whoops this month is terrifying

It is May Day, and I feel like yelling MAYDAY, MAYDAY.

...I may be slightly busy.

Viva is set, as previously stated, and my friends are doing me the huge favour of running a mock viva a week or so beforehand so I can get used to answering questions and not looking like a fool in the process. They are great, and are reading so much of my rambling, it's amazing.

I'm also doing a lunchtime recital for the Music Society, which happened sort of on a whim, but I'm hoping it'll garner some donations to the choir, and I'll get to play on a full concert grand, which is thrilling. Liszt and Debussy, a hard but familiar programme, and I'm sort of terrified, but also excited. Should be fun! Provided I don't crash and burn.

I have also landed a short research assistantship which will involve building a website and digitising the archives of an H.G. Wells journal, which is rad. I am going to be super rusty at web design, though, so it will also be a bit of an adventure. I have to get in contact with the professor I'm working with to see when I start, but it will likely be soon.

And finally, conference. I'm still not done with my paper, but it's almost there. It's been really difficult trying to pare down all of the various interconnected thoughts I have on the topic into something both coherent and succinct, and cutting and pasting from my thesis was really not helpful in that regard. Hopefully I will finish it tonight.

In sum, I am running on adrenaline and a multitasking haze for the foreseeable future. I'm super glad I took some time off before all this.

I have discovered pdfs of two volumes of collected contralto pieces published in 1900, copyright free, ranging from arias to Scottish airs. Overall, it's about 400 pages of music that's in my vocal range.

Guess what I'll being doing when not editing??

Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

So I went to London for a couple of days to take a break from editing, and it was fabulous! I stayed with my friend Marie, who is lovely and very connected with the cultural scene of London, which I benefited from immensely. When I first arrived in the evening, she took me to see some avant garde immersion theatre by the Arbonauts, which was based on Italo Calvino's 1957 fantasy novel, The Baron in the Trees. It was very strange, and I definitely didn't even begin to understand it until I went and googled the novel later, but it was very fun nonetheless, with some gorgeous music and minimalist set pieces, which were all set up in Nunhead Cemetery. I highly recommend people go and see the cemetery itself, by the way, as it's a bit outside the centre of London, and incredibly beautiful, affording a fantastic view of the city. The show was performed as the sun set, so that it started out outside while it was light out, and ended inside the roofless central chapel lit by candlelight as the sky went dark. Even if the content of the performance was fairly opaque, the aesthetic was very effective.

The following morning, we went and saw the 'David Bowie Is...' exhibition at the V&A, aka my favourite museum of all time, and it was also fabulous--full of amazing stage costumes and massive video installations, and lots of really excellent commentary on Bowie as a cultural critic and his interactions with surrealism and various other artists and art movements.

(Did I manage to relate it to my thesis? Of course I did. Commentary on the space age and the isolation of the modern condition! Machine culture! It was rad.)

Also, I bought a t-shirt that says 'David Bowie is Watching You' on the back, because of reasons.

After that, we went and grabbed sushi for lunch on the south bank, and as we had some hours free before I had to catch my train back to Durham, we headed over to the Tate Modern. Marie has a membership, which meant I actually got to look around the temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collections, which was great fun! Some really interesting international artists, including an installation which was pretty much an interactive museum inside the museum--various rooms of exhibitions, plus several 'classrooms' with activities for children, like building blocks and a playable piano. As a result, Marie and I built an awesome fort, and then waited out a mob of Japanese students for a chance to play the piano.

And that's how I ended up playing Rachmaninoff at the Tate on a Friday afternoon. For a 24-hour trip, I'd say it was a resounding success.

Stuff and Things

So I've decided to give myself a proper challenge in my quest to learn Chopin preludes and after fiddling about with a few short and sweet ones (nos. 3, 11, and 13) I have decided to learn #24, and it is going to be fun and also terrible, because oh god giant intervals and cascading chromatic thirds. I am finding that pieces that are 5 pages or less are really suiting me right now, because it means I can do really close work on a few measures quite a lot without getting impatient and wanting to just know the whole thing all at once. Just right for my practice habits, which basically happen whenever I have something on the stove, or the kettle is on, or I am frustrated with whatever else I am working on.

I definitely got a little obsessed today though, and spent a good few hours hashing out the first page or so of #24 in between yelling at the piano, and at my hands, and at various performers on YouTube who made it look easy (I'm looking at you, Pollini. Grr.). But like I said, it's fun! I haven't gone for something properly melodramatic in a while. It's a great piece for showing off. I'm determined to make it work. Whether it actually does, will of course remain to be seen.

In other news, I have been felled by a head cold this past week, which has made working on my chapter (and almost everything else) nigh impossible because the sentences I string together tend not to make too much sense when my entire skull feels stuffed full of cotton wool. This was highly inconvenient, as it was the last week of term, which mean that I had a great many things to do, and many of them were left until the very last minute as a result. All of the truly time-sensitive ones did get done, in between frequent naps, but as I am now on the mend, I must get cracking on everything that's left over. At least I will have the library at my disposal now that all the undergrads have gone home for the holidays.

It must be said that I am really enjoying learning stuff about F.R. Leavis for my last chapter because he was crotchety and frustrating and histrionic, and apparently I like that in authors I study who are now dead (see also: Carlyle). No doubt I would find him endlessly aggravating in real life, but on the page and safely in the past, fascinating and hilarious! Truly, he had all the subtlety of Fox News, it's pretty funny.

That's all the news for now; we've had utterly ridiculous weather that can't decide between snowstorms and sunny clear skies, often switching off between the two every half hour, and it is at best aggravating. I demand spring to spring, on the double. Maybe then I'd be more inclined to bring my work out to the library every day.

My feet will never be cold again!

I have acquired giant woolly fuzzy slipper booties that make me look like a wayward yeti. They are comical, but they are also incredibly warm, so no regrets!

I'm currently at work on my last chapter, having gotten leave from my supervisor to just go ahead and work from my finished outline. It's going all right so far, though I still have to do a bit more reading to flesh out the whole thing; mostly I'm just having trouble psychologically accepting that it is in fact the last chapter. Obviously I'll still have lots more to do after it's done, but still--last chapter! Weird.

In other news, this past weekend I participated in a research forum which was created to encourage collaboration between the hill colleges, aka the colleges that aren't in the centre of Durham, including the one I technically belong to, St. Aidan's. It was a fun day; the poster I made was given an honourable mention, there was free food and drink, and I got to listen to a bunch of talks from people in all sorts of different disciplines, everything from organometallic chemistry to Khachaturian. I still don't understand a thing about the former, sadly, but as a result of the latter, I'm back on my Soviet composer kick.

This has inevitably led to a new playlist in my iTunes entitled, "In Soviet Russia, Music Plays You," because I'm hilarious.

Lastly, I have the week off from teaching, so I'm using it to do my aforementioned extra reading, and also to toodle around on the piano a bit. I've decided to learn some more Chopin preludes to work a bit on my technique. Should be fun!

A lot of singing, and a very boring desert island.

I had a pretty awesome though exhausting Sunday, which began and ended with choir, and was filled in the middle with cramming as much knowledge about Robinson Crusoe into my brain as possible so that I don't make a complete fool of myself in front of my students.

I accidentally forced myself into getting a fair amount of cardio because part of the way over to St. Chad's at nine in the morning I realized that I had forgotten my robes and had to go back and this was on a day when our director particularly wanted us all to be on time because another choir was visiting to sing with us. So I ran (in a skirt and heels, mind you) back to the house and then back into town and just managed to slide in before the proverbial bell, but was a damp mess due to both sweat and the light rain. But then the rehearsal and service were fine, and the visiting choir were very nice, and afterwards there were eclairs. Tea and cake, I'm telling you!

After window shopping in town with a couple of other choir people, I then parked myself in the library for the entirety of the afternoon to read nearly the entirety of Robinson Crusoe, because I have to teach it in the beginning of November, and promised to email guiding questions to my students by this Tuesday. Man, I'm sorry, I know I'm an English student, but this book is boring. Incredibly important, and often quite interesting from a developmental standpoint, but boring. There is a reason I have avoided most of the first half of the 18th century. I adored, on the other hand, the essay on it by Virginia Woolf. Here's an excerpt:

It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective. For this reason he thwarts us and flouts us at every turn...Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read, and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. (From The Second Common Reader, copyright, 1932, by Harcourt & Company and renewed 1960,  by Leonard Woolf, pp. 50-58.)

It's a brilliant essay, and accurately describes, I think, the average modern reader's reaction (it certainly did mine). The novel is very much an experiment in narrative, and while occasionally exciting--there are battles and wild animals and of course, a lot of shipwrecks--it is also told from the point of view of the lowest common denominator of what makes a sensible man. There is, as another critic pointed out, nothing to make Crusoe at all distinguishable from anyone else--he has a certain amount of intelligence and resourcefulness, but no particular taste or preference for anything beyond what is most useful to him, and his emotions are more akin to physical ailments than feelings.

And yet at the time of its publishing, it was galvanizing because it was fiction, but it achieved verisimilitude. It was not a true story, but the sheer fact of Crusoe's (and Defoe's) unimpressed, undramatic style of narrative made it ring more truthfully than was expected of a fictional tale. One would not expect Crusoe to lie or to exaggerate, because he, as a character, lacked the personality or creativity to do so. It's a strange but fascinating trick, and one which his contemporaries were enthralled by.

I was not enthralled, though I was interested from the historical point of view. Which I suppose is enough to be going on with. I have definitely enjoyed looking at the critical articles around it--getting the Norton edition was a good choice.

Getting back to Sunday, I emerged from the library ravenous roughly six hours later and wolfed down a sandwich before heading over to the cathedral, where we did another small performance which was mostly interesting not because of what we were doing, but what was going on around us: It was sort of like an open house for the university's Christian Council, so there was a massive candlelight procession up from the center of town into the cathedral, which we watched as we sat in the stalls with all of the lights off listening to booming organ music and looking around at just how creepy and cool the spires and carvings were by moonlight. Then someone gave the processors a tour of the cathedral by lighting up different parts of it in isolation to describe what order it was all constructed in. Then finally they turned most of the lights on, and we sang some pieces in front of a thousand-odd people who were all milling around and taking pictures and gawping. It was bizarre.

After that I got home around ten and pretty much collapsed into bed for the evening.

But yeah, singing in the cathedral is badass. I'll definitely be looking forward to doing it again. And in the meantime I have to get back into the rhythm of literary analysis, because I am clearly rusty after having spent all of my days doing historiography and stuff. Good times!

I am in the Rachmaninov groove.

Well, after a very dysfunctional Christmas in which my visa came three days late, causing me to nearly give myself an ulcer, and then I caught my third case of the flu this season, things seem to be getting back to normal. I have one last thing to do with this frigging thesis chapter, and then I can print it and send my computer off to be rehabilitated. Oy.

And if that can happen by the end of tomorrow, then I won't have to worry about it when Maggie and her boyfriend and I all go up to Edinburgh for the ridiculous New Year's street fair. It's going to be fun times! I'm going to wear fifty sweaters.

In other news...guys, my Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux are going to be so badass! The first one's nearly up to tempo, the second one's finished completely, and I've started learning the third one, which is turning out not as hard as I was expecting it to be. I mean, it's still hard, and he still expects me to have hands the size of small dinosaurs, but I'm totally going to finish these pieces by spring. They are fun. Fun and dark and very, very Russian. I approve!

I've noticed that good things are happening to my form too. I'm having a much easier time relaxing my hands and being fast without being tense. I'm playing a bit more the way Tom Sauer wanted me to, I think. In any case, it's definitely paying off in terms of retaining stamina through fast passages full of large intervals and such which is, you know, useful with Rachmaninov.

And after that, I will actually finish bringing Ravel's Sonatine back. I started to a while ago and then stopped halfway through. And then I shall have a nice working repertoire. Ooo, and also that Schubert sonata from forever ago! I found the sheet music to that on my hard drive for some reason and now I want to relearn that. So many good pieces! They are putting me in a good mood.

Okay, H.G. Wells. You and I have a date with Marx.

I really like dramatic titling.

I have officially declared my dissertation title! It shall be called:

'Demons of Industry: Machines as Monster and Metaphor in the Victorian Gothic'

Exciting, yes? Hopefully the content will be as exciting as the title. We shall see. I'm going to try to get another 2000 words done before Venice happens, because then I'll be a little less than a third of the way through, and that would be extremely excellent.

The last of my unassessed work has been turned in, so I'm feeling a little burned out at the moment--writing an essay a week for three weeks in a row is tiring, so I'm glad it's over. On the flip side though, I'm reading War of the Worlds for Imperial Masculinities this week, and it is lots of fun! I think I'm going to write my final essay for that course on it and Sherlock Holmes, as a sort of compare/contrast piece about detection and imperialism. It will be fun times, hopefully. I also read Byron for Monday's seminar, and while I definitely enjoyed it he is very dense, and I am bad at reading Romantic poetry, so it was a bit of a struggle. He was at least significantly more accessible than Blake, for which I am thankful.

On the application front, I have one more scholarship form to fill out, and then I am done. It will be glorious. It will probably be another few weeks before I start getting any responses back, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.

And now, I'm off to a piano lesson. The Ballade is getting better! I'm amazed. Yay for having technical skills actually start to catch up with my interpretive skills. Took me long enough.

Woo Further Music Shenanigans

Another lesson with Georgia today, and there is much music afoot! Rachmaninov went very well, and we're starting work on the Sonatine, which needs lots of articulation and technical rehashing. Georgia also suggested (without prompting or knowledge of my previous repertoire) that I try the first Chopin Ballade! This is the first time it's actually been suggested to me that I play it, rather than my requesting hopefully with little chance of actually getting it up to performance level. So I'm trying it again--I feel like at this point I have a score to settle with it (pun not intended). I read through it this afternoon, and it's actually uncanny how much muscle memory I have of it, so we'll see how that goes. I may also try the Op. 26 #1 Polonaise, which Georgia also suggested, and if I get the chance I may round out the Rachmaninov pieces with the extremely fun Etude-Tableaux Op. 33 #6, which is sort of insane but great and I may die because it is crazy fast. So between old stuff and new stuff, there's more than enough to keep my on my toes, that is for sure! I may be slightly insane to be trying so many things at once, but it keeps me engaged.

Georgia actually paid me a lovely compliment by noting that I was capable of earning a diploma in music performance if I put in the time. Which I sort of knew, but considering my extremely sporadic practicing habits, it would probably take a small miracle for something like that to actually happen. But hey, at least its something I could look into if this PhD thing falls down around my ears. I've been putting in more hours in the practice rooms recently, so maybe there really is still room for growth on this front. My hands feel fit! Also slightly sore. I blame Chopin, and upright pianos with overly enthusiastic sound dampeners. It was impossible to get a proper fortissimo out of the Yamaha I was working on today. Oh well.

Okay, reading Allan Quatermain now.

Piano Win!

I have piano lessons! After much email tag among various members of the music department, I was finally able to get a hold of a PhD student named Georgia, who teaches piano in addition to working on her degree in musicology. I just met with her this morning, and she liked my playing (despite it being quite crappy--not only have I not touched a piano in at least six weeks, but the piano at our disposal was a very temperamental upright with very little volume control), and said she would be happy to give me lessons. She's going to email the department to see about getting me access to the practice rooms. Even if that fails, she indicated that since she's in the building working all the time anyway, she can let me in secretly. It was a good meeting, and she seems very nice, so I'll be happy to work with her. Exciting! Finally!

This weekend was quite nice as well. I went into town with Marta a couple times, and then was able to hang out with Erin back at their flat. We're getting revved up about our Thanksgiving plans, which we're holding on the 1st of November. I have to make an epic trip to Morrison's to get all of the baking stuff I need, but with some planning I may be able to go with a group, and then we can split the price of a taxi to get back. Anyway, it will be fun times.

Also, on Sunday Erin and I got our craft on and made picture frames through one of the little bonding sessions the union holds for the students, which was both random and fun. Kind of an activity for 5-year-olds, including poster paint and ridiculous feathers, but we met some cool people, and managed to be slightly more sophisticated in our designs than children. In a couple of weeks, we're going to paint mugs too!

I am secretly still seven. But with better motor skills.

And now I must chug coffee before seminar and finish A Tale of Two Cities, which I'm quite enjoying. I don't know why all high schools insist on students reading Great Expectations first, because that is by far my least favorite Dickens novel so far. Maybe it's the whole bildungsroman thing.

Incidentally, the reason I'm now finishing Dickens today instead of yesterday is that I got distracted by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you haven't heard of it, it is literally Jane Austen's novel word for word (she's credited as the co-author), except that in addition to dealing with Regency issues of class, society, and romance, the Bennets must also deal with the fact that England has been overrun with the walking dead. One would think the device of zombies would get old after the first hundred pages, but it really doesn't. Mostly because not only are there zombies, but also ninjas. Also, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy bond over beheading zombies with katanas. It's like if Quentin Tarantino decided to direct a Merchant Ivory film. Gold. Pure, ridiculous gold.

So yeah, a very entertaining few days, in many different ways.

Orientation: Part Une

Today was the first half of orientation, which meant actual human interaction! I've so far met two other Americans, a Canadian, a German, a great many Chinese students, and one very friendly girl from Thailand named Boboo, who I ended up running errands with after the presentations were over. We managed to not get lost in the city center, picked up a bunch of random supplies for our respective rooms, and scoped out a grocery store much closer to campus, so it was an all-around successful excursion. There were two Lebanese students tagging along with us to begin with, as well as one of the Americans and the Canadian, but they finished their shopping before us, and went off on their own. Still, I managed to get some conversation in with them.

Comparing notes on driving, drinking age, and other universal details of life was fascinating. It's great to hear about the impressions America gives to the rest of the world--one of the Americans I talked to related to me that she had been asked whether all Americans drove like "The Fast and the Furious", which is both hilarious and disturbing. A second-year Indian student handing out fliers inquired of me whether we were far more "emotional" than the Brits. And Boboo had a particularly interesting impression from her excursion to Ohio--she was taken to church every Sunday by her host family, even while they assured her repeatedly that she wasn't obliged to do so. I may have ranted a bit about how divided in attitudes different parts of the States are in response. She luckily didn't seem to mind. She had notes to compare of her own, mainly about many of the South Asian countries, whose histories she's actually getting her master's in. I'm looking forward to talking to her again.

All that said, I'm also looking forward to actually meeting British people, of whom I've encountered very few except in passing. I managed to find out so far that my one flatmate is Nigerian, and awesome from what I've seen of her, but the rest have yet to move in. I'm hoping they're Brits, so we can ask stupid cultural questions and get a slightly more local flavor in the flat as well. Maybe they'll even be more on the arts-side of things, since most of the foreign students tend towards the sciences and social sciences. I could use a few less askance looks when I tell people my concentration!

In less fortunate news, I've been informed that practice rooms in the music department are only available to music students proper, so I'm now devising plans to circumvent such restrictions. There's one practice room in the Student Union, but that will likely be crowded. I think my best bet will be joining a choir, getting lessons, or joining an ensemble who have enough clout to talk the department into giving me access. There's an activity fair next week that will include such groups, hopefully, so I'll definitely be there. I'm always surprised when this happens, but I itch to practice. Go figure.

Tomorrow means more orientation, followed by possibly some decorating so that I can actually prop my door open with pride. Hello, poster sale! And hopefully, hello more friends! I am not quite as socially awkward as I feared.