A Grain of Sand presents:

A Grain of SandA Grain of Sand

Charles McGuigan

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My show’s title comes from the William Blake line about how you can see the entire world in a grain of sand. I believe that. Always have. There’s something consubstantial about all things, human and otherwise. Some spark of the Other within all. And I know that ordinary sounds and vernacular speech hold the very truths of existence, you’ve just gotta be patient and plough through dung hills for those rare gems.

All stories of merit—not simple anecdotes—contain hints of the universal. And I’ll go anywhere for a story and listen to anyone, and I do believe these stories exist everywhere and with everyone. I’ve heard it said that not everyone has a story. I just don’t believe that.  Sometimes it’s hard to extract that story. Sometimes the teller has a hard time framing their own story. But the story’s there nonetheless. Even those who have lived the most solitary of existences.

There’s a great short story by Turgenev out of A Sportsman’s Notebook. I think it’s called The Relic. And here’s the gist of it: the narrator visiting a large estate in Russia where he will hunt and fish discovers an old, infirmed woman, who is of no longer useful in the household of the landowner and so she lives a solitary life in the barn. Other serfs bring her food and tend to her needs and so on. This woman can’t even walk. But when the narrator presupposes that this woman’s life is without joy or validity, she takes him to task. Each morning in spring and summer she feels the sun warm her face, in the winter the cold gnaw her feet. There are the birds and rodents and life awakening in the fecund soil and life withering back into it come fall. And that, in and of itself, is the story. 

And for me it’s always the story. Most precisely the short story. It has a structure and finiteness that permits me the luxury of making it just so. I write short stories and employ many of the devices of that art to the creation of these grains of sand. Every day I learn more about these inventions and adapt that knowledge to the craft.

So A Grain of Sand, through the words of others and my own, along with ambient sound and original music by Charles Arthur, hopes to tell these stories in ways that reveal, illuminate and entertain. I thank everyone who listens.
 

Dan S

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    September 22nd, 2011

Posted In: Music Shows