Pocket Shelley

Melting from this stern and obdurate, into the tender and pathetic mood, Mr. [Dick] Swiveller groaned a little, walked wildly up and down, and even made a show of tearing his hair, which, however, he thought better of, and wrenched the tassel from his nightcap instead. At last, undressing himself with a gloomy resolution, he got into bed.

Some men in his blighted position would have taken to drinking; but as Mr. Swiveller had taken to that before, he only took, on receiving the news that Sophy Wackles was lost to him for ever, to playing the flute; thinking after mature consideration that it was a good, sound, dismal occupation, not only in unison with his own sad thoughts, but calculated to awaken a fellow-feeling in the bosoms of his neighbours. In pursuance of this resolution, he now drew a little table to his bedside, and arranging the light and a small oblong music-book to the best advantage, took his flute from its box, and began to play most mournfully.

The air was 'Away with melancholy' -- a composition, which, when it is played very slowly on the flute, in bed, with the further disadvantage of being performed by a gentleman but imperfectly acquainted with the instrument, who repeats one note a great many times before he can find the next, has not a lively effect. Yet, for half the night, or more, Mr. Swiveller, lying sometimes on his back with his eyes upon the book, played this unhappy tune over and over again; never leaving off...

--Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

Moreover...

Pocket Shelley's full-length CD, Small Illuminations in a Darkening Sky, is available for sale at CD Baby .
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The musicians who have been essential to the project of bringing Pocket Shelley on stage are Abel Mouton on guitars and Matt Seiling on organ, glockenspiel and harmonica. It's a great pleasure to be collaborating with these musicians. With drummer Lennon Zamora we have begun working on a new project, The Seedy Naturalists . You can hear one of my songs on that page: "The Song in Which the Singer Invites Heartache Into His Life and the LIves of His Bandmates" (click on "a.k.a. 'Sad Guys'").
Novelist Adam Klein and I have also kept our longterm collaboration alive. You can find out what we've been up to lately at The Size Queens . Something about a Magic Dollar Shoppe.... We thought we had finished that CD, but then we wrote some good new songs, so now we won't be done until the end of the summer.
I'm also working on the next Pocket Shelley project, Glockenspiel and Other Love Songs. At this point I'm hoping that this will come in the form of two separate CDs, "Part I: Glockenspiel" and "Part II: Ukulele". I can listen to the whole thing already, but it's not finished.
And ideas for the project after that have begun to percolate (and rough versions of songs to be recorded). The working title is Pocket Shelley's Golden Treasury of Well-Thumbed Poems and if all goes well it will include songs inspired by (and in some cases adapted from) poems by Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Randall Mann and John Ashbery, and prose from Jean Rhys, so far. Last November, I got to play a lovely acoustic set with Cara Wick , who has also been setting poems to music. Listen to "Brooches" on her site.

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