Baby steps
Happy Monday to all who observe!
It wasn't a particularly restful weekend, but there were some pleasant things. On Friday, a book I ordered arrived, and I ended up getting sucked into it and finishing it in a couple of days. It was a gripping, brutal read (necessitated by the subject matter), but it was brilliantly conceived and written.
When the Putlizer Prizes came out last week, I ended up glancing through the list of previous winners, and I came across a book I vaguely remembered from when it won: Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," because the concept sounded absolutely brilliant. In the book, the underground railroad isn't just a nickname for the network of folks who helped slaves escape, it's a literally secret railroad that runs through tunnels. When I started reading, I found that the book is much, much more than its intriguing premise. Plot-wise it's a novel about a teenaged slave named Cora, already an outcast on a plantation in Georgia, who seizes an opportunity to escape. She travels from state to state searching for a safe place, all the while pursued by a slave catcher with a personal interest in returning her to bondage. That brief description of the plot does little justice to the frankness with which Whitehead portrays brutalized, traumatized people, the indignities and outright tortures they suffer, and the ways that each new place falls short of promises of freedom or safety (or lack thereof). It's not a literal history by any sense, apart from the real "lost" slave advertisements that masters put into papers, but each place encompasses different aspects of white supremacy that exist today, and combined with railroad itself, with its unreliable schedule and no information about where exactly the different trains will take you, embodies the false hope that safety exists anywhere. But while the whole story is not exactly hopeful or optimistic (nor should it be), Cora's inegenuity and determinatiation are a grim joy to behold, watching her her take ownership of herself is awesome. All in all, a harrowing, horrifying, and powerful read, plus I couldn't put the damn thing down. An absolutely deserved winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
in other news, I participated in filming Sunday's church service live on Saturday instead of just prerecording my musical contribution. Fr. P gave a very sweet Mother's Day sermon, and one of the other participants pinged other choir members to ask if we all got medals this week for not ugly sobbing during the sermon, which, yeah, talk about hazard pay. Mr. 42 and I did Zoom happy hour that night with our friend JS and we shared silly and/or awesome and/or deceptive music with one another. Though my favorite aspect of that service was that (married) Fr. J and Mtr. T each held one of their infant twins for most of the service. I know it's probably because they were fussy and not having a great day, but it was so sweet to see our clergy holding the babies they made for the Mother's Day service. I also finally put together an overdue real-name author blog post on pandemic reality, which was needful, since I hadn't updated since early March, which was all about my appendectomy in February. It's not brilliant, but it'll do.
On Sunday, I got up early to watch RV's church-sponsored forum on how we're doing church music in the pandemic and how it compares to other church music interruptions (like Oliver Cromwell, enemy of beauty!), which was interesting. He was asked to speculate on when it'll be safe to do singing again in person, and he expressed more optimism than I possess in the wake of last week's NATS/ACDA webinar. I honestly do hope he's right. And in the interim, we shall continue do to a shit-ton of chant and contribute what we can! A hymn sing may be in the offing, as is a new anthem by Sarah MacDonald, whom we like quite a bit, who wrote a piece to be performed via Zoom. I haven't received the score yet, but the preview from RV indicates that the text is lines from psalms arranged in an acrosting that spells QUARANTINE. So that looks like good fun for this week!
After I dutifully participated in the Facebook Live broadcast of the service we'd recorded Saturday (plus the other section leaders' musical contributions), I had a nice chat with my folks and wished my mom a Happy Mothers' Day, and took a good, long walk with the girls and enjoyed the fact that it was overcast and cooler than Saturday. When Mr. 42 got home from lessons, he brought with him a feast. Our local pub has been doing special, multi-course Sunday dinners in lieu of the beer dinners they held once or twice a month, and their Mothers' Day meal sounded really awesome to us. So we dined on strawberries with honey goats cheese whip and manchego cheese, farfalle with parma rosa sauce and grilled shrimp, and Mexican chocolate mousse with cajeta caramel, sea salt, and pecans, all with a bottle of bubbly to go with it. And it was every bit as good as it sounds!
After letting that amazing meal settle, I continued futzing with a poem for San Diego Arts + Culture's challenge, Poetry Together. Shockingly, it's not a sonnet, nor does it rhyme. But I've had an image stuck in my head for a couple of weeks, and that's usually a sign that I need to exorcise it somehow, and if you squint, it kind of suits this week's poetry prompt ("What are your Dreams like in these times?"). It may suck. It may be just what they're looking for. I have no idea. They'll be sorting through the submitted poems this week and publishing a selection of them on the Arts + Culture website next Sunday, when the next prompt is released. If I don't have any sticky or fizzy ideas for the next prompt, the poems don't have to be new, and I have a few (hundred) sonnets on different subjects to choose from so...
As for today, I slept rather poorly last night, but at least with crappy sleep came the opportunity to think about my book, so while I was lying awake in the wee hours, I decided to cut one of the twee-er aspects of one of the meet-cutes and came up with a possible solution for the MacGuffin Microbe Conundrum. And it's consistent with one semi-explored aspect of the species that cultivate it, so that's pretty awesome. I feel like I'm nearing where I need to be to start turning this long-ass incomplete draft into a story. This is very, very good.
This morning, I took a pretty terrible introductory training on one of the new [university] systems. It was just so incompetently produced. Not only was there insufficient time to read everything on each slide before the video advanced, the figure resolution was so poor that the fields one is supposed to fill in weren't even legible. So we only have to fill in the boxes outlined in red, but we have no idea what those boxes are supposed to contian. SO HELPFUL. At least this was only meant to familiarize us with the bare bones of how things are going to work. I hope we have a different trainer for advanced topics in this system, because yeesh. I feel 0% prepared by that.
Tonight, is Master Chorale's weekly get together, which involves warming up together (nice), running through a couple of pieces (not hugely useful to those of us who know them already, but fun at least) and chatting while everyone arrives, which is probably my favorite part. At some point between walking the dogs and SDMC, I shall hie me to my costume closet to see what calls to me. None of them have seen my Xena Warrior Princess costume, but I don't currently own the right kind of wig for it, so perhaps that'll debut another day. Alice is always an option, ditto Mary Poppins. Or I could pull out a gown and bling, though I will probably save that for Heavenly Choir Zoom check-in on Thursday. Anyway, the options are a-plenty, so I'm looking forward to seeing what inspiration strikes Well poo. Never got an email with a Zoom link for Master Chorale, so I guess there's no official word about what our plan is moving forward. I guess I'll wait and see like everyone else.
Oooo, the fancy caramels I ordered arrived! I know what I can use to motivate myself to continue doing things today!
Wishing you wellness and fancy caramels,
Mun42
It wasn't a particularly restful weekend, but there were some pleasant things. On Friday, a book I ordered arrived, and I ended up getting sucked into it and finishing it in a couple of days. It was a gripping, brutal read (necessitated by the subject matter), but it was brilliantly conceived and written.
When the Putlizer Prizes came out last week, I ended up glancing through the list of previous winners, and I came across a book I vaguely remembered from when it won: Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," because the concept sounded absolutely brilliant. In the book, the underground railroad isn't just a nickname for the network of folks who helped slaves escape, it's a literally secret railroad that runs through tunnels. When I started reading, I found that the book is much, much more than its intriguing premise. Plot-wise it's a novel about a teenaged slave named Cora, already an outcast on a plantation in Georgia, who seizes an opportunity to escape. She travels from state to state searching for a safe place, all the while pursued by a slave catcher with a personal interest in returning her to bondage. That brief description of the plot does little justice to the frankness with which Whitehead portrays brutalized, traumatized people, the indignities and outright tortures they suffer, and the ways that each new place falls short of promises of freedom or safety (or lack thereof). It's not a literal history by any sense, apart from the real "lost" slave advertisements that masters put into papers, but each place encompasses different aspects of white supremacy that exist today, and combined with railroad itself, with its unreliable schedule and no information about where exactly the different trains will take you, embodies the false hope that safety exists anywhere. But while the whole story is not exactly hopeful or optimistic (nor should it be), Cora's inegenuity and determinatiation are a grim joy to behold, watching her her take ownership of herself is awesome. All in all, a harrowing, horrifying, and powerful read, plus I couldn't put the damn thing down. An absolutely deserved winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
in other news, I participated in filming Sunday's church service live on Saturday instead of just prerecording my musical contribution. Fr. P gave a very sweet Mother's Day sermon, and one of the other participants pinged other choir members to ask if we all got medals this week for not ugly sobbing during the sermon, which, yeah, talk about hazard pay. Mr. 42 and I did Zoom happy hour that night with our friend JS and we shared silly and/or awesome and/or deceptive music with one another. Though my favorite aspect of that service was that (married) Fr. J and Mtr. T each held one of their infant twins for most of the service. I know it's probably because they were fussy and not having a great day, but it was so sweet to see our clergy holding the babies they made for the Mother's Day service. I also finally put together an overdue real-name author blog post on pandemic reality, which was needful, since I hadn't updated since early March, which was all about my appendectomy in February. It's not brilliant, but it'll do.
On Sunday, I got up early to watch RV's church-sponsored forum on how we're doing church music in the pandemic and how it compares to other church music interruptions (like Oliver Cromwell, enemy of beauty!), which was interesting. He was asked to speculate on when it'll be safe to do singing again in person, and he expressed more optimism than I possess in the wake of last week's NATS/ACDA webinar. I honestly do hope he's right. And in the interim, we shall continue do to a shit-ton of chant and contribute what we can! A hymn sing may be in the offing, as is a new anthem by Sarah MacDonald, whom we like quite a bit, who wrote a piece to be performed via Zoom. I haven't received the score yet, but the preview from RV indicates that the text is lines from psalms arranged in an acrosting that spells QUARANTINE. So that looks like good fun for this week!
After I dutifully participated in the Facebook Live broadcast of the service we'd recorded Saturday (plus the other section leaders' musical contributions), I had a nice chat with my folks and wished my mom a Happy Mothers' Day, and took a good, long walk with the girls and enjoyed the fact that it was overcast and cooler than Saturday. When Mr. 42 got home from lessons, he brought with him a feast. Our local pub has been doing special, multi-course Sunday dinners in lieu of the beer dinners they held once or twice a month, and their Mothers' Day meal sounded really awesome to us. So we dined on strawberries with honey goats cheese whip and manchego cheese, farfalle with parma rosa sauce and grilled shrimp, and Mexican chocolate mousse with cajeta caramel, sea salt, and pecans, all with a bottle of bubbly to go with it. And it was every bit as good as it sounds!
After letting that amazing meal settle, I continued futzing with a poem for San Diego Arts + Culture's challenge, Poetry Together. Shockingly, it's not a sonnet, nor does it rhyme. But I've had an image stuck in my head for a couple of weeks, and that's usually a sign that I need to exorcise it somehow, and if you squint, it kind of suits this week's poetry prompt ("What are your Dreams like in these times?"). It may suck. It may be just what they're looking for. I have no idea. They'll be sorting through the submitted poems this week and publishing a selection of them on the Arts + Culture website next Sunday, when the next prompt is released. If I don't have any sticky or fizzy ideas for the next prompt, the poems don't have to be new, and I have a few (hundred) sonnets on different subjects to choose from so...
As for today, I slept rather poorly last night, but at least with crappy sleep came the opportunity to think about my book, so while I was lying awake in the wee hours, I decided to cut one of the twee-er aspects of one of the meet-cutes and came up with a possible solution for the MacGuffin Microbe Conundrum. And it's consistent with one semi-explored aspect of the species that cultivate it, so that's pretty awesome. I feel like I'm nearing where I need to be to start turning this long-ass incomplete draft into a story. This is very, very good.
This morning, I took a pretty terrible introductory training on one of the new [university] systems. It was just so incompetently produced. Not only was there insufficient time to read everything on each slide before the video advanced, the figure resolution was so poor that the fields one is supposed to fill in weren't even legible. So we only have to fill in the boxes outlined in red, but we have no idea what those boxes are supposed to contian. SO HELPFUL. At least this was only meant to familiarize us with the bare bones of how things are going to work. I hope we have a different trainer for advanced topics in this system, because yeesh. I feel 0% prepared by that.
Tonight, is Master Chorale's weekly get together, which involves warming up together (nice), running through a couple of pieces (not hugely useful to those of us who know them already, but fun at least) and chatting while everyone arrives, which is probably my favorite part. At some point between walking the dogs and SDMC, I shall hie me to my costume closet to see what calls to me. None of them have seen my Xena Warrior Princess costume, but I don't currently own the right kind of wig for it, so perhaps that'll debut another day. Alice is always an option, ditto Mary Poppins. Or I could pull out a gown and bling, though I will probably save that for Heavenly Choir Zoom check-in on Thursday. Anyway, the options are a-plenty, so I'm looking forward to seeing what inspiration strikes Well poo. Never got an email with a Zoom link for Master Chorale, so I guess there's no official word about what our plan is moving forward. I guess I'll wait and see like everyone else.
Oooo, the fancy caramels I ordered arrived! I know what I can use to motivate myself to continue doing things today!
Wishing you wellness and fancy caramels,
Mun42