I take it as a great personal accomplishment that I am not yet dead. I've finally come back from spending too much time in a weird and unhappy emotional place- the worst of it hit when I was alone in the new flat and there was no one around to pat my head and tell me things would be ok. Lovely members of my flist are lovely, but I've been spoiled by four years of dorm living followed by three years of living with my big sister in the basement. But! I'm mostly over it now- I'm still freaking out over all the oncoming Big Crazy, but I no longer feel like I'm about to burst into tears given half a chance, so, yay me! ;) For the record, I've got a day-long orientation tomorrow on the Art of TAing, with a few more meetings for Professor Jazz Hands's class, as well as class registering hoo-ha on Thursday and then some more orientating to be done on Friday. Next week, classes! Also to come next week- a lively glimpse of Emily freaking out ALL OVER AGAIN!
On the upside, I do get to use the following picture of myself for Prof JH's class website, which you may well recognise from a certain icon of mine
Ahh, memories. I think it was Shakespeare's birthday, 2005 in that shot- you can see the walls of my fabulous Barclay single behind me. I've still got some makeup on, as the picture was taken right after a dress rehearsal of Once Upon a Mattress- ah, good times. ;)
MY GOD that was a long time ago. Staggeringly so, it seems at times.
In other news of recent times, I spent several hours polluting my lungs with second-hand smoke at a birthday party BBQ on Saturday for Fo's friend Andrea, newly moved in from Dallas, then on Sunday, we made a girly night of it by Fo, Andrea, Celeste and I getting our ABBA on by seeing Mamma Mia at long last. I'm glad to have seen it, but honestly, ABBA really did write a lot of mediocre music, didn't they? I'm quite happy to have my mp3 collection remain at 'Dancing Queen', 'Waterloo', and 'Mamma Mia'. *shrug*
Also, SADNESS! The pair of H&M khakis that have seen me through the last 3 summers are finally starting to fall apart. They've done quite well to hang on for so long, but their death knell has surely begun... Ah well. It'll be fall soon enough, anyway, and they're made of very lightweight fabric.
But, HAPPINESS! I took my overfull change jar to a Coinstar on Saturday and made a cool $49.10 worth of Amazon Gift Credit that I've already used to order the second volume of Absolute Sandman. \o/ In other news of crass materialism with bookish ends, have any of you ever encountered what is surely one of the greatest pieces of YA fiction ever created:
Weirdos of the Universe, Unite! My hand to bob, it is MAGNIFICENT and one of the happiest discoveries of my wayward youth. I just got a used copy in the mail today and I honestly don't know why I'm over on LJ talking to you lot and not DEVOURING IT. It's all about weird kids GLORYING in their weirdness, rather than trying to fit in to the cool crowd, and there are ALIENS and AMAZING MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS COME TO LIFE to save the universe and just FSALJFLKSJFKLSDJFLKDJF GLORY.
Oo! One last thing! I MISSED my beloved Stephen Fry's birthday yesterday, but I can still provide a bit of the traditional Fryspam! This time, I'm going from Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen's autobiography, where he expounds on music- probably the section that made me laugh the loudest out of anything in the entire book when first I read it.
Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E.M. Forster wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested to me the idea of physical flight, then music suggested something much more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry "Wow!" all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
Other arts do this too, but other arts are forever confined and anchored by reference. Sculptures are either figuratively representational or physically limited by their material, which is actual and palpable. The words in poems are referential, they breathe with denotation and connotation, suggestion and semantics, coding and signing. Paint is real stuff and the matter of painting contains itself in a frame. Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy "music-making", all that grain of human performance, so much messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
AND I CAN'T FUCKING DO IT
I can't so much as hum "Three Blind Mice" without going off key. I can't stick to the rhythm of "Onward Christian Soldiers" without speeding up. I can't fucking do it.
Bollocks to Salieri and his precious, petulant whining. Maybe it is worse to be able to make music just a bit, but not as well as you would like to. I'd love to find out. But I can't fucking do it at all.
To see friends gathering around a piano and singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," "Anything Goes," "Yellow Submarine," "Summertime," "Der Erlkonig," "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain," "Edelweiss," "Non Piu Andrai"-- it doesn't fucking matter what bloody song it is...
I CAN'T FUCKING JOIN IN
I have to mime at parties when everyone sings "Happy Birthday"... mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.
I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.
I'M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF
--- Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry, p70-73.
I couldn't possibly love him more, but I always find that I DO.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR FRY!