Beyond the mixed bag

It's not like I've never had odd juxtapositions before:

So try to imagine yesterday's Amazon.com shipment.

First, the music, by Scottish composer James Dillon (1950-    ), three pieces that don't go out of their way to be accessible but will eventually find their way into your synapses. East 11th St. NY 10003, it is said, is where John Cage once lived, and this 1982 work for six percussionists is indeed dedicated to Cage. This doesn't sound like Cage, particularly — its most obvious antecedent is Edgard Varèse's Ionisation — but the wild variations in durations and rhythms make it necessary to listen to the rests as much as to the notes, a very Cage-y idea indeed. East 11th St. was the first completed section of Dillon's Nine Rivers cycle: some of those rivers are relatively placid, some of them are turbulent, but all of them flow. Also part of Nine Rivers is La Femme Invisible (1989), the fourth section, a river flowing underground through caverns and tunnels and creating echoes and harmonies therein, the body of a woman rendered in rock and water. The piano and the percussion maintain the current; the winds define the surface. Windows and Canopies (1985) lie atop the rainforest, and sometimes you can see your way to the sky (winds and percussion) and sometimes the forest is so thick you can see nothing at all (strings scored as a veritable thicket of interlaced threads and glissandi). The recording dates from 1992 and was released on NMC, a non-profit English label funded by the Holst Foundation.

The book has English roots as well, but far different ones. Marianne Mancusi's A Connecticut Fashionista in King Arthur's Court (2005) doesn't quite mix Mark Twain and Candace Bushnell, but it's a cheerfully preposterous read in its own right, and while some will tag it with the hated term "chick lit," I, a guy-type person, found it quite entertaining, perhaps because Mancusi's Kat is every bit as anxious as I am to work pop-culture references into everything, and besides, she's prettier. What's more, as is no secret, I am a sucker for off-kilter romances, and for sweetening, there's an absolutely shameless Back to the Future ripoff in Chapter Two that floored me: "I suppose Armani is not your surname either," says Lancelot.

Of course, the sort of person who thrives on breezy fiction like this is generally not the sort of person who buys contemporary music by self-taught Scotsmen either, but I've been out of sorts for most of my life. (And oh, there's a sequel to Fashionista due next year: A Hoboken Hipster in Sherwood Forest. How can I resist?)