I often find January challenging, and this year is no exception! A close family member is facing a difficult medical situation and we are all, I think, bracing ourselves for what's to come. Taking things day to day and trying not to worry too much about the failure to accomplish pretty much any of the work I'd hoped for (there were more other bits and bobs of work than I had admitted to myself, including Skyping in for a day and a half of MLA interviews for our eighteenth-century search). School starts next week, and will be crazy from the get-go....
However there have been many good things this month too.
Two Days, One Night is utterly mesmerizing in a terribly depressive way (glimpse of hope at the end); also, who knows whether everyone in Belgium eats their ice-cream cones like that or whether it just happens that the two actors in that scene were asked to lick in distinctive and identical fashion?
My friend Tanya's show Sorry Robot is absolutely delightful: like Hedwig, only with robots, and the exact right balance of existential and hilarious! It is really about the human condition, and I am only sorry that the song "Tears on the Treadmill" is not yet available as a Youtube link.... (A nice review at the Times.)
This is the sporting activity I have just taken up. It is making me extremely happy.
Lots of tabs to close:
Peter Hirsch on how a trip to the spa could end your marriage.
Greene Street soundscape c. 1972!
Memorable reference questions at the NYPL.
Identifiable images of bystanders extracted from corneal reflections.
R. Crumb on the Charlie Hebdo deaths.
Checking in with Thomas Lauderdale at the Pink Martini world headquarters in Portland, OR.
And quite a bit of light reading, all things considered (very soon I'm going to have little time for it, between teaching Clarissa and the TRAC committee shifting into heavy mode, although really the quantity speaks to the fact that I've been slightly struggling to get from day to day!):
Two very enjoyable albeit largely fantastical crime novels (I can tolerate preposterousness in the grand scheme of things so long as the sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph developments are plausible, which is so in this case) by Pierre Lemaitre, Irene and Alex. Which I read the wrong way round: ignore Amazon's use of the term "prequel" to describe the first one I list, it was written and published first in France, takes place chronologically prior to the subsequent volume and only happens to have been published belatedly in the US! More on Lemaitre here.
Comfort reread that reminded me of my deep conviction that I should write a long essay or a short book about Diana Wynne Jones, The Islands of Chaldea, posthumously completed by her sister Ursula Jones.
The first three books of Adrian McKinty's excellent Sean Duffy series, set in Belfast during the Troubles: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone. Another installment coming soon, but I felt bereft when I'd finished these three: the comfort of finding a really transporting fictional world and knowing that there is more of it where that came from is inversely proportional to the pain of being cut off at the end. I am always convinced, when I finish a series of books I enjoy, that I am never going to find anything I like to read ever again....
Ben Aaronovitch's Foxglove Summer: these novels are pretty much perfect in my book, though it took me some chapters to become fully immersed in this one - that may have been circumstantial, though, as I have had a lot of minor subway travel and waiting around for things.
Meghan Daum's new essay collection, The Unspeakable, which I enjoyed very much. (Here's an interview with Daum in Bookforum.)
Finally, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends. Several friends have recommended Macintyre's books to me, and I certainly enjoyed this one (I wanted to follow up the factual story of Kim Philby, so far as it is known, after reading Tim Powers and other alternate-history versions).
I am really beginning to be grumpy about not having written anything recently. I need to think about this semester and whether I can build in a couple sessions a week of writing time. I think it is conceivable, but it will only happen if I make a concrete and realistic plan....
Showing posts with label cartoons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cartoons. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Saturday, December 08, 2012
Closing tabs
Abandoned swimming pools.
At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.
Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)
How to create cartoons.
Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)
At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.
Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)
How to create cartoons.
Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)
Monday, November 26, 2012
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
"What's opera, Doc?"
This must be my earliest acquaintance with Wagner....
Really I have no commentary in particular on the Ring at the Met - I did enjoy it, and I'm very glad to have seen the whole thing in one bash, but it confirmed my sense that it's not really suited to my sensibilities. The music is very easy and compelling to listen to, and the purest and most intense pleasure for me in the whole thing was probably just the lavish beauty of the writing for woodwinds, my favorite family of orchestral instruments. The clarinets were especially lovely, but of course also English horn, and at various moments my mind drifted to an alternate universe where I am perhaps a professional bassoonist with a sideline in oboe and English horn - really it wouldn't have come to pass, but one has time in that context to sit and ponder such things!
The 'machine' came into its own in Siegfried, as a surface on which light is projected; in other respects, it seemed cumbersome though not unduly so. There is a sense in which the lighter moments, especially in Siegfried, are actually familiar anachronistically by way of this vintage of Disney film; in fact, the whole thing was much more Disney than I had possibly imagined, as I had some vague and largely misleading association of the cycle with the most avant-garde wing of twentieth-century Bayreuth productions (why did I somehow imagine that more of this music would sound more like Webern?!?), and of course this is not at all the style in which a house like the Met is going to approach the thing. It is not an original observation if I say that really the Disney theme park is the most fully realized twentieth-century sequel to Wagner's fantasy of the total work of art. The music must have sounded electrifyingly strange and original when it was first heard, but has been largely naturalized by way of a century plus of over-the-top movie music; in fact, that was probably my other most startling realization, that the idiom for a certain kind of movie music continues to be borrowed almost literally from Wagner's orchestration, how strange that this should be so!
It was not an electrifying production, in short, but I am very glad to have heard the music all the way through and gain a much clearer sense of what it is really like and how it works. My one regret is that Eric Owens wasn't singing Alberich in any of the performances I saw; I will have to make sure to go and hear him in something else before too long.
I have no substantive complaints for this week, and in fact I have been busy with some very pleasant things: a party at the NYPL in bestowal of the Young Lions Fiction Award; congratulating our graduating senior English majors and handing out awards in the humanities to other CC students, including one or two of my own, on a day so rainy that it made even me, a die-hard umbrella-despiser, contemplate the utility of such things; a beautiful long run this morning and a very good subsequent meeting on a student's dissertation prospectus. However I cannot shake my end-of-year malaise: I suppose it is the usual consequence of overwork.
I have an overdue essay that I should be writing, but I really can't face any work for another day or so; all I want to do is exercise, which puts me in a good mood while I am doing it and for a few hours thereafter, then results in a total mood crash so persistent that even the unexpected arrival in the mail this afternoon of a thousand-dollar check that I wasn't at all expecting didn't cause any appreciable lift! I think I just have to be patient and wait for the cloud to go away (only I really do need to write that essay!).
Closing tabs:
Nico has a good long post that touches on many matters of interest, but especially wombat gait!
Also: body language....
Really I have no commentary in particular on the Ring at the Met - I did enjoy it, and I'm very glad to have seen the whole thing in one bash, but it confirmed my sense that it's not really suited to my sensibilities. The music is very easy and compelling to listen to, and the purest and most intense pleasure for me in the whole thing was probably just the lavish beauty of the writing for woodwinds, my favorite family of orchestral instruments. The clarinets were especially lovely, but of course also English horn, and at various moments my mind drifted to an alternate universe where I am perhaps a professional bassoonist with a sideline in oboe and English horn - really it wouldn't have come to pass, but one has time in that context to sit and ponder such things!
The 'machine' came into its own in Siegfried, as a surface on which light is projected; in other respects, it seemed cumbersome though not unduly so. There is a sense in which the lighter moments, especially in Siegfried, are actually familiar anachronistically by way of this vintage of Disney film; in fact, the whole thing was much more Disney than I had possibly imagined, as I had some vague and largely misleading association of the cycle with the most avant-garde wing of twentieth-century Bayreuth productions (why did I somehow imagine that more of this music would sound more like Webern?!?), and of course this is not at all the style in which a house like the Met is going to approach the thing. It is not an original observation if I say that really the Disney theme park is the most fully realized twentieth-century sequel to Wagner's fantasy of the total work of art. The music must have sounded electrifyingly strange and original when it was first heard, but has been largely naturalized by way of a century plus of over-the-top movie music; in fact, that was probably my other most startling realization, that the idiom for a certain kind of movie music continues to be borrowed almost literally from Wagner's orchestration, how strange that this should be so!
It was not an electrifying production, in short, but I am very glad to have heard the music all the way through and gain a much clearer sense of what it is really like and how it works. My one regret is that Eric Owens wasn't singing Alberich in any of the performances I saw; I will have to make sure to go and hear him in something else before too long.
I have no substantive complaints for this week, and in fact I have been busy with some very pleasant things: a party at the NYPL in bestowal of the Young Lions Fiction Award; congratulating our graduating senior English majors and handing out awards in the humanities to other CC students, including one or two of my own, on a day so rainy that it made even me, a die-hard umbrella-despiser, contemplate the utility of such things; a beautiful long run this morning and a very good subsequent meeting on a student's dissertation prospectus. However I cannot shake my end-of-year malaise: I suppose it is the usual consequence of overwork.
I have an overdue essay that I should be writing, but I really can't face any work for another day or so; all I want to do is exercise, which puts me in a good mood while I am doing it and for a few hours thereafter, then results in a total mood crash so persistent that even the unexpected arrival in the mail this afternoon of a thousand-dollar check that I wasn't at all expecting didn't cause any appreciable lift! I think I just have to be patient and wait for the cloud to go away (only I really do need to write that essay!).
Closing tabs:
Nico has a good long post that touches on many matters of interest, but especially wombat gait!
Also: body language....
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