Rabbit, rabbit!
I spent most of my day at the deCordova with my niece who is nearly three years old. The museum itself was closed for winter hours, so we walked around the sculpture park while I read out all the signs to her and took pictures, a few of which have made it from my mother's camera to my computer.
( In the parking lot, time had stopped. )
I am very happy that Paul Matisse's Musical Fence (1980) is still in place. I remember it fondly from my childhood, along with the interactive musical sculpture in the Kendall T station (Kendall Band (1987). I watched it stop working over the years; I hadn't realized there was a student intiative to restore it. Go, MIT. It's one of the best memories of my subway-riding childhood, the others being the view over the Charles River from the Longfellow Bridge—which I still enjoy—and the time my father took me to see the implosion of the Traveler's Insurance Building in 1988). It took some demonstration by me before Charlotte was comfortable hitting the aluminum pipes with a stick of her own, but after that she wouldn't leave it alone. I explained how shorter pipes produce higher pitches and longer ones lower; I asked her to guess if the next pipe would sound higher or lower based on its height and I think she got the idea. I'm not sure how much she understood about overtones, but she did like the idea that she could stop a struck pipe from humming by placing her hand on the metal. I'd like to take her to Matisse's Charlestown Bells (2000) next. I like that she enjoys art.
I had an unexpected windfall in a used book store earlier this afternoon, while waiting for my mother and Charlotte in Arlington Center; I have been reading the collected prose of Marina Tsvetaeva which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks got me as a birthday gift, so when I saw a bilingual Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, 1777–1992 (ed. Catriona Kelly, 1994) in the Book Rack, it seemed thematically contiguous and I pounced. I am feeling cautiously optimistic about my library. I have moved another four books out of storage into my office to unpack and shelve.
Most of yesterday was spent on writing for Patreon with a surprise publication in the evening, but it was not a bad Halloween. We ran out for candy in the late afternoon and had exactly four trick-or-treaters, but they were the cast of Super Mario Bros. 2 as portrayed by four six-to-nine-year-olds, almost entirely genderswapped and minus Mario, so it was worth it. The pumpkins are extinguished, but still on the front steps. We watched a movie after dark and it was a doozy. We do have kind of a hazardous amount of candy left over.
I spent most of my day at the deCordova with my niece who is nearly three years old. The museum itself was closed for winter hours, so we walked around the sculpture park while I read out all the signs to her and took pictures, a few of which have made it from my mother's camera to my computer.
( In the parking lot, time had stopped. )
I am very happy that Paul Matisse's Musical Fence (1980) is still in place. I remember it fondly from my childhood, along with the interactive musical sculpture in the Kendall T station (Kendall Band (1987). I watched it stop working over the years; I hadn't realized there was a student intiative to restore it. Go, MIT. It's one of the best memories of my subway-riding childhood, the others being the view over the Charles River from the Longfellow Bridge—which I still enjoy—and the time my father took me to see the implosion of the Traveler's Insurance Building in 1988). It took some demonstration by me before Charlotte was comfortable hitting the aluminum pipes with a stick of her own, but after that she wouldn't leave it alone. I explained how shorter pipes produce higher pitches and longer ones lower; I asked her to guess if the next pipe would sound higher or lower based on its height and I think she got the idea. I'm not sure how much she understood about overtones, but she did like the idea that she could stop a struck pipe from humming by placing her hand on the metal. I'd like to take her to Matisse's Charlestown Bells (2000) next. I like that she enjoys art.
I had an unexpected windfall in a used book store earlier this afternoon, while waiting for my mother and Charlotte in Arlington Center; I have been reading the collected prose of Marina Tsvetaeva which
rushthatspeaks got me as a birthday gift, so when I saw a bilingual Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, 1777–1992 (ed. Catriona Kelly, 1994) in the Book Rack, it seemed thematically contiguous and I pounced. I am feeling cautiously optimistic about my library. I have moved another four books out of storage into my office to unpack and shelve.Most of yesterday was spent on writing for Patreon with a surprise publication in the evening, but it was not a bad Halloween. We ran out for candy in the late afternoon and had exactly four trick-or-treaters, but they were the cast of Super Mario Bros. 2 as portrayed by four six-to-nine-year-olds, almost entirely genderswapped and minus Mario, so it was worth it. The pumpkins are extinguished, but still on the front steps. We watched a movie after dark and it was a doozy. We do have kind of a hazardous amount of candy left over.
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