Cleaning out the “to blog” emails to myself:
- Tonight, I’m going to go home, put on some music, and pour myself a nice glass of pruno.
- Interesting story on the resurgence of French in Maine. There are some very clear echoes of the situation in south Louisiana: The post-World War I use of the school system to punish French speakers; the post-World War II push to assimilate; the “dumb Frenchman” jokes; the class barrier between native dialect speakers and those who consider Parisian French the only legitimate French. It’s one of my real regrets that I grew up in south Louisiana in an era when adults who grew up as French speakers were shamed into not teaching their children the language. As it was, the French I learned in school was so tenuous that Spanish has pretty much subsumed it all.
- If you’ll be in Chicago in early September, I’d highly recommend attending the Touch & Go 25th anniversary bash. Along with crabwalk.com faves Calexico, Enon, Quasi, !!!, Ted Leo, and Pinback, you get to see reunion shows by the pleasantly bludgeoning Girls Against Boys, the best-space-rock-band-out-of-Alabama Man…or Astroman?, and the dreamy Seam. (Seam is of particular note; they were terrific in the mid-’90s but haven’t done anything for eight years.)
GVSB was featured in this week’s MP3 Monday. As was Bedhead, whose leading Kadane brothers now perform in The New Year, who’ll also be at the bash.