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Thursday, December 20th, 2007
Meredith Sue Willis has a blog! (Found via South Orange Journal's list of links.) One without permalinks, which I haven't seen much of lately. But if you scroll down to December 12 you will see she is recommending José Saramago's Blindness. This is good timing because I had been looking for a book to read, Blindness was on my list but forgotten, I think now is a good time to find a copy and read it.
posted afternoon of December 20th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
The opening pages of Absalom, Absalom! are great pages. I was trying today to figure out what I could compare them to: they are sort of like a really long shot in film of a scene with very little action or dialogue, with the camera panning and tracking its subjects, taking in every detail of an elaborate set. But what this scenario really brings to mind is the reaction I am always hoping to have (and only rarely actually experiencing) to seeing a great painting. Faulkner is narrating the experience of looking hard, for minutes on end, at a painting of the scene he is describing. (Also: my memory of this book doesn't have much to say about Quentin Compson; but rereading these opening pages, I am thinking he's a really important element to understanding what's being told. I wonder if after the beginning of the book, Faulkner moves more completely into the world of Miss Coldfield's story. Or alternately if I just missed out on the point of the story, when I read it last.)
posted evening of December 19th, 2007: Respond
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I may have just added an RSS feed. Try subscribing to READIN.  Update: I think it might be working!
posted afternoon of December 19th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Further to yesterday's post: I think I've found the best of all configurations, which is to have the shoulder rest on the violin and no chin rest. The sound is lovely and it feels completely natural to hold it this way -- easier to hold than it ever was with the chin rest on, shoulder rest or no. My head leans down so that my jaw is holding the violin completely steady, and my ear is right next to the sound box. Still not totally sure what to do about the pickup. I might mount it again, but on the right side of the instrument. Might seek out a new, lighter weight pickup. Might just learn how to play with a microphone.
posted evening of December 18th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
Lately I have been experimenting with taking stuff off my violin. Like for the past couple of months I have been playing without a shoulder rest. I kind of like the feel of the violin that way; and when I tried to figure out what it is I like about it, I came up with that my ear is in closer to the sound box -- that is, the natural position of my head when I don't have the shoulder rest is leaned in next to the fiddle, so my cheek is against the chin rest instead of my chin, and it feels like I'm closer to the sound. Well with that going on, I've been thinking the next logical step is to remove the chin rest, so my cheek and jaw will be against the actual sound box. I tried that tonight and I'm not sure yet -- it does sound really nice*, but it's a lot of work to keep the violin in the correct position. I will try it out for a while though and see how it goes, if I can adjust to this position it would be nice. The adjustment to no shoulder rest didn't take very long. Also, I took the pickup off -- time to learn how to play into a microphone. The pickup was throwing off the instrument's balance.  *Also I think I am getting a better sense of how well I am making contact with my bow -- the distinction in sound between full contact and partial contact is really sharp, I think moreso than it was with the chin rest on. Although another possible explanation is that when I was playing with the chin rest on, my bow hold was much more consistent.
posted evening of December 17th, 2007: Respond
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Sylvia's semester is wrapping up; and yesterday and today she played at the winter concerts of the Youth Orchestras of Essex County, her first performances since she joined the Overture Strings (the youngest group in YOEC) in the fall. The shows were great. Overture Strings performed "The Blue Danube Waltz", "The Great Gate of Kiev" from "Pictures at an Exhibition", and "The Nutcracker March". Lots of fun, although Sylvia found the second violin part for "Blue Danube" quite frustrating -- it is mostly disjointed quarter notes with rests in between and it's hard to get a sense of the melody when you are practicing by yourself. Her favorite piece was "Pictures at an Exhibition".
posted evening of December 17th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, December 15th, 2007
With the sojourn in Güdül, The New Life is starting to feel more like a book than it was before. I mean it is still very weird and different from other books -- but I now have the sensation that I'm reading a novel, which I didn't really before. I'm seeing some intimations of Snow -- the narrator's reaction to the town is a bit reminiscent of Ka in Kars; his desire for Janan is like Ka's desire for İpek -- and this though they are very different characters individually and pairwise; and the militant fundamentalism in Güdül, and the sense that the place is on the edge of breaking down -- these are some bits that I think come out more fully in Snow.
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Another evening, another movie -- tonight we watched the first act of The Magic Flute, and were pretty pleased with it all in all. My experience with Bergman has been pretty mixed; I liked this a lot. It had the beautiful photography and lacked the slowness and storyless-ness that has turned me off to some of his movies. And it presented the opera in a way that allowed me, who am not much good at enjoying opera, to really dig it -- I especially liked the reaction shots of the audience. Sylvia was into it too, except for the part with Papageno and Pamina singing about the wonderfulness of love, which she found boring. ...Idly wondering whether Bergman's films had much influence on the creative process of Monty Python. There were a number shots in this film that made me think of The Holy Grail. The dragon at the beginning could easily have been a Gilliam design. Both movies came out in the same year so I guess there isn't much of a possibility of direct influence one way or the other; but it seems to me like they could be coming from similar places stylistically. And if this were so I would tend to think of Bergman as the source and Python as the derivative since Bergman had been around for a lot longer at that point -- or I guess it's also possible that the source was some third party from which both The Magic Flute and The Holy Grail are derivatives -- but the similarities were striking enough to make me want to think there is a closer point of connection.  (Note: if you are watching this movie with young kids, there are one or two scenes in Act II that you will want to skip over.)
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Excellent news: Allan Evans of Arbiter Records has just released a new disc of old blues: Lifting the Veil: the First Bluesmen (1926 - 1956). It features newly remastered tracks from Davis, Leadbelly, Broonzy and more; and in the liner notes is a previously unpublished 1951 interview of Davis by Alan Lomax's wife, Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold.
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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I am a better violinist than I am a guitarist -- not really surprising considering I have been playing violin much more than guitar over the past few years. At the show tonight, I felt like I played a really respectable fiddle on "Smile to Pretend" -- like the performance was pleasurable in the same way that listening to really good music is, like I was tight and in the groove. My guitar parts felt more like flailing and nerve-wracking. So I think I am going to work on my violin and let my guitar serve as an aid to writing chord charts for songs, more than a performance instrument. (It can be hard to figure out what the chords are, to tell to other musicians, when you're only playing a melody.) Something I really appreciate about the work I did with Hannah for this gig, is her helping me to work out a violin part to "Smile to Pretend" -- the chart she wrote for me helped me to listen to her CD in a way of actually hearing what the violinist was playing and how I could adapt that to my own voice. I'm not used to listening to music this way but it is something I ought to do more of. A feature of this fiddle part was long baritone notes during the lyric, moving into fills between the lines -- this sounds really good. After the show, the second act was Felt, whom I haven't seen in a year or so. They asked me to sit in on "Angel from Montgomery" -- I was really happy to have the evening end up with more fiddling and not have to think as much about the flaily guitar playing.
posted morning of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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