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Liberating my iTunes library

Our home had become a disconnected, cacophonous jumble of music-playing gadgets that was making me crazy (or, more accurately, crazier).

We have three full stereo systems (living room, TV room, workout room), a Bose radio knockoff on the porch and an Ubuntu-driven  computer playing Internet radio  in the dining room.

What I wanted: A network that would allow me to play all of the music on my half-terabyte hard drive in the loft throughout the house, including Internet radio. A critical component of this is the ability to control what’s playing from anywhere in the house. That turned out to be the tough part.

I first downloaded the Rowmote app from the iTunes store. Good little app, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t allow you to pick songs, choose radio stations, etc. After searching around a bit, I stumbled across the much pricier ($24.95) Signal app. They let you try it free (the demo version is fully functional, but “please register” appears for every third title in your media library).

In installed it on the server in the loft that runs my music library. It provides an address on my local network that I can point iPhone, iPad and computer browsers to so they can control the library.

It worked really well. So well that I paid for the app and am happily using it. I’ve bookmarked the address on our phones, computers and iPad to make it easy to call up the control, which is an HTML driven interface that looks like an iPhone. Pretty easy to use. A bit kludgy at times. But coupled with a few AirPort Express Base Stations (about $99 each) I can let my iTunes media library roam the house freely. If I want to listen to something different, my phone, computer or iPad works as a remote to let me sift through my music collection and pick something new.

The main drawback: It won’t allow me to pick the speaker source in the iTunes library in the loft. I have to go up there to dictate which speakers are playing. I solved that by having iTunes play to all the speakers in the house. Since the stereos are off if I’m not listening to them, it really doesn’t matter that the music is being output to all of them. I hear it only on the stereo that’s powered up.

Better living through geekery …

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Assorted Bob Books Uncategorized

A good Dickey is hard to find

One of my favorite moments in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction comes at the grisly finale to “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Misfit has just killed a grandmother in cold blood, prompting his cohort to note: “She was a talker, wasn’t she?”

“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

After finishing Henry Hart’s impressive biography “James Dickey: The World as a Lie,” it strikes me that Dickey had a lot in common with that grandmother.

The truth, no matter how painful, dangerous or even mundane, is often a terrible thing to confront. The only way some people can grapple with it is when their very existence is at stake.

The Dickey in Hart’s biography is a brilliant poet with a remarkable mind. He’s also a bloviating racist misogynist alcoholic asshole who lives a life of lies.

The daring fighter pilot?

Lie.

The rugged outdoorsman?

Lie.

The gifted athlete?

Lie.

It takes a brush with death to force him, like the grandmother, to start rethinking the world of lies he inhabits.

Hart notes that Frank Zoretich (who happens to be a longtime friend of mine) interviewed Dickey shortly after a major surgery that put a considerable scare into Big Jim.

“Nobody who’s come back to life can have greater incentive to enjoy just getting out into the sunlight, just walking around talking to people,” Dickey tells Zoretich. He also starts to tell the truth. He concedes he’s not the rugged outdoorsman he claims to be. He starts to deconstruct the “Hemmingwayesque myths” he wrapped himself in.

But it lasts only a short time. Once the gun is no longer pointed at him, Dickey pretty much returns to his lying. Hart argues much of it is by design. And clearly it is. Dickey sees the poet as a godlike force that creates reality rather than just reflecting it. He sees no problem in creating a gumbo of reality, fantasy, myth and fabrication in his art and in his life. But by the end of the biography, it’s clear this is more a compulsion than some sort of artistic Tao. Dickey’s a liar. Plain and simple.

Hart doesn’t flinch from showing us a Dickey that could give Mel Gibson a run for his money when it comes to racist and anti-Semitic rants. But he tends to downplay it, claiming it was for shock value more than echoing core beliefs. Bullshit. Having an African-American maid who likes you doesn’t exonerate you for repeatedly making statements like this one (which he said in front of one of his classes):

“Don’t you agree that niggers smell worse than we do?”

There is a good Dickey. The one who was a gifted and supportive teacher. The man who wrote Deliverance. The poet who carved words into something that could leave the reader overwhelmed and breathless. But that Dickey proves difficult to find in Hart’s book.

Related:

  • An interview I did with Dickey in the late ’80s. Part 1. Part 2.
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A kayak made of poetry

In a New York Times obituary of George Hitchcock, the founder of Kayak poetry magazine, it noted the publication carried the following motto in every issue:

“A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle or speedboat. It is a small watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed of light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been successfully employed as a means of mass transport.”

Nice.