Imitation

Just now I was lying awake, imagining a "degrees of imitation" gauge for my creative writing students (after observing they were too attentive to poems by Lynes, Wayman, Collins, Cooley, Carson, etc., in an assignment about imitation), when I heard, on the CBC Radio 2 program "Nightstream," about Rufus Wainwright's Judy Garland project. Apparently he re-staged, song for song, her 1961 Carnegie Hall concert, and plans to do the same with her follow-up Hollywood Bowl concert in Los Angeles. After laying all this out, the host played some Wainwright tune or other--I can't stand the guy's music so was about switch the radio off when I heard, from two miles north of my place, the call of a CPR train. At first the train just imitated Wainwright--that diesel whine--then (thank goodness) made its own night sound.