also: my last day on the job was yesterday. I am now completely flying freelance.

(via Warren Ellis)

Hey! It’s the Locus 2006 cover gallery.

Pretty cool, if you’re a nerd for such kinds of things, as I certainly am.

In other news, who knew that there was a new Amphigorey collection out and didn’t tell me? That’ll be 10 demerits.