Personal

[Lindsay Smith]

>I too, prefer to lurk. I started playing harmonica at an early age, old
>Dylan ditties. Gravity's Rainbow fell upon my mind 'round '74 like, well,
>psychedelia around a Thanatoid concert. It made me study, made me take
>words far more seriously than I had before, and (most important, really,
>of all fallouts) gave my sense of the absurd nice little nudges. Hell,
>learning guitar I tried to put chords on some of those songs! I used the
>songs and the humor to hook friends into trying--"Just try!"--a
>reading--but how few ever did it. Two? I mingle with the sort of
>deep-fried southern bigots and bigotresses you can sometimes find in a
>Harry Crews novel, in the usual course of living, working and writing in
>the Deep Deep South. Faulkner's ghost, writing a ornithological musical
>around a thesis I'll probably need for graduate school this fall, sings
>inside the mockingbirds all damned night--"hot as the butt-crack of your
>personal devil."
>--
>http://www.mindspring.com/
>~tdennis/index.html
>East Birmingham AL
>aka La Ville Tragiqui


I grew up in B'ham too, but left to go off to high school in 1970.  My
freshman English teacher at Vanderbilt told me I should read GR back in 74
but I didn't actually start till 79.  Read the first 700 pages in a week,
the rest took three months.

Much of my family is still in Birmingham, I wander back for a short week
every year or so.  I find the place amazing but have never been able to
imagine actually living ther again.  I've lived in Seattle for the last 14
years, mainly as a techno-junky-designer for theatres and museum but I just
recently joined the corporate world as a designer of audio and video
systems for a consulting/engineering firm.

My other cultural reference points include:  J S Bach, T S Eliot, Giant
Sand, Neville Shute, Richard Thompson, Jasper Johns, Arvo Pdrt, Brian Eno,
Walter R Brooks, Nirvana, Steven Sondheim, theater that makes your head
hurt, Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, Islamic art, C R Mackintosh, acid jazz,
Walker Percy, the Tao te Ching and very loud noises.



Lindsay Smith