Wednesday, September 24, 2008

thank you

Inspired by William Michaelian but not wanting to imitate him-- see his 2008-09-24 thank you post-- blogs that I know link to mine will for now be identified by a ~ symbol and blogs I frequent by a * symbol, and one especially timely blog by ** in my Blog List. Below the posts on this blog's main page/ are the two which are presently followers of this blog. This new Blogger feature is one I am experimenting with. Rho00189

3 comments:

William Michaelian said...

Thanks. I like the way your “And the son went down” lines look and read under the bold “Followers” title and the little profile photos. That whole section looks like a poem.

One of my very best friends in high school was named Ragsdale. An excellent artist, he died of cancer at the age of eighteen. I’ve written about him on my website several times, and I refer to him in my blog here.

brian (baj) salchert said...

About the 3 lines and the section
they are in: There is a post at
PF's Harriet which centers on the
Spanish word duende and on
Lorca. The comments beneath that post are somewhat contentious. I decided to see what my dictionary had to say about that word. It then occurred to me that the sun was a perfect symbol for that word, and so because line 3 is a pun on duende and because these lines are at the bottom of my blog's main page/ those lines--which I must admit I lucked into--became my secret comment on the Harriet debate.
-
Why they are where they are was the result of my trying to figure out how you placed your email address and copyright information at the bottom of your blog.
---
The "Followers" part came days later. I figured I would put it there since I have only 2.
---
About Ragsdale: The one there is 21 and lives in California. He is a musician and a sound technician I found out about via a comment he made beneath a post by Noah Cicero who is part of the group of 21 young writers who wrote about each other. Then, then, but after I posted the link to "Dust in the Wind" I went to Wikipedia where I discovered that the Kansas band often changed, and involved in those changes was a David Ragsdale who sang and played the violin. I haven't mentioned this to Will yet.
---
I read your remembrances. They are intimate without being sentimental. The magic of knowing how to maintain an evocative distance informs them.

Thank you.

William Michaelian said...

Thanks very much for reading those entries, and for your kind words.

And I see I typed “son” instead of “sun.”

I just read a little about duende and Lorca here, and will return for a thorough reading later.

Another interesting coincidence: the Ragsdale I knew had a little brother named David. He would be close to forty by now.