Octopuses!

The arthritis in my left thumb was acting up, so I haven't been playing much guitar. (I stumbled on an old blog post from July, 2007 which said that at the time I was taking Naprosyn for left thumb arthritis.) The thumb is better now.

Plus, there really doesn't seem to be a market for my Jaz Dumoz musical act. It has been disappointing to find that the great majority of solo "live" music acts seem to use tracks. Jaz Dumoz was explicitly dinner music rather than dance music - a 1st for me. But more casual restaurants who provide "live" music usually want some dance music. The 1920s-1960s songs that Jaz performs are going to work mostly at more upscale restaurants, and it is very hard breaking into such restaurants' music rotations.

Additionally, I really thought that people of all ages would respond to Jaz's songs - they are such great songs. But by and large younger people treat these songs as old fogey stuff.

I could do a solo Jim Dumas act with looper and harmony box, but then:

1. I'd need to start practicing with the harmony box, which was not usable with Jaz Dumoz.
2. I felt that what Jaz was offering was unique, while there are many other singer/guitarists playing bar standards - Tom Petty, Bill Withers, Stones, Motown, etc.
3. For dance music, tracks are probably better than what I do. You have bass and drums for the beat.
4. I'd much rather play dance music in a rock band.
5. There is too much modern pop music that I have 0 feel for.

So I'm going to back-burner Jaz Dumoz. There's still a few possible gigs pending. I'll keep the (most excellent) web site going, and keep doing a Song Of The Day 1x/month or so. Song Of The Day is currently at #181, I think I'll try to get to 200. So I will go back to playing rock & roll at jams (or otherwise with a band), rather than Jaz tunes at open mics.

The result of less practice time is that I am reading a lot more. Recently I seem to have been finding more novella length sci-fi, which I have been tearing through. Lets start with the octopuses!

1. "The Mountain in the Sea", by Ray Nayler, 2022, 312 pages, 96k words. A species of octopus with language and culture is found! Set against a backdrop of a near future world where "point 5" AIs are in wide use, the 1st generally intelligent android has been created, and most corporations continue extractive madness, there are a couple of 2ndary threads that do finally rejoin the main thread. That junction seemed a little sketchy - overall, the book seemed like it could have been longer, plus, more octopuses, please! I suspect and hope there will be a sequel in the future. A very good read, and an indictment of our human-centric world view.

2. "Station Eternity", by Mur Lafferty, 2022, 489 pages, 133k words. I enjoyed their novel "Six Wakes" - holy moly, that was 6.5 years ago - so I thought I'd try this. Several murder mysteries, including 1 set on an intelligent, organic space station. Interesting races, well plotted, a page turner. This was Book 1 of "The Midsummer Murders", Book 2 is out this month.

3. "One Day All This Will Be Yours", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2021, 125 pages, 34k words. This is Book 2 of the "Terrible Worlds: Destinations" series. Book 1 "Walking to Aldebaran" I recently blogged here. These books seem to specialize in plot twists and possibly monstrous protagonists. This 1 reminded me of "This Is How You Lose the Time War", blogged here, but I think I enjoyed this story more. Some very good thinking about what happens when you try to use time travel as a weapon - followed by causality bonbs. A quick, fun read. Tchaikovsky continues to be my fav active hard sci-fi author. It's great that he is so prolific.

4. "Johnny Mercer", by Glenn T. Eskew, 2016, 408 pages, subtitled "Southern Songwriter for the World". This was not available in eBook, so I read the trade paper hardcopy. I decided that this was probably the best bio of Mercer to read because it is the newest, and Eskew is a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, which houses the Johnny Mercer library with most of his personal papers. I decided to read Mercer's bio after consecutively placing songs #16 & #17 by him into my songbook. This is the 3rd biography I have read in my life, joining Albert Einstein and Harpo Marx.

   New heuristic: avoid books written by southern college professors. Eskew is not a very good writer - long, long paragraphs. And there is this drumbeat that he keeps returning to - that jazz, blues, and rock & roll were not appropriated from blacks by whites, but were part of common southern culture, along with hillbilly (now country) music - yeah, right.

   Mercer was white and a scion of Savannah, GA. He had an ancestor who was a Revolutionary War general, a friend of Washington's, and another ancestor who was a Confederate general - who, of course, "fought valiantly" in the Civil War. Blech. Eskew comes down on the right side of issues of race and racism, but at times it seems that he does so grudgingly. A "See, the south isn't so bad" kind of feel.

   Following Mercer's career, Eskew declares the 1950s "The Age of the Singer" - I had realized with Jaz Dumoz that I was trying to become a crooner, like in the 50s. But the Age of the Crooner came to an end with Elvis. I totally realized that the older or newer pop music I play as Jaz Dumoz or Jim Dumas is delineated by Elvis. Old pop is up to and slightly overlapping Elvis, new pop is Elvis and later.

   At the end of his career, Mercer bemoaned the end of the good old days - he was having as little luck getting work as Jaz Dumoz is! ;-P

5. "Observer", by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress, 2023, 338 pages, 104k words. Lanza is an influential scientist, Kress the most awarded living sci-fi author. This novel goes all-in on quantum physics, positing that consciousness creates matter, rather than the other way around - and they have hardware and software to prove it! A very nice effort. Kress doesn't push her libertarianism too much, although this is 1 of those stories where a small group of ubermensch accomplish everything.

6. "And Put Away Childish Things", Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2023, 167 pages, 45k words. Book 3 of the "Terrible Worlds: Destinations" series. A nice riff on portal fantasies, particularly "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". Following the theme of this series, the protagonist starts out being completely unlikeable, but does get better with time.

7. "A Stranger in the Citadel", Tobias S. Bucknell, 2023, 220 pages, 68k words. After Bucknell, in response to an email query from me, sent me the ePub files for 3 of his novels currently unavailable elsewhere, I resolved to read all his stuff from then on. He has had issues since the pandemic, but seems to have worked through things. This is an intestering read on a post-singularity society that for a time has outlawed books and reading: "Thou shalt not suffer a librarian to live." A good read, nicely paced.

8. "Ironclads", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2018, 141 pages, 38k words. Book 1 of the "Terrible Worlds: Revolutions" series. Military sci-fi with rich humans heavily mechanized and basically unbeatable, and grunts without weapons to oppose them. Nicely plotted, and with some decent commentary on economic inequality.

So that's 7 ebooks leaving the Unread collection in Kobo on my iPad, which is now down to ... 137 titles. Onward!