Self-Conscious Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

"You know, it's funny, I look back at some of this writing on my blog over the past few years and I think, oy.  How preening and insufferable I could be.  My only hope (and it seems, from looking at the dates of the posts as they progress, that there's some evidence for this) is that cancer finally (finally!) beat all that useless, adolescent shit out of me."

Stone Street Interview: The McDuffie Project

What to say about Robert McDuffie?  How to introduce him?  Maybe better to introduce the interview.  I'll start by saying I didn't do a very good job with it.  The recording quality isn't terrific, a hilarious final sign-off from Mr. McDuffie was inadvertently edited out, while some of the other edits are confusing and don't give enough context for the conversation.  For my money, the questions aren't thought out enough to elicit the really complex connections and insights that one would want to discover along with one's interview subject.  And it's several months late--Mr. McDuffie (who, by the way, would want us to call him Bobby) came to us in Vilnius in mid-October.  All of that is my fault.  What can I say?  Mea culpa.

But, what I hope comes through anyway is the utter irrepressibility of the man, the sheer force of his experience, intelligence and humor.  The example: when my wife and I first conceived of the plan to bring McDuffie to Vilnius (after hearing him on NPR's Performance Today), he responded to our emailed invite with an email of his own: "Great!  The last time I was in Vilnius, I was 19 years old, touring the Soviet Union, and I was smuggling gold for Rostropovich!"  I said to my wife, we have to have this man here, and interview him for Stone Street.  Well, at least we did get that story out of him, and it is predictably hysterical.  Enjoy it here, or via the RSS feed to right of this post.  Please listen.  It's worth it.

For more on Mr. McDuffie, his very famous (and expensive) violin, the +Rome Chamber Music Festival , and the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University, see Bobby's website here.