Pamela Mordecai Writers in Residence Archives
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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly and the Canefields
Sugar Belly pulled all kinds of sounds out of his bamboo sax. Hear the sax wail!
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly, the Bamboo Saxophone, and Slide Mongoose
Sugar Belly, the Jamaican mento musician who invented the bamboo saxophone, explains how he made it, and plays a Jamaican folk tune, "Slide Mongoose"
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May 19, 2009
Sugar Belly's Bamboo Sax
We were teenagers, older teens.On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously ...
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May 14, 2009
Should Professors of Poetry at Oxford Be Without Sin?
A friend of mine, a Jamaican man, told me many years ago that he disliked going to bars in England, where he’d been a student. Why? Because if a man put his hand up under a woman’s skirt, he was likely ...
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May 14, 2009
More Duppy Business?
Many years ago I read a book called HEALING THE FAMILY TREE by a psychiatrist, Dr. Kenneth McAll. I won’t go into the theories he presents in the book (it’s still available, for anyone who’s interested) ...
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May 11, 2009
Duppy Business?
“Man proposes, God disposes.”The disposition in this case concerns the rear window on the driver’s side of our Civic.We’d said goodbye to our daughter, her husband and our granddaughter five minutes ...
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May 07, 2009
Cool Stuff
Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES carried an article in their “Dining” section about Shave Ice, which Florence Fabricant, the author, describes as “popular in Hawaii and Japan as well as other parts ...
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May 04, 2009
It’s About Time
I once told my next door neighbour that I was eighty-seven.It was meant to be a joke.“No…” said she, unbelieving. “You couldn’t be…”“No,” said I. “I’m really not!” And we both ...
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May 03, 2009
Our Town, 2009 Edition
Come the goodweather folks inthis Portuguese-Italian neighbourhoodhang their clothesout to dryso stirring linesof laundryin the breezeare a sure signit’s warming up.Come fill the cupthe poet said…Of ...