Pasta Day/Black Poetry Day/Gaudy Day
2006-10-17 @ 9:51 p.m.

I'm looking at what I think are the original chords for It's All About Jesus. It's a bit freaky. Sounds very nice, but looks like an absolute bitch to play! I'm trying to simplify it with the help of the score Ben e-mailed me months ago for one of my YE worships. I was correcting some of the chords in the other Christian songs I have on my computer, and I realised that some of the chords that Hui Juan insisted were wrong a few weeks ago actually sound pretty okay to me. So I compromised and modified only those bits that were obviously wrong or that sounded better after the chords were changed. I think sometimes we think something sounds wrong because we're just not used to hearing it played that way. I guess it's always best to try out new arrangements and everything anyway, see what works best for you and your musicians. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that a Thursday practice will materialise, but I'm okay if it doesn't.

I finished reading Ciaran Carson's The Twelfth Of Never, a series of 77 sonnets written in alexandrines, which could easily be read as one long poem because of the way images keep echoing across individual poems. I thought it was beautiful writing. Speaking of which, I modified a couple of my recent poems from the Love in Hexasyllables series. Snipped bits off, swapped some of them to other poems, and I think the overall effect's an improvement. Still nothing that's cracklingly good though. Feeling too harassed to parcel out time to think through and revise my work. At least I managed to cancel my policy today, so that's one load off my mind. Setting up drill tomorrow. Not looking forward to it. Some people in camp are just such lazy sods. I mean there's slacking, and then there's skiving. When you slack, everyone slacks with you. When you skive, someone else has to do your work for you. That offends me on some really fundamental level that I can't explain.