The attention just encourages her

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

He's cool. I like him. And I sang for him once in Hungarian, and he did not tell me that my pronunciation sucked, so that made my day. He's got a copy of Postcards now: I'm hoping he likes!

[sovay]

You're not Magyar, are you?

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!

[sovay]

I never majored or minored in music at Brandeis, but that didn't stop me from being regularly mistaken for a student in the department. Chorus, Solo Ensemble, Chamber Choir, private lessons . . . I've taken voice lessons since I was twelve; I would have gone to NEC after high school if I had gotten into Tufts' half of their five-year program*; I was in my first opera last spring. And weirdly enough, my only professional performances (i.e., actual money involved) have been folksongs. Right now I can't sing anything near as seriously as I did in college, because of the immense time commitment of grad school—otherwise known as, Classics has eaten my life!—but it is not something that I ever plan to give up. And it's something I love.

*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.

[sovay]

I picked up some rather impressive swear words from my grandfather, but can't pass them along except orally (oh dear, that sounds rather dirty).

Er. Yes. Rather.