“Well,” said Erwin, finally sitting up and taking the last sip of his honey wine. “We cannot do it alone. The job requires a third. And a third of some abundance of skill, and no small amount of magical power. We are both thinking the same thing, of this I am sure. So let me be the first to give it voice.”
I had nearly forgotten about the picture, had come so terribly close to letting it slip away from my memory forever. Weeks would go by before the amber-red flames would dance and roil in my mind’s eye once again.
One of the marketing tools used by publishers to promote books are book trailers. It's almost exactly what you think it is -- like a movie trailer, a minute or two, with maybe a voice-over, some graphics. I watched a few and decided that I'd like to make my own for Canebrake.
On Friday and then again on Saturday evening, I drove south to the Sarasota Contemporary Dance studio for the first installment of what turned out to be a fantastic collaboration. My friend and world-class cellist Natalie Helm came up with the idea: Bach Immersion Concerts, a one-of-a-kind exploration of Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. The idea is to present "a multi-sensory interactive live performance," and that's exactly what happened.
He puts the cigarette in his mouth and lights it with a match, letting the match burn as he continues speaking, “I didn’t even give you a name, Inspector. What could you possibly arrest me for that I won’t deny by the time we walk out of this office?”
The Great Northern had left Grand Forks before the dry, yellow prairie was touched with the sun’s first light. By mid-day, the whistle was crying long and loud as the train chuffed out of the weathered Sioux Falls station, heading southbound towards Wichita across the dismal plain.
“Whatever it is,” Jim says. “It can’t be bad enough for you to want to get it through who knows what the hell past the Black Line.”
I listened to the sounds of the night. A mockingbird called through the brush, far off, maybe halfway across the lake. The cool wind rustled the tops of the trees and they whispered together. The ker-klack sound of the horses going down the trail past the lake was almost hypnotizing.
Don't get me wrong: Blackbirds is wildly violent, wickedly chaotic, like those old wooden roller-coasters that rip you this way and that, make you call a chiropractor when you wobble off.
benjamin j kirby 