Hypothetically…

Question for you, dear readers. Hypothetically, if you had to choose between

  • relocating to a largish city where you spent some of your earliest years, with which you still feel somewhat familiar, and which is near to a variety of family and friends; or
  • relocating to a smaller city you don’t know at all, in a
    far-flung location, which would take you further from the people you
    know, but the idea piqued your sense of adventure (fresh woods and
    pastures new and all that)…

…and you’d be there for around a year and a
half, and you felt you could be happy in either place — which would you choose?

(Yes, there’s a reason for this question, and yes, I’ll post about it soon.)

Alternative housing fantasies

The things you find on del.icio.us — today I came across a link to a company that makes yurts, which you can
apparently outfit with central heating, plumbing, interior walls and
everything. Fantasizing about portable housing, I looked up an old link to a designer of hanging spherical treehouses (originally spotted at scribblingwoman‘s blog); other people’s similar links led me to UFO-style treehouses, loft cubes, and floating houses. I’ve always wanted to live on a houseboat…

Also found while poking around through items tagged "prefab" and "microhousing": fabprefab, a site about modernist prefabricated housing (I’m quite taken with these), and the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Now I’m having Thoreau-ish fantasies about siting a tiny ready-made house in the woods, or suspending one from a tree.

Opera review!

I’m back from a trip to DC with my friend R. to see the National Opera’s production of La Clemenza di Tito this past Saturday night. There’s a pretty thorough review of this production over at ionarts, with which I mostly agree. I thought Marina Domashenko, as Sesto, and Cristina Nassif (that night’s Vitellia) were the standouts in the cast; I liked Jossie Perez’s Annio too. Hoo-Ryoung Hwang, as Servilia, had a somewhat buzzy quality to her vibrato that I found kind of distracting, but she and Jossie Perez had so much chemistry in their scenes together that I almost didn’t care. I found Michael Schade’s Tito a bit forgettable, though he seemed to warm up as the evening went on. And I liked Vitellia’s bright red dress of crazed wannabe empress-dom (with matching tiara and staff), the one outrageous element in an otherwise rather sombre-looking production.

It’s an odd opera, to be sure, and not to everyone’s taste, partly because the conventions of opera seria seem contrived to the modern audience, but also because Tito, its supposedly central figure, is so heavily idealized. He corresponds only loosely to the historical Roman emperor Titus, and he resembles probably no real ruler ever, what with his impossible niceness and his penchant for pardoning people who try to bump him off. (In his first scene, presented with a huge haul of tribute, Tito immediately allocates it for disaster relief for the victims of the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius. He also insists that he’d rather have his people obey him out of love than out of fear; he’s the kind of ruler Machiavelli would have found eye-rollingly exasperating.)

In this production, the harder-to-swallow moments were played for laughs. When Vitellia sends Sesto off to assassinate Tito in revenge for Tito’s refusal to marry her, and then finds out seconds later that Tito wants to marry her after all, we all giggled; we giggled some more when, at the end of the scene, she abruptly turned around and dashed off after Sesto. Watching, I wondered if any of these moments would have struck 18th-century audiences as comic, or whether the conventions would have been as unremarkable to them as certain cinematic conventions (e.g. the fruit cart rule, or the way a shaky handheld shot of the back of a character’s head signals their imminent doom) are to us.*

But then there was the scene with the burning of the Capitol, and Sesto’s gorgeous arias, and the scene where Annio and Servilia try to do the selfless thing and renounce each other but can’t, all of which were a bit like wandering into a different opera. All of which made me wish I’d been there to see it on its very first night in 1791.

* Years ago, in a graduate seminar on early modern English literature, a bunch of us had a long discussion about how it’s impossible to read The Revenger’s Tragedy nowadays as anything but over-the-top farce. (Parts of the last scene, in particular, are straight out of Monty Python.) And we all boggled over the difficulty of entering into the minds of the original audience: did they think they were seeing gruesome tragedy, or would they have laughed? And if they didn’t find it funny, what other parts of their inner world were closed off to us?

In a perfect world, all bars would have people singing Verdi

A group that performs opera in bars. Neat! Why am I not living in Canada so I can hear them?

(Hat tip to wolfangel, who did get to hear them.)

Eggcorn of the week

Line from an online apartment listing: "These apartments are diamonds in a ruff!"

Which is kind of a wonderful image. I bet you’d need a lot of starch in your ruff to get the diamonds to stay in there…

(What’s an eggcorn? Here’s a definition.)

Sunday miscellany

Hello? Anyone out there? It’s been awfully quiet around here of late. Though if my own blogger’s block is any indication, this is the time of year for minimal posting, minimal commenting, and vacations.

In assorted Bullets of Random Crap news:

  • Up next on my reading list: Alison Bechdel‘s new graphic novel Fun Home (which I’m especially looking forward to after Bitch Ph.D.’s review) and Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure, by the author of the addictive Apartment Therapy blog.
  • The Charlottesville farmers’ market has restarted, and there are already tomatoes. And salad greens. And lots of fresh flowers. This is a very good thing.
  • I’ve been on a "must…declutter…apartment" kick lately (and my God, I swear the back issues of the New Yorker are multiplying when I’m not looking). I’m about to test out this cleaning strategy and see if it works.
  • (On second thought, it’s so gorgeous outside that I may just catch the last of the daylight on my balcony…)
  • In popcorn-movie news, I have no great desire to see either MI:3
    (despite the admirable Philip Seymour Hoffman) or that Da Vinci thing
    (despite the admirable Ian McKellen and Audrey Tautou). Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, though? I’m so there.
  • I want to write more. I’ve been missing my creative-writing side rather a lot. Any suggestions for making time to write in the interstices of the workweek, O blogospheric hivemind?

The lamp in the spine

Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind out-of-town trip for a dinner with my friend R. and our mutual friend W., a reunion of sorts: it was the first time in nearly a decade that we’d all seen each other at once. There was much catching-up and exclamations of "You look exactly the same!" and "I can’t believe we’re all sitting at the same table again!" The dinner was fantastic, too (ceviche with squid is my new favorite thing ever). Incorrigible English major that I am, I thought of what Virginia Woolf called "the lamp in the spine" in A Room of One’s Own: "and thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow." I thought of it because back in our student days, one of our favorite eateries had a line from the same chapter — "One cannot think
well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" — painted on the wall. Did they remember, I asked. They did.

At the end of the evening W. said she thought we had all ended up happier than we used to be, and I was a little startled to realize she was right. This is a sad time of year for me; it was just over a year ago that I lost my father, and I have a feeling that early May is never going to be the same. And yet, and yet. To sit across from people you’ve known for years, laughing over the simple fact of being there together, lighting the lamp in the spine with good food and better company, is a reminder that some things continue — that, whatever happens, there will be more moments like this. Before we dispersed, we promised each other that we’d all come back and do the same thing again. And that, in itself, is enough to keep the lamp lit.

Personal anthology: The Pearl-poet

This passage on the turning of the seasons and the progress of time from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been on my mind of late. (Someone in my corner of the blogosphere posted it a while back, but I can’t remember who.) It’s quite long, so I’m ellipsizing a bit:

A year soon runs its length and never returns the same,
And the end seldom seems to belong to the beginning.
So this Christmas was over then, and the last of the year followed it,
And the seasons went in by turn one after the other.
After Christmas came crabbèd Lent
That chastises the flesh with fish and plainer food.
But then the weather of the world makes war on winter,
Cold cringes downward, clouds lift,
The shining rain comes down in warm showers,
Falls on the fair meadow, flowers appear there,
Both the open land and the groves are in green garments …
Then comes the season of summer with the soft winds,
When Zephyrus breathes gently on the seeds and grasses.
Happy is the green leaf that grows out of that time
When the wet of the dew drips from the leaves
Before the blissful radiance of the bright sun.
But then comes harvest time to hearten them,
Warning them to ripen well before winter.
It brings drought until the dust rises,
Flying up high off the face of the field,
A fierce wind wrestles with the sun in the heavens,
The leaves fly from the lime tree and light on the ground,
And the grass is all withered that before was green.
Then all that was growing at first ripens and decays,
And thus in many yesterdays the year passes
And winter comes back again as the world would have it,
          in the way of things,
     Until the Michaelmas moon
     When first the days feel wintry
     And Gawain is reminded then
     Of his dread journey.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. W.S. Merwin [Knopf, 2002], Part 2)

I’m liking this translation so far; I think it’ll be my weekend reading. If you want to see the original Middle English, UVa has the text edited by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Book wheels

Earlier today I was trying to remember the source of a 16th-century
engraving of a reading machine — a giant wheel that could hold
multiple books at once and allow a reader to rotate from one book to
another. I’d seen it in multiple places (reproduced in one of the
essays in The Renaissance Computer, for one), but I couldn’t remember
who made the image in the first place. But a quick check of Google
Images reminded me that it’s an illustration from Agostino Ramelli’s Le
diverse et artificiose machine
, a 1588 treatise on mechanical
engineering. Another spin through Google led me to this exhibit, from the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, which I’d love to visit someday when I’ve gotten my potential dissertation-meets-library-science research project off the ground.

Most of the machines pictured in this book are for lifting and dragging things (Ronald Brashear’s introductory essay
for the Dibner Library exhibit lists "110 Water-raising machines, 21 Grain
mills, 4 Other mills, 10 Cranes, 7 Machines for dragging large
objects" among the illustrations — though there are also "4 Fountains and artificial bird-calls"). There’s only the one reading
machine. The book wheel has caught a lot of people’s attention, though;
witness this post at Earmarks in Early Modern Culture,
a blog I didn’t know about before today, but am looking forward to
reading more of. Kristine at Earmarks notes the
similarities between Ramelli’s book wheel and hypertext, while drawing
another connection with digital paper.

Personally — maybe because I
have so many Firefox tabs open as I write this — I think of tabbed web
browsing as one of the modern counterparts of the book wheel. Who says
multitasking is an invention of the 20th century? Thomas Jefferson, at least, wouldn’t have thought so. He invented a book wheel of his own — more of a book lazy-susan, actually (not to mention being an early adopter of the hipster PDA).

The Smithsonian’s other online exhibits are also worth checking out. I’m going to be in DC at the end of the month on a whirlwind weekend operagoing trip (Clemenza di Tito, hooray!). I may drag my travel companion to the Smithsonian when we’re not basking in Mozartian glory.

Mmm, syllabub

And while I’m on the subject of food: a friend pointed out Historic Food, a fascinating site about British cooking from the late Middle Ages to the Victorian era. The author gives courses on historically accurate cookery; the site has pictures of forgotten, astonishing culinary tools (my current favorite is the confectioner’s mould to make a sugar four-poster bed). And there are recipes. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making syllabubs. Or conserve of roses. Or asparagus-shaped ice cream (okay, maybe not). And look at the wonderfully weird jellies! And the tabletop sugar architecture! I feel like throwing a Henry VIII dinner party now.