Household Opera

The five non-library blogs meme

Rachel Singer Gordon at The Liminal Librarian has a meme for library bloggers: Post five non-library blogs that you read. I'll bite! Here are mine:

Apartment Therapy: I visit AT at intervals when I'm feeling the need for home-decoration wish-fulfillment, voyeuristic gawking at other people's apartments, or advice on finding furniture. Or when I just want to say "Ooh. Pretty."

dykestowatchoutfor.com: Alison Bechdel's blog, with her fabulous cartoons. I started reading Dykes to Watch Out For, the comic strip, at least a decade ago, and I hope I'll still be reading it years hence.

if:book: The blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Lots of really interesting observations about textuality in the digital age.

indexed: I've mentioned it before, but I can't resist mentioning it again. Life explained through graphs, charts, and Venn diagrams, all hand-drawn on 3x5 index cards. Come for the hilarity, stay for the strange allure of data visualization.

strange maps: A coworker introduced me to this blog, and I'm so glad she did. It's entirely devoted to (as the title suggests) out-of-the-ordinary maps. I love maps, and these are fascinating.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Well, this is encouraging:

I am: James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) In the 1970s she was perhaps the most memorable, and one of the most popular, short story writers.  Her real life was as fantastic as her fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I suspect that a big factor in my getting this result was the fact that, for the question "Are you a total dork with the opposite sex?", the answer I picked was "I am the opposite sex." (What can I say? I like travesti.)

(Via PZ Myers, who's also James Tiptree, Jr.)

Nine questions about poetry

I stole this from Jane Dark. How could I possibly resist a poetry survey?

1. The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to was...

I don't remember what poem it was, but I have a vague early memory of trying to rearrange the words in a nursery rhyme, and being perplexed when it didn't sound as good with the words in a different order. I have much clearer early memories of Eugene Field's "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," which was in a picture book I had (I can still picture the illustration), and of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky."

2. I was forced to memorize (name of poem) in school and........

I didn't have to memorize any poems in school until the year my mother (then in grad school) was in a semester-abroad program, and we spent half of my third-grade year in Florence. Going to a school where nobody spoke English was in some ways traumatic, but one of the things I liked about it was they had us memorize poems. The one I can still recite is a short poem about snow:

Sai tu cosa sia, bambino,
Quel candido dono che trovi
Sui campi, sui tetti, sui rovi,
Svegliandoti un certo mattino?
Battendo le mani, tu dici,
"Che bella!" (quando in casa c'è il fuoco),
E subito pensi ad un gioco,
Un gioco con tutti gli amici.

[Do you know what it is, child, this white gift you find on the fields, on the roofs, on the brambles, waking you up on a certain morning? Clapping your hands, you say "How beautiful!" (as long as there's a fire in the fireplace). And immediately you think of a game to play, a game with all of your friends.]

I don't know who wrote it. I've Googled for it many times and never found it.

3. I read/don't read poetry because....

Because I want to be surprised; because I like the frisson along the spine that poetry seems to produce much more than prose does; because I like having my thought patterns pushed in unexpected directions; because I enjoy both the process of figuring out how a poem works and the not-yet-articulate understanding that sometimes runs far ahead of that process.

4. A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is .......

I change favorites constantly, but off the top of my head, I'd say John Ashbery's "Just Walking Around," or Wallace Stevens' "The Candle a Saint," or any of Andrew Marvell's Mower poems but especially "The Mower to the Glo-Worms" and "The Mower's Song." Or Susan Stewart's "The Forest." Or George Herbert's "The Flower." Or Elizabeth Bishop's "Insomnia" or "Sestina." The list could go on indefinitely.

4.5: There are some poets/poems that I don't like or don't understand...

Sharon Olds, in general, and poets like her. I'm not really into confessionality. Billy Collins I occasionally like, but more often his poems leave me with no inclination to reread them.

5. I write poetry, but...

I'm slow to write, because I seem to need one good (or at least halfway-decent) line to start with, and that doesn't always happen. I sometimes have the frustrating experience of a good idea for a poem that never turns into a poem because it won't precipitate into words.

6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature.....

Poetry seems a lot closer to music than any other genre. Which is part of why it interests me so much, I suspect.

7. I find poetry...

... indispensable, and everywhere.

8. The last time I heard poetry...

A friend and I were reciting bits of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" to each other: "Now no matter, child, the name, / Sorrow's springs are the same; / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for."

9. I think poetry is...

... about as close as we can get to reading someone else's mind short of actual ESP-type ability.

Memetracking for science!

I've wondered before about how one might measure the spread of memes across blogland, and now Scott Eric Kaufman is doing exactly that in preparation for a panel on academic blogging at the MLA. Here's the post explaining his project in full; here's the basic explanation:

Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them.  Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

For my talk at the MLA, I'd prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers. ... Since I lack foresight, I'm stuck announcing my intentions and begging participation.

So here's my own contribution, since I'm always happy to supply a data point or two, and the prospect of the blogger panel at the MLA fills my heart with joy. Please consider doing the same if you've got a blog and would like to help with the project.

And speaking of the MLA convention: it's right here in Philadelphia, which means I don't have to pay for a hotel room, and there are people I want to reconnect with and panels I actually want to attend (the blogger one for sure, but also a bunch of poetry-related ones). So I'm going. Anyone else out there reading this who's also planning on being there?

Peeved

Via Clancy, a "pet peeves" meme. And since an airing of one's pet peeves is always therapeutic on a hot day in the dead of summer, I'm passing it along.

1. Grammatical pet peeve: I don't have all that many of them, but "flaunt"/"flout" misuse bugs me.

2. Household pet peeve: People who don't remove their hair from the hair trap in the shower. I once had an apartment-mate who did this, and it grossed me out every time.

3. Arts & entertainment pet peeve: The way every movie or TV show with an interesting female lead and an interesting male lead seems to go for the "will they or won't they?" romance plot sooner or later. I get peeved at both the heteronormativity and the predictability. (Also: Commercials before movies. Previews I like; advertising for Ray-Bans or Coke or whatever, I most emphatically don't.)

4. Liturgical pet peeve: I'm not a churchgoer, so N/A, I suppose. But I'm perpetually irked by people who selectively quote a tiny handful of Bible verses that support their favorite prejudices, while apparently ignoring the whole rest of the Bible.

5. Wild card: People who stand too close when they talk to me. (As W.H. Auden said of his personal space: "Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes / I beckon you to fraternize, / Beware of rudely crossing it: / I have no gun, but I can spit.") People who punctuate their online discourse with "LOL!" And I've already blogged about waiters who ask "Are you still working on that?"

Bonus. Things I do that become other people's pet peeves: The same apartment-mate who left hair in the shower drain went ballistic if anyone left a newspaper sitting on the dining room table for longer than a day, which I tend to do if left to my own devices. I still think mine was the lesser crime, though.

The pre-1800 women writers meme

Bardiac has started a Really dead women writers meme, aiming to put some pre-1800 women writers into an already-circulating list, and I can't resist. Here's her description:

I'll put in five women writers. If you're interested, pick up the list, add five more of your favorites, and drop me a line at Bardiacblogger at yahoo dot com to check your site. With even a few contributors, we'll get a great meme with fewer of my idiosyncracies than if I do it myself. (And yes, it will probably end up Euro-centered, but I'd love to learn more about non-Euro earlier women writers, too, so add them in, please!)

Here's Bardiac's list:

Behn, Aphra - Oroonoko
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) - The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Locke, Anne (aka Ane Lok, etc) - A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France - The Lais of Marie de France

And here are my contributions:

Bradstreet, Anne: collected poems
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe
Lanyer, Aemilia: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania

(The ones in bold are the ones I've read. Also kind of Eurocentric, but Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana at least lived across the Atlantic.)

Spreading the love

Found via Bardiac:

If there is someone on your blogroll who makes your world a better place just because that person exists and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence on your blog.

(Explains Bardiac: Copy the sentence without naming which bloggers you're talking about. I can say this about multiple bloggers, as a matter of fact. Thanks, y'all!)

Literary speed dating!

Jane Dark of Evensong Martini Club points to, and responds to, the best meme ever: if you were going to a literary speed dating evening, what three books would you bring?

It's the sort of question that immediately provokes second-guessing, because one has to think carefully about the the impression one's books make. Will my Renaissance-era favorite authors make me look way too academic? If I show up with Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, fond as I am of that book, will everyone assume I'm ripping off the idea from "The L Word"? And so on.

And there's the question of how familiar the books are, as well. If books are a common language, then bringing books nobody's heard of would be like trying to converse in Latin.* And bringing books everyone has a copy of would be like limiting the conversation to extremely well-worn catchphrases. I'm suddenly reminded of how LibraryThing calculates the relative obscurity of people's collections. (I feel another LibraryThing post coming on! Maybe later.) On the other hand, unfamiliar books are good for starting conversation, wouldn't you say?

So here's my provisional list: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; Shadow Train by John Ashbery; and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.** I tag anyone and everyone, but especially Bane, Cleis, the dynamic duo of About Last Night, and Clancy.

* Actually, I would date someone who could converse in Latin. Though I know from having tried it that forming complete Latin sentences on the fly is well-nigh impossible, so we would have to switch to English after exhausting our stock of dialogue from Latin for All Occasions.
** Is it cheating to post runners-up? Probably. But I also considered The Faber Book of Opera, A. S. Byatt's Possession, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Too bad I can't just commission these.

Via Sarah of Prima la musica, poi le parole comes an irresistible meme: nominate four currently living, breathing people likely to produce interesting and stageable libretti, and four books which could be re-worked into, again, interesting and stageable libretti. As I commented over at Sarah's blog, I have a hard time coming up with anything as good as her answers (I love, love, love the idea for turning Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" into an opera), but here's my effort.

For the four potential librettists:

1. Anne Carson. Though I don't know if she counts for the purposes of this question, because she's already writing libretti. I heard her read her oratorio, "Lots of Guns," at a reading a couple of years ago (it's in Decreation, her latest book, along with an opera libretto I haven't read yet).
2. Sarah Waters, who has a wonderful way with the kind of grand, unabashed emotion and multilayered melodrama that nineteenth-century novelists and composers liked to wallow in — hence, I think, her fondness for that time period as a setting — and because Tipping the Velvet demonstrates that she can write one hell of a trouser role.
3. Neil Gaiman. Because he's one of those authors who can do anything they like in any genre they like (I mean, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story set in H.P. Lovecraft's universe, for crying out loud!), and because his imagination is the kind that constantly juxtaposes the everyday and the mythic.
4. And, finally, I have to steal one of Sarah's answers and nominate Stephen Fry, because I am a huge fan, and the very thought of him writing a libretto would make me happy.

And for the four books to adapt:

1. I want to see an opera based on a Jorge Luis Borges story. Most of them, I suspect, would be unadaptable (I can't see a libretto coming out of, e.g., "The Aleph" or "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), but I think it could be done with "The Garden of Forking Paths," an old favorite. It's got enough of a plot to cross over to the stage without being static, and the central passage — the reading of the labyrinth-novel and Yu Tsun's sense of the "invisible, intangible swarming" of possible futures — would be fascinating to see translated into words, music, and action. Plus, it's the only Borges story I can think of off the top of my head that has music in it.
   
2. I was going to nominate Henry James's The Aspern Papers, another old favorite, but I see it's already been done before, by a composer I've never heard of. I'm still putting it on the list, though.
   
3. John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, which gets my nomination for "Jacobean play most unjustly neglected by composers and librettists." (Also been done, but not nearly enough.) It's got everything: obsession, murder, corruption in high places, a secret love affair, and over-the-top mad scenes. And the scene with the echo from the Duchess's grave is just begging to be set to some really eerie music.
4. Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Think of the possibilities for the composer to quote the musical idioms of every period between the Elizabethan age and the 20th century. And think of the Orlando/Elizabeth I duets!

Four things

I've been memed! (Ta, wolfangel.)

Four jobs you've had in your life: cat-sitter, editorial assistant, lecturer, clerical underling in hospital chem lab

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Company, My Beautiful Laundrette, Le Rayon Vert, Singin' in the Rain

Four places you've lived: Baltimore, Santa Monica, Florence, Philadelphia

Four TV shows you love to watch: Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (no-longer-running shows still count if they're still being shown on some cable network or other, right?), House, Gilmore Girls

Four places you've been on vacation: Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, New York, Nantucket, Toronto

Four websites you visit daily: Bloglines, Salon, Arts & Letters Daily, del.icio.us

Four of your favorite foods: Capri salad, spicy tuna maki, cheddar scones, chicken biryani

Four places you'd rather be: San Francisco, Shenandoah National Park in the summertime, wandering the quieter corners of New York with my friend R., in a houseboat on the Tiber or the Arno

[Edit: whoops, forgot the four albums and four vehicles. The answer to the "four vehicles you've owned" one is "n/a", though.]

Four albums you couldn't live without: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Handel Arias; The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs; The Pogues, If I Should Fall from Grace with God; Nina Simone, In Concert / I Put a Spell On You

Four people to be tagged: If you're reading this and haven't done it yet, consider yourself tagged.