Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Obscure Anniversaries: RE: Erik Satie


One hundred and thirty years ago, young Erik Satie flunked out of the Paris Conservatoire.

Erik Satie was rad.

He did the above sketch--a study for a possible bust head of himself.

He was one rad dad....

I've been thinking about Erik Satie because I've been writing a bunch of shorts I call 'gymnopédies.' Maybe to combat the strong association of rainy Parisian scenes, I've been naming each one after a different American city. Today I did three: "Atlanta Gymnopédie," "Manhattan Gymnopédie," and "Omaha Gymnopédie." At first only two of them were good, but then I went back and redid Omaha, and now it's good too. They're all about a hundred words long and seem to me to be a cross between stories and poems without being anything like prose poetry, if that makes sense. I'm liking them a lot and may try to put a bunch of them together in a collection--American Phonometrics.

Here's a link: to ES's Gymnopédie No. 1. Probably you've heard it b4.

2 comments:

BlogSloth said...

I like the idea of series. I like to do three of all ideas.

Scott Garson said...

yeah i did three at first. i thought, Good. then i did three more...