Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I have made the irrevocable choice. In the words of the great Emperor Joseph II of Austria:
Well. There it is.
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(11)
03:51:58 PM,Wednesday 19 November 2003
Waaah! The Peace Corps is going all Barmecidal on my ass!
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(8)
01:59:49 PM,Wednesday 19 November 2003
Oooh ooh! CDs from the fantastic mysterious New York Intellectual Opera Singer. {bliss-zing}
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11:25:20 AM,Wednesday 19 November 2003
Oh my god. So I picked the title Baldanders from Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings several weeks before I began my NaNovel. Then a person I met on Queer Opera Punks happened to have a friend whose username was baldanders. So I'm writing along, la di doodle dum, and I get to a bit where I'm trying to be scary, so this guy who's about to rob the good guys' carriage has shoes that go "tock. tock. tock." Scary, right? Except what kind of shoes do that on a dirt road? So I make them wooden shoes. And then, when I runs away, I figure, "wooden shoes fall off pretty easy, right? I bet he loses one." So he did. And then they ran in with the gypsies and, because I had absolutely no idea what the hell my plot was doing, I had this old gypsy guy buy the shoe they found and start carving this random-ass stuff into it. Then, as I'm kvetching to poor Julia for hours and hours about my drivel-laden mess of a novel, I look up that Baldanders definition again, which I hadn't read for nearly a month by that time, and find that Baldanders was first described by HANS SACHS, the famous shoemaker of Nuremberg (see: Wagner). Like, fizz. So the shoes were obviously magic -- both my co-worker and Julia agreed independently, so I figured they must be right -- and so, obviously, they had to be made by Hans Sachs. Now, fortunately, a large part of my story was already set up to take place in Ghent (not that I'd had that in mind when I came up with the tocking-shoes idea), so I had to finagle a connection, somehow, between German shoemaker/singer (a lost-chord type of mystical song thingie also features prominently in the plot), a Flemish city, and a pair of magical wooden shoes. So I'm looking looking looking... and I sort of work Hans Sachs in edgeways, though it's a little forced, and then I remembered that he's also a playwright, and that one of my characters used to be an actor. So I go looking for plays by him, and one of 'em is about a guy named Fortunatus (good omen, huh?), who goes back and forth from London to Flanders to Cyprus (which is really freaky, 'cause I had already decided independently that Baldanders was part Greek, part Turkish, part German, and part English, so... whoah.) But I realized that the guy wasn't gonna have played it in German, so I go looking for contemporary English translations, and find one by a guy named Dekker, who wrote his Fortunatus in 1600 (Sachs's was in the 1560's) -- but GET THIS! Dekker's other most famous work (I had never heard of the guy before) was called THE SHOEMAKER'S HOLIDAY, about a DUTCH FUGGIN COBBLER and and and... my mind is officially blown. Still not sure how I can fit it in with my bloody plot or nothin', but whoah. Damn. Yeah. I love you, Internet.
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(1)
11:23:43 AM,Wednesday 19 November 2003
I just read that Frederick the Great used to make his morning coffee with champagne instead of water, and then stir in a spoonful of powdered mustard.
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(2)
11:12:18 AM,Wednesday 19 November 2003
I just thought of an awesome idea for the next blogswap. It'd take massive bucketloads of work, though, so I'm not sure I have it in me. But damn it'd be cool.
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12:04:05 AM,Tuesday 18 November 2003
Listening to the tape of my opera quiz segment. The guy played the songs on the piano, which was cool, but they hardly used any of my clues, and they made up their own! Not that I'm complaining, but still... I'd rather hear Madama Butterfly sing "I Cover the Waterfront" than anything Puccini wrote for her...
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08:23:06 PM,Monday 17 November 2003
If you don't read Gillen's Livejournal, shame on you. You missed an unutterably brilliant link to a collection of raps written by some '03 Fe Johnny known as the Mixmaster. I mean, you got the whole of Aeschylus's Oresteia, you got Kreon and Xerxes -- and the Meno one is just friggin' priceless. Holy damn. Nerdcore Hip-hop at its very very finest.
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(1)
03:26:32 PM,Monday 17 November 2003
Exposition of 3-part fugue: done.
"Yeah, it's part of a...trilogy really, a musical trilogy I'm doing... in... D minor, which I always find is really the saddest of all keys really. I don't know why, but it makes people weep instantly, you play a..baaaaa...baaaaaa.... it's the horn part. Yeah, just simple lines intertwining, you know, very much like, I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, It's sort of in between those, really, it's like a Mach piece really, it's..."
"What do you call this?"
"Well, this piece is called 'Lick My Love Pump'."
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(2)
11:31:13 AM,Monday 17 November 2003
A quiver of thighs.
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04:21:57 AM,Monday 17 November 2003
The internet is so goddamn wonderful I could just plotz.
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04:22:12 AM,Sunday 16 November 2003
I just thought of something. If I join the Peace Corps, it's entirely possible that I'll be in a situation which will require me to drink alcohol or risk being impolite. I still have four years to teetotal or I lose the bet. Damnit. What am I gonna do? I don't want to give offense... on the other hand, I couldn't bear to see my brother's smirking face after all this time... grr. Plus, it's up to a $100 payoff by now, and that's a healthy slice of cabbage. This is one more reason why I wanna be placed in a Muslim country. (Morocco Morocco Morocco pleeeeeease!)
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(7)
03:05:00 AM,Sunday 16 November 2003
Ok, only opera-loving Harry Potter slash fans are going to find this amusing, but I just discovered that the Britten-Pears School for (ahem) Advanced Musical Studies is located in (heh heh heh) Snape. Oh lordy is there a fic in that. And now I so totally want to go to school there, if only to meet whoever wrote the marvelously Snapish FAQ (No picnics! No looking around the concert hall! If you're hot, we'll lower the temperature by 3%, you sniveling weed.)
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10:28:16 AM,Saturday 15 November 2003
Ok, how much of an indelible stain upon one's soul would it be, hypothetically, to listen to a Henry James audiobook that's -- shudder -- abridged? I don't ask this because I in any way condone abridgement of any book ever for any reason imaginable (ok, except for Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, which I found and read -- God help my weak word-devouring will -- in a box outside the rock room in the basement of Mellon and, lordy, if the Reader's Digest Condensed version was that bad, the original must be several hundred megatons of bad), but because my dad got an audiobook version of The Portrait of a Lady, which I have not read (I know I've read some James short stories, but I can't really remember them; none of his novels), and I'm wondering whether I could listen to them now without jeopardizing my immortal soul, whether I shouldn't listen to them until I've read the original, or whether I should just never listen to them at all because abridgement is bad, mmmmkay? Help me out here. I need guidance.
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(13)
11:05:16 AM,Thursday 13 November 2003
So this is another of those things that has been brewing a long time, but it finally got clinched a couple days ago: some classical music is boring. Yeah. Now, I'm not talking about the type that's just odious to me, lord knows there's enough of it -- Debussy, Grieg, Sibelius, Elgar, Puccini, that whole blegfest -- but the stuff that I'd ordinarily like. It doesn't grate. It sounds vaguely pretty. But it glances off me. Most of the time, it's 'cause it's not performed properly -- like the stuff I hear when I go to the McDonalds on Broadway; they have this utterly robotic trumpet voluntary stuff playing whenever I'm in there, and, though I prefer it about ten billion times more than the eyeteeth-shattering Easy Listening Stuff I had to endure a couple days ago when I was waiting in the evil strip mall section of town for Best Buy to open so I could ream them out about my computer (which I did, with no success), it's just always unrockoutable. It's competent; no sour notes or anything -- but it's BORING.
And sometimes, even when it is performed with a little pep and some unquestionable doughtiness -- like the stuff I heard on Morning Classics later that day; a little divertimento thingie, all bouncy and pleasant -- it's still boring. Or... let me tell you what I mean by boring, 'cause it's complicated. For me, with pop music, I generally have to hear a song five or six times before I can come to any kind of judgment on it. I mean, sometimes, like if it has witty lyrics or something, I'll like it straight off -- but most of the time even the catchy stuff won't sink in until I've let it trickle down through whatever stodgy filtering layers I've got in the fo'c'sle of my head. 'Cause what I listen to most is Classical -- by which I mean Longhair -- music, and that's where my groove-sniffer is usually sitting by default.
I think it's the other way 'round for people who mostly listen to pop (read: everything that's not Longhair) and only go to classical now and then, for a sideline. They listen, but it doesn't hit them. Like, I played the Trout Quintet for the guy I work with, 'cause he's a string bassist, but he only plays classical music; what he really listens to and loves is Metallica and Eminem. Which is cool. But it was just kinda baffling to me to see him sit there politely, hearing but not rocking out to this music that never fails to get me all hotted up and whooping. I tried it again with that Haydn Cello concerto I put on Sex, Death, and Frenzy. Same thing. This guy is not a philistine. And I don't think it's even a matter of taste, exactly... it's a matter of... resonance.
'Cause the same thing happens to me now and then. I'll hear music that I should like: well-performed, well-written, fascinating complex music, Renaissance or Baroque or Classical or Romantic (it happens most often with the Classical, I've noticed), and for the life of me I can't tell whether it's the music or my ears. 'Cause it could be either one. Sometimes it's just that it's throw-off music. Background music. Music that's meant to be inoffensive, which basically guarantees that it's good for nothing else. And sometimes it's that I'm in the wrong mood or frame of mind (this mostly happens with Renaissance music; I'll listen to it over and over and over and it'll go in one ear and out the other. And then one day I'll hear the same thing and fall over weeping.) -- that I've lost the ability to listen.
And sometimes it's associations. Like, for various reasons, jurarire V urne Ryvmnorguna ivby pbafbeg zhfvp, V guvax bs gelvat ba pbpx evatf va gur onguebbz bs n cbea fgber. Or, pretty as it may very well be, Pachelbel's Canon makes me want to see coiled loops of human viscera dangling from my fingers. And I think most people have associated that "classical" sound with the boringness of background music. And that ain't right. Um. In conclusion... I don't think I have a conclusion. Just something I've noticed in myself which makes me even more baffled when stuff that can seem so insanely exaltedly beautiful and perfect and powerful and magnificent can leave people cold. And not just people -- me. And even the stuff that's not the greatest of the great. Just the good-sounding stuff. When's it dross? When's it booty-shaking? Why can't there be some kind of objective bloody measurement of quality or suckiness in art so that I can know how to judge things without waffling all the time? Huh? Answer me that. No, don't. It's ok. I don't really wanna hear it.
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(7)
12:18:56 AM,Thursday 13 November 2003
I just got called by a senior Johnny asking for money (I gave him $20, which isn't much, but better than nothing, I guess :`/ ) -- he's writing his essay on Nietzsche and Maimonedes, and he used to work in a group home like the one I'm working at now. Pang pang pang... no, I'm ok. There is life after SJC... there is life without SJC... there is life beyond SJC... oh, glurgh-a-mercy.
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10:29:25 PM,Wednesday 12 November 2003
Why is there a referral to my blog from the International Atomic Energy Agency?
{concerned, bordering on alarmed}
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(2)
09:59:17 PM,Wednesday 12 November 2003
If I were a better man, I would love her. As it is, I only want her.
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09:17:11 AM,Wednesday 12 November 2003
Yay for computers that work again after you let them rest for 12 hours and then take them out into the cold!
Boo for wired remotes that go intermittent again after two RMAs and utterly doting completely gentle overly-cautious pampering!
Yay for ingenious and even somewhat plausible solutions to gaping plot holes!
Boo for still being 2000-something words behind!
Yay for snow and full-mooned mornings!
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09:16:42 AM,Wednesday 12 November 2003