![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Snow, Symphony, Tsarnaev
Feb. 14th, 2015 01:38 pmRecord amounts of snow on the ground with another blizzard on the way. I've gotten out of the house more than usual in the last week or two, but am nevertheless feeling stir crazy; it has to be empathy. Or just the skies being low and the ground several snowy feet higher than usual.
Went to the symphony on Tuesday; house only half full, if that, presumably because of weather. The conductor, as a last-minute replacement because of visa issues, was the young assistant; it was wonderful. It gave the whole concert an earnest, bashful warmth, both him and the orchestra trying to support each other and show how proud they were. Wonderful textures to the music, more focused on feeling than precision. Ciro has been going to physical therapy for his left shoulder, to strengthen the muscles he didn't know he hadn't been engaging at all for 15 years, which means his shoulder is currently boot-camp tired. He had trouble clapping. Turns out you need your shoulder for that.
The upcoming Tsarnaev trial has been in the news a lot in Boston; it's a strange thing to look at a 19-year-old and know that the very best he could hope for is a life in prison with no possibility of parole. It's a confusing sentence. It seems like by letting someone live, you're acknowledging that they could become a better person or contribute in some way you're not sure of yet - that future them might not be identical to present or near-past them. But by giving no possibility of parole, no matter what, you're saying it doesn't matter at all, and you hate them and want them to die in a hole no matter whether they turn their life around.
Mom talked about how people look for closure in trials now; she seems to think it wasn't always that way, at least in the past she remembers. I wonder if harsher sentencing is partially an outgrowth of the way we storify news now and want events to come to a conclusion.
The haunted card deck story I've been trying to sell forever because it's my favorite but nobody else agrees has finally sold to Farrago's Wainscot, and it could not have a better home. I hope the return of FW to print is a harbinger that the New Weird is coming back into fashion; contemporary fiction was knocked off its axis by 9/11, the banking collapse, and other "hide your head" cataclysms, and has been more than a little comfort-food dull for a while.
Meanwhile, I continue to be obsessed with Dragon Age. I have passionate feelings about both Alistair and Anders, although they are opposite ends of the spectrum of passionate feelings, in that Anders makes me shout a lot. Rarely have I been so angry and felt so personally betrayed by a fictional character. Terribly satisfying.
Went to the symphony on Tuesday; house only half full, if that, presumably because of weather. The conductor, as a last-minute replacement because of visa issues, was the young assistant; it was wonderful. It gave the whole concert an earnest, bashful warmth, both him and the orchestra trying to support each other and show how proud they were. Wonderful textures to the music, more focused on feeling than precision. Ciro has been going to physical therapy for his left shoulder, to strengthen the muscles he didn't know he hadn't been engaging at all for 15 years, which means his shoulder is currently boot-camp tired. He had trouble clapping. Turns out you need your shoulder for that.
The upcoming Tsarnaev trial has been in the news a lot in Boston; it's a strange thing to look at a 19-year-old and know that the very best he could hope for is a life in prison with no possibility of parole. It's a confusing sentence. It seems like by letting someone live, you're acknowledging that they could become a better person or contribute in some way you're not sure of yet - that future them might not be identical to present or near-past them. But by giving no possibility of parole, no matter what, you're saying it doesn't matter at all, and you hate them and want them to die in a hole no matter whether they turn their life around.
Mom talked about how people look for closure in trials now; she seems to think it wasn't always that way, at least in the past she remembers. I wonder if harsher sentencing is partially an outgrowth of the way we storify news now and want events to come to a conclusion.
The haunted card deck story I've been trying to sell forever because it's my favorite but nobody else agrees has finally sold to Farrago's Wainscot, and it could not have a better home. I hope the return of FW to print is a harbinger that the New Weird is coming back into fashion; contemporary fiction was knocked off its axis by 9/11, the banking collapse, and other "hide your head" cataclysms, and has been more than a little comfort-food dull for a while.
Meanwhile, I continue to be obsessed with Dragon Age. I have passionate feelings about both Alistair and Anders, although they are opposite ends of the spectrum of passionate feelings, in that Anders makes me shout a lot. Rarely have I been so angry and felt so personally betrayed by a fictional character. Terribly satisfying.
