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Lear; Ades; Toes
Mar. 10th, 2019 05:34 pmFinished and turned in the Edward Lear essay which will run during poetry month; am feeling twitchy about it. I set a trap for myself with this one, because whenever I write autobiographically I have the suspicion that I'm being pompous and precious, yet withholding, and in this piece I set as my subject my poetry's relationship to Edward Lear, another writer who was full of self-doubt worried that he was too revealing and too concealing. And a lot of his poetry was nonsense, so it's dangerously easy to write about yourself instead of the poem. (So many of the interpretations I've read seem to have nothing to do with what is present in the text.)
(That was another difficulty of this essay; I kept writing paragraphs and paragraphs arguing against somebody who said a stupid thing which the reader would never know was said unless I brought it up and then deleting that section because although I am right this is not the place.)
Anyway, good old Lear. I hadn't known how much time he spent in the same part of Italy where I lived, and I hadn't known until today that Donald Barthelme, my favorite short story writer, had written a short story about him. (And Auden wrote a poem but I don't think Auden's poem knew what it was talking about. This is another of those arguments I could have. Auden! I'll have to think about it. Maybe I do actually like it. Okay, yes, it is excellent.) Anyway, turns out me and Auden and Barthelme are in a club that writes Edward Lear fanfic, since my essay, because it is in the context of the speculative poetry genre, gets fictional and impossible at the end.
==
Ciro and I went to see the Thomas Adès' second piano concerto last night; this weekend was its world premiere, although I think we were at the third performance. I liked the second movement a lot (the slow one). It's common these days for composers to try to extend the sound of one instrument into another instrument - to try to make the entire symphony sound like a single organ - but I've never heard it work to the extent it did here. It sounded and felt as though the rest of the orchestra was connected to and being vibrated by the strings of the piano. It was uncanny.
The audience was extremely distracting - they kept coughing and moving and loudly unwrapping or shuffling things, sometimes entering or exiting the auditorium and twice dropping something loud and heavy. I've never heard so much audience noise - not at the BSO, not anywhere. I would have guessed this meant inattention or dislike, except the applause was a long and enthusiastic standing ovation, and in the halls at intermission, and later as I exited, everyone was ecstatic and revved up and talking about how far they'd travelled to see this, and how it hadn't disappointed. Maybe that's it; maybe people came out even though they were sick or tired and would have stayed home for something else.
==
Have painted my toenails iridescent gold-green. Built a silly-looking snowman.
I've been trying to push past an extremely-low plateau of number of pushups I'm able to do in a row. Today I did manage to do 8 consecutively, but now I want to eat everything. It is not enough pushups to warrant this kind of hunger. Someone is confused.
(That was another difficulty of this essay; I kept writing paragraphs and paragraphs arguing against somebody who said a stupid thing which the reader would never know was said unless I brought it up and then deleting that section because although I am right this is not the place.)
Anyway, good old Lear. I hadn't known how much time he spent in the same part of Italy where I lived, and I hadn't known until today that Donald Barthelme, my favorite short story writer, had written a short story about him. (And Auden wrote a poem but I don't think Auden's poem knew what it was talking about. This is another of those arguments I could have. Auden! I'll have to think about it. Maybe I do actually like it. Okay, yes, it is excellent.) Anyway, turns out me and Auden and Barthelme are in a club that writes Edward Lear fanfic, since my essay, because it is in the context of the speculative poetry genre, gets fictional and impossible at the end.
==
Ciro and I went to see the Thomas Adès' second piano concerto last night; this weekend was its world premiere, although I think we were at the third performance. I liked the second movement a lot (the slow one). It's common these days for composers to try to extend the sound of one instrument into another instrument - to try to make the entire symphony sound like a single organ - but I've never heard it work to the extent it did here. It sounded and felt as though the rest of the orchestra was connected to and being vibrated by the strings of the piano. It was uncanny.
The audience was extremely distracting - they kept coughing and moving and loudly unwrapping or shuffling things, sometimes entering or exiting the auditorium and twice dropping something loud and heavy. I've never heard so much audience noise - not at the BSO, not anywhere. I would have guessed this meant inattention or dislike, except the applause was a long and enthusiastic standing ovation, and in the halls at intermission, and later as I exited, everyone was ecstatic and revved up and talking about how far they'd travelled to see this, and how it hadn't disappointed. Maybe that's it; maybe people came out even though they were sick or tired and would have stayed home for something else.
==
Have painted my toenails iridescent gold-green. Built a silly-looking snowman.
I've been trying to push past an extremely-low plateau of number of pushups I'm able to do in a row. Today I did manage to do 8 consecutively, but now I want to eat everything. It is not enough pushups to warrant this kind of hunger. Someone is confused.
