Summers end, Semesters start... A synopsis, of sorts.

I realized how long it's been since I posted last by watching the video that was tacked onto the end of my last entry, and recalled that the evening we filmed it, we had spent most of the day at the beach. Now, the leaves on the tree directly opposite my desk have turned red (almost even past the prime of their foliage.)

My first few weeks of grad.school have been very busy. Which I thoroughly enjoy. It feels great to be finally back in school, my limbo-period finally over.

Today, then, between my scouring of critical essays on Milton, I'll just post a brief and scattered laundry-list of assorted topics.

First... in regards to my last entry (about Alan Kirby's "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond")... apparently the ideas expressed in that essay have morphed, in the years following its publication, from "pseudo-modernism" to "digimodernism." These ideas have expanded quite a bit, and, I'm pleased to say, seem to have rectified many of my concerns with them over that time (as I found out from the author himself, who learned of my posts via Google Alerts [which seems fitting, due to his subject-matter])... He has a new book out called Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture that I'm actually rather excited to read at some point... whenever I might get time to. You can find information on this, and links to the current evolution of these thoughts on his blog, at his website.

In other news... this seems like an appropriate time to look over my list of "things to do before school starts," and see how much of it I accomplished... Or rather, maybe it's easier to start with the things that I didn't, as the list tended to evolve as items were removed from it over the course of several months. So, I never did "get into good exercise habits" as I told myself to do. I never did submit any of my poetry or short-fiction for publication. Although I completed recording records with both Tipsy Cougar and Swords We Swallow, I have yet to package and make available either record as I had planned to. I haven't written the first-drafts to the two pieces of short fiction that I have mapped-out and outlined in my notebook. And I still have 10+ pages of fragments in the "ideas" section of my notebook that I planned to work through and complete (blog-entries, poetry, fiction, essays, visual-art, etc.) that I have yet to.

Obviously being in school again after a couple of years off involves an adjustment... and, partly, that involves adjusting to the idea that most of these things aren't going to get done (or even thought about) until my next break from classes. I'm trying to negotiate with my own mind a bit in terms of creative ways to still get what I need to out by way of music, art, and creative writing... but this early in the semester, I think it's a bit too early to tell how that will work. I'll keep you posted, I'm sure.

In terms of things that I DID end up getting crossed off of the list...

One of the things that had sat daunting me on such long-term lists the longest (if you haven't figured out yet, I'm one of those weirdos who lives and dies by my to-do-lists) was the idea of getting more of my acoustic-tracks recorded. Looking at that list the week before classes started, I didn't have the motivation to deal with the hassles of audio-recording (my thoughts on that process have become increasingly self-contradictory and problematic in the last couple years... it's a love/hate sort of thing, at this point)... so I decided instead to just run video and jam out some songs... and, in one way or another, I had accomplished that particular bullet-point.

So, then... here are a couple video-clips that I recorded in the process. Enjoy.

Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour- Peepers (acoustic)


Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour- Rusted Tricycle's "Cherry Coke"