John murray classes week of Feb. 28, 2011

The Province Town dunes and obscure old Delta blues.

i spent wed and thurs of last week in ProvinceTown and hiked for miles through the gorgeous sand dunes and beaches on this ocean racked strip of land. i was also reading a book, "The Delta Blues", by Ted

Gioia, a faculty member at Stanford and music critic and writer. The combination of this exquisite, bleak winter landscape and the excellent description of this amazing music and culture by the author: "...one of the most salient and overlooked truths about the traditional blues: the supposed inadequacies of its most famous exponents were not limitations to be lamented, but rather inseparable from their brilliance. As such , they were no different than the avant-garde artists dazzling audiences in other genres of the time-Joyce, Picasso, Eliot and the like".

This is an idea that has a special place in my aesthetic, especially when faced with an over-whelming visual phenomena such as the sea, sky and dunes on the outer-beaches of the winter Atlantic. One's inadequacies are one's strengths in the face of such experience.

See you next week, john.