snapshots from recently
Apr. 15th, 2009 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaks-- sitting by the side of Mass. Ave. in a patch of sun, peeling and eating the hardboiled egg they gave me on the way out of church, and watching the Easter Zombies shamble by. I know, I know, the organizers insist every year that it is total coincidence that the Zombie March is on Easter Sunday and that no relationship should be inferred, but watching them lurch and stumble and moan in the strong spring light, fake blood and greasepaint smeared liberally over everything within reach, well, I take my symbols of renewal where I find them.
-- after the third or fourth time in a week that B. goes to the ramen place, the owner stops taking his order and just puts it down on the table in front of him along with the water. The ramen guy is always very nice to me considering I never order anything. I think about telling him that B. comes halfway around the world for the ramen here. It is after all pretty much true.
-- on the train B. is writing out, or maybe drawing out (he isn't comfortable with it yet) the Urdu alphabet on the back of an envelope. I notice that despite the fact that he has to concentrate on it, and the letter shapes are all totally different from the English ones, it is recognizably his handwriting. I mean that there is a quality about it, something about the line weight or something, that would cause me to identify it as his in a lineup. I noticed this with people back when I took Japanese too; also Greek. I don't know if this is a universal, but there is definitely something that transfers.
-- despite the fact that I have now actually memorized my part in it, I still get 'Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis' mixed up in my head with 'Though Amaryllis Dance In Green'. The difficulty with this is that when I try to sort them out internally the entire mass of pastorale rushes in on me, and sits there, with a thud, and all I can do is wonder whether Clorinda and Chloris are actually meant to be each other, and where Camilla comes into it, and who decided Thyrsus was a reasonable name for a shepherd, and I entirely blame Ted, who directs the Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir, for transplanting the entirety of The Triumphs of Oriana into the back of my brain despite the fact that really in many ways I cannot imagine a more terrifyingly twee collection of music. If you don't know The Triumphs of Oriana, well, it was commissioned for Elizabeth I in her old age, and constitutes a great many mostly minor pieces by a great many mostly major composers who were using pastoral motifs, as nymphs, shepherds, sheep, hills, dales, etc. to praise the queen's beauty, majesty, virginity, grace, wisdom, etc. etc. etc.. All of the sheep are remarkably fluffy and all male shepherds play panpipes. The piece in the thing I like best is probably 'Thyrsus, Sleepest Thou?', in which Melibaeus, who is trying to wake up Thyrsus, gets to belie his habitual epithetic adjective of 'gentle' by having the entire bass section bellow into Thyrsus' ear. I suppose it is the time of year for this sort of thing.
-- am reading (or trying to) the letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccoli. Poggio and Niccolo were early Renaissance humanists; Poggio, being attached to the papal government, had the ability to go around Europe rooting through old monastery libraries for moldering classical manuscripts, and is directly responsible for the Renaissance and our later posterity having Lucretius, parts of Tacitus and Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, and a great many other things. Niccolo had probably the best library in Europe and one of the great libraries of history. They corresponded for more than twenty years. Unfortunately my primary impression so far is that Poggio is an unmitigated whiner. Also, we simply don't name people things like Poggio Bracciolini anymore, especially when you consider that the Latin is Poggius.
-- after the third or fourth time in a week that B. goes to the ramen place, the owner stops taking his order and just puts it down on the table in front of him along with the water. The ramen guy is always very nice to me considering I never order anything. I think about telling him that B. comes halfway around the world for the ramen here. It is after all pretty much true.
-- on the train B. is writing out, or maybe drawing out (he isn't comfortable with it yet) the Urdu alphabet on the back of an envelope. I notice that despite the fact that he has to concentrate on it, and the letter shapes are all totally different from the English ones, it is recognizably his handwriting. I mean that there is a quality about it, something about the line weight or something, that would cause me to identify it as his in a lineup. I noticed this with people back when I took Japanese too; also Greek. I don't know if this is a universal, but there is definitely something that transfers.
-- despite the fact that I have now actually memorized my part in it, I still get 'Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis' mixed up in my head with 'Though Amaryllis Dance In Green'. The difficulty with this is that when I try to sort them out internally the entire mass of pastorale rushes in on me, and sits there, with a thud, and all I can do is wonder whether Clorinda and Chloris are actually meant to be each other, and where Camilla comes into it, and who decided Thyrsus was a reasonable name for a shepherd, and I entirely blame Ted, who directs the Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir, for transplanting the entirety of The Triumphs of Oriana into the back of my brain despite the fact that really in many ways I cannot imagine a more terrifyingly twee collection of music. If you don't know The Triumphs of Oriana, well, it was commissioned for Elizabeth I in her old age, and constitutes a great many mostly minor pieces by a great many mostly major composers who were using pastoral motifs, as nymphs, shepherds, sheep, hills, dales, etc. to praise the queen's beauty, majesty, virginity, grace, wisdom, etc. etc. etc.. All of the sheep are remarkably fluffy and all male shepherds play panpipes. The piece in the thing I like best is probably 'Thyrsus, Sleepest Thou?', in which Melibaeus, who is trying to wake up Thyrsus, gets to belie his habitual epithetic adjective of 'gentle' by having the entire bass section bellow into Thyrsus' ear. I suppose it is the time of year for this sort of thing.
-- am reading (or trying to) the letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccoli. Poggio and Niccolo were early Renaissance humanists; Poggio, being attached to the papal government, had the ability to go around Europe rooting through old monastery libraries for moldering classical manuscripts, and is directly responsible for the Renaissance and our later posterity having Lucretius, parts of Tacitus and Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, and a great many other things. Niccolo had probably the best library in Europe and one of the great libraries of history. They corresponded for more than twenty years. Unfortunately my primary impression so far is that Poggio is an unmitigated whiner. Also, we simply don't name people things like Poggio Bracciolini anymore, especially when you consider that the Latin is Poggius.
