Tag: Ravi Shankar

To show that, when you peruse this blog, you are reading the finest quality reading material, per instructions from Dustbury, I went to the website I Write Like, where one can supposedly “check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.”

I took the first ten blog posts of this month as a typical sampling.

The War On Christmas post and the reviews of the Walter Cronkite autobiography and the Vince Guaraldi biography, I write like Lovecraft:

A couple of newsier pieces my life on a treadmill and the FantaCon update are Joycean.

My more informational pieces, politics and commerce, and the Baseball Hall of Fame and the UHF TV are very David Foster Wallace, who, I must admit, I’ve never read.

No time to blog is in the style of Cory Doctorow, who I read regularly these days. (Note to Dan: so is your December 2 post.)

Finally, my World AIDS Day piece is like William Gibson, whose writing style I am not familiar with.

Whose writing style do YOU emulate?

The Dave Brubeck webpage. I wanted to say something clever about Brubeck, who died earlier this month, like this piece by EJ Dionne. He was a real ambassador of jazz. I DO remember hearing, and liking, Take Five on the radio when it first came out. My favorite of his songs, though, is Blue Rondo a la Turk. Also, SamuraiFrog links to a Disney song.

Like most Americans, I became aware of sitar master Ravi Shankar, who died this week, via his relationship with Beatle George Harrison. Still cracks me up when, at the Concert for Bangladesh, the 1971 event that Ravi encouraged George to initiate, Shankar says to the clueless Western audience, “If you enjoy the tuning so much, I hope you enjoy the playing even more.” The official recording label of The Ravi Shankar Foundation is East Meets West Music. “With unique access to an archive featuring thousands of hours of live performance audio, film footage, interviews, and studio masters, EMWMusic releases rare recordings and provides audiences with the definitive portrait of Ravi Shankar’s long career. And, in keeping with Ravi’s dedication to looking forward and not back, EMWMusic provides a vibrant platform for new artists, projects, and collaborations.”