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The attention just encourages her
I have discovered the miracle that is downloading music from iTunes. Mostly this means live versions of Dresden Dolls songs, but I am sure it will soon extend into all sorts of debauchery. But at 99¢ a song, they look so affordable . . .
I am returned from D.C. There was much Indian food. There was much Turkish food. There was much discussion of Greek elegy. It was good. I have two new books by Greg Nagy, Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens and Homer's Text and Language, as well as Elizabeth E. Wein's The Sunbird. And the regional had an inexplicable hour-long layover at Penn Station in New York City, so we spent something like six hours on the train, and as a result my brain's a little like oatmeal at the moment. On the bright side:
My poem "The Laying-Out" (Mythic Delirium #11) is now online, with appropriately creepy illustration; there is also a review up at MultiVerse, for those who like some commentary with their poetry. Hermeneutics, anyone?
And Postcards from the Province of Hyphens is now available from amazon.com!
I'm going to read some Aksumite Arthuriana and pass out. This has been a good weekend.
I am returned from D.C. There was much Indian food. There was much Turkish food. There was much discussion of Greek elegy. It was good. I have two new books by Greg Nagy, Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens and Homer's Text and Language, as well as Elizabeth E. Wein's The Sunbird. And the regional had an inexplicable hour-long layover at Penn Station in New York City, so we spent something like six hours on the train, and as a result my brain's a little like oatmeal at the moment. On the bright side:
My poem "The Laying-Out" (Mythic Delirium #11) is now online, with appropriately creepy illustration; there is also a review up at MultiVerse, for those who like some commentary with their poetry. Hermeneutics, anyone?
And Postcards from the Province of Hyphens is now available from amazon.com!
I'm going to read some Aksumite Arthuriana and pass out. This has been a good weekend.
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No way: I just know a bunch of Bartok songs. I had recently performed one of them in a recital when I met him for the first time, and it came up in the conversation, so: there was performance.
(I'm half, can sing Hungarian folksongs but not read or write it....)
That is still deeply cool. My heritage is Welsh-Irish on the one side, Russian-Polish Jewish on the other.
And I don't know any Welsh folksongs other than "Sospan Fach," and really I picked that one up only because of Calcifer in Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle . . . I'm pretty decent for Yiddish folksong, though!
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*My college story in a nutshell. The longer story is that while I successfully auditioned into NEC, Tufts put me on the waiting list: and their response date was the week after the point at which NEC needed to know if I'd accepted their offer. So I got NEC to grant me a sort of extension, so that I could find out about Tufts, because I really wanted this program; it was a double major, an academic degree from Tufts and a conservatory degree from NEC, and that sounded perfect. And I waited. And I was near the top of the waitlist. And because of online application, Tufts took no one off their waitlist that year. So I cried for an afternoon, and then determined that if I went four years without serious academia, my brain would drop dead, and I wrote a very apologetic letter to NEC and went to Brandeis. Where, in the end, I was very happy.
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Er. Yes. Rather.
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I have not yet read The Sunbird, but my experience of the first two books—especially The Winter Prince, which is one of the darkest and most brilliant Arthurian retellings I have ever read—leads me to look forward greatly to the experience. She has a gorgeous, lucid style and very deft characterization; you can't read her with your brain turned off, but there's no real danger: the story will keep you alert. I strongly recommend.
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Are you familiar with Mary Stewart's novels about Merlin? The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment. They form a loose Arthurian trilogy, but my favorite is still and always the first book. (There is also a fourth novel about Mordred, The Wicked Day, but The Winter Prince has so much my preferred version of Mordred that I have not read Stewart's in several years.) They're very much grounded in the tradition of a Roman Arthur—they are akin to Elizabeth E. Wein's books, in that sense; although not to the degree of Parke Godwin's Firelord—and their interpretation of Merlin's parentage is my absolute favorite out of all the versions I've seen.
And if you want something completely different, there's Phyllis Ann Karr's The Idylls of the Queen, which is a murder mystery set in the world of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and narrated by Sir Kay. I came to it later than Mary Stewart or Elizabeth E. Wein, but I am extremely fond of it, and it's not really like any other Arthuriana that I've read.
Anything you recommend?
arthurian books
As for recommendations, the only Arthurian fantasy I've read as an adult that has stayed with me in a positive way are The King's Peace and The King's Name by Jo Walton (
Hmn -- I just remembered that when I was a kid I was really fond of Rosemary Sutcliff's books on Arthur, but that was nigh on 20 years ago, so I don't know what I'd think of them now.
Re: arthurian books
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The author is
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When do you want me in Boston?
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