Category Archives: Books

Weekend Review

I cannot find my CD of William Boyce symphonies anywhere, and it is making me very cranky because that’s what I want to listen to this morning, damn it. I have to settle for Percy Grainger piano stuff instead. Which is nice to rediscover and all, but he’s not William Boyce.

The weekend ranged from really quite nice to argh and back again.

1. Lovely weather. Everyone’s health seemed to improve somewhat, at least during daylight hours. Thumbs up.

2. Saturday morning: We found HRH a new fall jacket, I picked up some heel liners for my red shoes, and then we headed out to Longueuil to pick up my cello. And oh joy, it sounds bee-you-ti-full. My cello has always been easy to play (in the getting-sound-out-of-it sense, not the oversized-body-thick-neck-argh sense), but now it’s even easier! I always forget how strings deteriorate in sound quality over time, and the awful warp on the bridge certainly wasn’t helping. I, like an absent-minded sick person, wore a long straight denim skirt and a black sweater along with my red shoes. Lovely for a day out in fall; not so conducive to cello-playing. No matter; I sat with both knees together and to the left, and played the cello side-saddle to hear how it sounded. The ten year old girl there renting her first violin gave me a surprised look. Anyway, lovely, lovely sound: I love the feel of the strings, the new scoop on the fingerboard makes thumb position easy to play (I never thought I’d say that, ever) and the bridge is just beautiful and looks so much sturdier than my last one from my now-ex-luthier. They reshaped the pegs, too. “Really?” I said. “They were fine — never stuck, never slipped.” “You’d have noticed sooner or later,” the assistant luthier said darkly. “They were decidedly… oval.” And then he asked shyly about the mystery cello, which is still tucked away along a wall of the workroom, so I obliged him by telling him the Secret Origin story. The luthier flew in from dealing with three people in the other room long enough to make sure I was thrilled with the tune-up and then apologised for not getting to the quote on the mystery cello; he said things were very busy. I assured him that of course it was busy, it was the beginning of the school year as well as the concert season, and not to stress about it. It’s going to take a while to restore anyway; a few weeks aren’t going to make much difference in the long run. It’s also not like the mystery cello is my main instrument, and I’ve lived fifteenish years of my cello-playing life without it. Of course I’m excited about it, but there’s no rush.

I forgot to buy rosin again. Again. I give up.

I didn’t bring my bow with me to test the new setup so they lent me one, and it’s a good thing I didn’t play with it for more then five minutes because I was falling in love with it. Perfect weight, nice balance, good springiness; more responsive than the one I currently use, which has been my favourite up till now. The assistant helpfully looked it up for me: pernambuco of Chinese make, four hundred dollars. If it had been three hundred I’d have bought it on the spot. But still, it’s a decent price for a pernambuco bow with those fittings and that kind of response. I keep telling myself there’s no point in buying a new bow now if I’m going to be playing a different cello in a few months. But I want it.

3. I finished Anathem last night, a brilliant philosophical story that reminded me a lot of the discussions we used to have after classes at the Liberal Arts College. And on Saturday I read the entirety of Mr. Darcy Presents His Bride, a book I obtained for review through MiniBookExpo. Best Austen sequel I’ve ever read.

4. HRH took down the awning on the back deck and removed the air conditioner from the kitchen window, replacing the regular windows instead. Suddenly there is a lot more light in the kitchen. He also moved the heater from the wall that backs onto the neighbours’ place (a inside wall, which makes no sense) to the half-wall in the kitchen that backs onto the living room, i.e., in the middle of the house (which makes a heck of a lot more sense). This involved buying electrical cord and a junction box, turning the electricity off, installing said junction box, feeding new cord around the kitchen, wiring it all in, turning everything back on to make sure it worked, then swapping baseboards to hide the old installation spot. Those of you who know HRH’s track record with electricity will be immensely gratified to hear that he did not experience a single shock. We’re going to look at doing the two similarly stupidly-placed heaters in the living room next, moving one to under the window (you know, where it’s actually needed) and removing the other entirely, which would enable us to put furniture along the walls. (What a concept!)

5. Saturday night I zoned out and forgot my on-line writing date with Ceri. I can’t even use falling asleep as an excuse.

6. Thanks to a timely question from Ceri on Friday, I realised that I’d written the harvest picnic down on the wrong day on the calendar. It was Sunday, not Saturday, and thus we had to cancel our appearance as it was in fact taking place concurrent with my mother in law’s birthday celebration. Grr.

7. We had the neighbours down for breakfast with us on Sunday. The waffles were so good we sent HRH back to the kitchen to make a second batch. Could have sat and zoned in the sunny living room all day, except we all had things to do.

8. I dug my first ever potatoes from the back garden on Saturday. They are so very adorable, ranging from the size of my thumb to the size of a Real Potato. We have enough for one meal. Note to self: next year, plant lots more potatoes. Although to be fair, this was a single potato that had sprouted in the darkness of the back cold closet that I chopped up and buried to see what would happen. Next year I’ll plant them seriously, at an earlier date and at a proper depth.

9. Lovely, lovely late afternoon visit with my in-laws on Sunday. I had a cappuccino as soon as I got there (thus averting the grumpy ‘no I can’t have after-dinner coffee with everyone else’ thing I always go through) and enjoyed it very much, along with the creamy Brie and crackers with rather fortified port wine jelly my mother in law set out for us all to nibble (last year’s jelly; it has aged, apparently). We had my father in law’s spectacular ribs for dinner and a light hazelnut cake for dessert. It was just so nice to sit down in the sun and watch the boy playing with Grandma. No energy, remember?

10. Laundry. Lots of laundry. Our clothesline snapped a few weeks ago and we keep forgetting to replace it, alas.

11. The cello still sounds lovely. It sounded much nicer at the lutherie, of course, because of the surroundings and because I wasn’t afraid to actually make noise. Pizzicato sounds terrific; nice sustain. I’m looking forward to playing it at orchestra on Wednesday.

12. Everyone else is getting somewhat better health-wise except me. Well, nights and mornings aren’t good for anyone, but I’m bad all the time. Everyone else is sleeping. Gnarr.

Right; my freelance assignment finally came through, so off I got to work.

PS: I have an iBook to play with for a week or so. Muah-hah-hah.

Music Stuff

Yay! Daniel Levitin has a new book out, this one called The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. I loved This Is Your Brain On Music, so I’m going to pick this one up ASAP. Because, you know, I don’t have enough books on the To Read pile. (Two-thirds of the way through Anathem, still loving it, regretting that there are only 300 pages left; sigh. Also, I have a review book I’m supposed to read and, well, review, except I am so not in the mood for something set in the Regency period right now.)

Last night’s first rehearsal of the season was great. It felt really good to be back playing in concert with everyone. Our first guest conductor is in fact someone who we tested fiveish years ago when our original conductor passed away. I didn’t remember his name or his technique at all until about halfway through this rehearsal. He worked on having us express the music cleanly and with emotion, already set bowings for us prior to the rehearsal, and used examples and terminology to shape our interpretation. One night isn’t enough to fully evaluate someone’s technique, of course; we’ll be working with him properly for a couple of months to see how we suit. My borrowed cello was solid and serviceable but I’m glad I don’t play it on a regular basis. It was somewhat stiff, and the action was very high; thumb position would have killed me. I can see why C. upgraded to her current instrument, and again I’m reminded of how easy my cello is to play (oversize notwithstanding).

When I left for rehearsal I thought, Hmm, what do I need to bring? Oh, I should take my bow. A bow is a very personal thing, you see. So I grabbed that and off I went… leaving behind my (empty) music folder, my tuner, my pencils, my cleaning cloth, and my rosin. All these things are usually in my cello case, which is currently at the luthier with my cello, and since I don’t carry them separately it didn’t occur to me that I might need to collect them as well. At least I brought a bag with me so I could carry the music home, there was a pencil in my purse, and our section leader lent me her rosin (Liebenzeller Gold, wow; wish I’d had my own cello so I could have evaluated it better) and tuner.

Of course, although she’d heard about the new mystery cello and asked after it (hurrah for the tiny musical community who shares links to exciting blog posts about a fellow musician’s good fortune!) I forgot to ask her about lessons. Argh. I will write myself a note and stick it on the front of my music folder for next week.

In other news, I am not adverse to the government sending me random cheques based on my tax return, especially when they are nice chunks of money, but I do get suspicious and start looking over my shoulder when things have been going so nicely for a few months. I keep expecting a piano to fall. (Although if it’s an apartment sized piano, I will catch it and bring it home and install it in our living room for the boy and I to mess about with.)

Not The Official Festival Report

Am exhausted. Ran out of spoons mid-Saturday, not long after it started to pour buckets of rain upon the fest. Fortunately, the energy ran out after my workshop; unfortunately, before the other workshops and rituals I’d planned to attend. Sleeping badly all weekend plus two seven-hour car rides did not help. Neither did the energy-sapping damp weather. It’s going to take me about three days to get back into some sort of normal operative mode.

Workshop = success. Yay me. Yay workshop attendees. Yay festival organizers for being an awesome team of awesome people. Love them all with much love.

Sold some books, even. Was also asked to do an article on hearthcraft for Circle Magazine.

Both HRH and I came home from the festival with new blades from Helmut’s Forge. I also acquired a stunning kyanite pendant from Shan, a highly polished cabochon the size of my thumbnail that looks nothing like that Wikipedia photo of the mineral. (Oh, this site has a gallery of cut and polished stones; much better.) Websites variously tell me that kyanite is used for stimulating energy, encouraging clarity and intuition, dispelling anger/confusion/frustration, protecting in energy-sapping situations, facilitating communication, and promoting tranquillity, among other things. We just bought it because it looked pretty.

Stopped by t! and Jan’s new home on the way back yesterday to run around the place (okay, the boy did the running, I did a lot of sitting and drinking a glass of water) and generally admire their house and land. The boy smashed the cats’ water goblet in one of his enthusiastic turns through the kitchen. Sigh.

Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last night. Would have been life-changing had I not just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem this morning and love every word of it.

The boy has a cold; his chest seems congested and he coughs now and again. (Travelling with him was not much fun yesterday.) He stayed home with me till we verified that the preschool takes kids so long as they are not feverish or diarrheaic or have streaming noses, drove him in for ten, dropped the car off for HRH, and metro/bussed home. Walked through the front door at 12:30. Lay down for a while, then hauled myself here to assure you all that no, I is not ded.

Except now, having seen that the world and the Intraweebs did not blow up in my absence (the remnants of Hurricane Ike smashing into the back of the house last night notwithstanding) and my inbox holds nothing of dramatic deadline, I will drag myself off to lie on the couch again and read more Anathem, because I have the energy for nothing else.

Thirty-Nine Months Old!

The biggest news of the past month is, of course preschool. “Bye Mama! I’m going to school!” Liam says jauntily in the morning, and heads down the stairs to the car with HRH. Sometimes I even get a “See you later!” or “Have a good day!” as he waves up at the living room window and then climbs into the car. His teacher called me after
his first two weeks and gave me the update: they love him, he plays enthusiastically with everyone but has one special girl he absolutely adores ( “I’ve seen love affairs begin this quickly before, but not often,” she said!), his language skills blah blah blah, has a wonderful imagination, eats well, has adjusted well to the structure and directed play as opposed to the completely free play he was used to, is very sensitive and picks up on emotional states very quickly, helps set things up and clean them away, falls asleep at rest time within ten minutes and sleeps well, and so forth. If there’s one thing he has to work on it’s dressing and undressing himself. (Yes, we know, trust us. And we find it odd that out of all the things he could choose to rebel against, it’s pulling pants up and down and taking shoes off.) It took a week or so (and a new pair of shoes one size larger so that he can slip his feet in and out more easily) but he now puts them on and takes them off by himself, and even puts them away tidily by the door. I am always particularly amused when he carefully hangs his cap on the handle of his bedroom door.

He brought home ‘art’ his third day there: a piece of paper with bits of coloured construction paper from the scrap box glued all over it. “I made art!” he said, bursting through the front door. “Put it on my fridge!”

He sang selections from The Sound of Music in bed to me the other night, then patted my face and said “Sing with me, Mama!” So we sang ‘Do Re Mi,’ and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ (I must learn all the proper words), and ‘Eidelweiss’. Singing in general has increased in frequency, accuracy, and volume. He’ll even sing for other people instead of clamming up when they notice. He tends to sing to himself when we’ve finished a story and our cuddle at bedtime, kissed him, tucked him in, and closed the door behind us. Putting him to bed at home has become much easier, and his midnight wakings have vanished. On average he wakes between six and six-thirty, which is right on time for school mornings.

He has lately been introduced to a 1996 BBC animation of The Wind in the Willows, and absolutely loves it. He has dubbed ‘Concerning Hobbits’ (of The Fellowship of the Ring score) “the Wind in the Willows music”. Sometimes he has an ice cream cone for dessert on the back porch after dinner, and he often brings a book out with him and asks one of us to read aloud while he sits on the deck and eats his treat. One night he asked if we’d read to him and I said that I had something new to share. I brought out my Ernest Shepard-illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows and read the first half of the first chapter to him. He was spellbound. He has to be in a very quiet mood to listen to a chapter book like this, but we’ve managed to do it once or twice for a few pages so far.

The other film he is obsessed with is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. We watched it in three or four sittings to make sure he didn’t get overwhelmed by the appearance and behaviour of the various spirits, and he has been asking lots of questions about spirits in general since. “Can you tell me about river spirits?” he asked me in bed one night. “Lots of things?” He plays at being a river spirit in the bath and listens to the soundtrack at night while falling asleep.

When we got the laptop back up and running he went into my office and pulled my chair over to the writing desk. “I’m working, Mama,” he called. I came in to the office to see him confidently tapping away on the keyboard. “What are you working on?” I asked. “I’m writing a message to you!” he said. So I opened Word for him, enlarged the font to something huge he could see very easily, and let him go to town.

Overall I see him growing into a confident and enthusiastic boy, wearing size nine shoes (size nine!), who converses clearly and plays complicated little games, who is ever more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks. The odd whiny/resistant period has almost vanished. I think we timed the preschool thing perfectly; he needed more structure and social-oriented activity than I could provide for him. When we were out shopping one day I heard him say, “quatre, cinq… quatre, cinq,” and I stood there in the middle of the grocery store aisle, staring down at him. “Are you… counting?” I said. “Yes, but there are no more,” he said, waving his hand at the empty space after the sequence of air fresheners he’d been counting. It’s like a miracle: we send him to school, and he comes home counting in French and singing songs I never taught him. It’s just incredible, after being the ones to teach him everything for a while. We love it. And so does he.

Workshop Wibbling, By Me

Once upon a time when I prepared lectures/workshops, it went something like this:

1. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to know what to say at all!

2. I know, I’ll outline it extensively in point form.

3. That can’t possibly be enough to fill ninety minutes. I’ll add more.

4. Oh no, we’re going overtime! I’ll try to squeeze the last trillion bits of info into the following five minutes.

Now it’s more like this:

1. Oh my gosh! I’m not going to know what to say at all!

2. I know; I’ll put handy book extracts on a couple of pieces of paper.

3. Oh my gosh! There are TEN PIECES OF PAPER! With wall to wall type on them! This will never work!

4. I will reduce it to point form. Even if I think I won’t remember what to say.

5. I’ll bet this would take an hour and a half to cover. I should cut more out.

6. I AM GUTTING MY LECTURE! This will never work!

7. Maybe I should aim for a half-hour lecture, then it will actually fit into an hour.

8. I cannot possibly choose what to leave out!

9. Oh, fine. I’ll cut those three pages.

10. This will never fit into an hour.

11. I give up. I’ll use these two pieces of paper, and we’ll just go where it takes us.

12. I should probably print this out…

Note: I am currently around step seven and step four. Yes, at the same time.

ETA: I give up; I’m printing what I’ve got. I need to highlight things and write little notes in by hand to properly satisfy my need to make changes. Also? Eleven pages. Oy. The last two are just-in-case-we-have-time. But we won’t. I’m becoming a lot more comfortable with what I’ve got down, which is good too; I think that’s what I was most concerned about going into this. You know, the whole ‘I handed in the book and all the info promptly fell out of my head’ syndrome that pops up every time I finish a manuscript? That. I’m much better now, though, because I’ve been talking through what I see on the monitor. (I’m sure this completely reassures you.)

Weekend and Book Roundup

I am drinking the most excellent jasmine green tea this morning and feeling very happy about it. It’s Mighty Leaf Mountain Spring Jasmine, one of three remaining jasmine tea bags I’ve been hoarding from the huge sampler box ADZO gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It makes the morning very, very good indeed.

The weekend was lovely. There was the trip to the luthier on Saturday morning (see below for associated cello-squeeing), house tidying and general upkeep Saturday afternoon, a two-hour dinner prep and cooking Saturday night (in which I winged a roasted garlic-mushroom-onion-chicken thing that I served over pasta), the annual M&M birthday party Saturday night (at which we saw many many people, huzzah!), a trip to the Marche de l’ouest for fruits and vegs (we ate all the berries on the way home in the car, though, oops; but hey, it’s fruit) and then the bookstore on Sunday morning, groceries Sunday afternoon, and homemade pizza Sunday evening. The only thing I forgot to do was go to the bank to deposit a tax refund.

There’s been a lot of book reading lately. (Not that there isn’t usually, but it just seems more intense than usual.) I might be the only person I know of, or at least within three degrees of separation, who geeked out in absolute excitement over receiving my secondhand copy of the out-of-print Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855. Gods bless Jane Baldauf-Berdes for writing exactly the book that I needed, fifteen years before I knew that I did. I devoured Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps and Last Days in an afternoon and evening, and will cheerfully lend them out to anyone looking for a decent and believable vampire story for teens. Ceri lent me her copy of Charles de Lint’s Dingo, which I also read in an hour in a half. I also finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma this weekend, and it was excellent. I looked for The Botany of Desire in the bookstore Sunday morning but of course it wasn’t in stock; if I’d wanted In Defense of Food I could have had one of twenty-three hardcover copies, but I wanted Botany. I don’t try to be difficult, really. (I also went with the intent of picking up Neal Stephenson’s new Anathem, couldn’t find it anywhere, was absolutely mystified at how they couldn’t have a single copy in stock when Stephenson is So Damn Big, then checked a terminal and discovered that it doesn’t come out in North America till Tuesday. Argh. Should have ordered the UK version that released on September 1 [obviously why I thought the NA edition was also out]; I could have had it finished by now.) Since they didn’t have the Pollan I wanted I picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle instead, which has been on my to-read list since its release.

I read the boy the first half of the first chapter of The Wind in the Willows while he ate his after-dinner ice cream cone last night. I’m stunned that he sat still for twelve pages of text with only the occasional pen and ink sketch tucked among the words. I’m looking forward to sharing this with him, a few pages at a time.

Speaking of books, I have to reread the hearthcraft book today in preparation for drafting this weekend’s lecture. I suspect everything I’ll need for this hour-long intro-to will be in one particular chapter, prefaced by a quick definition of the subject and the importance of addressing home-based spirituality. The problem will be keeping it to an hour! Those of you who won’t be coming to Hamilton for this festival (and really, that’s 98% of my readers here) can assuage their trauma with the knowledge that this lecture will be a condensed version of the extended one I’ll be presenting next spring at the Avalon Centre, and most likely at Le Melange Magique as well, to celebrate the release of the hedge witch book.

Time for more jasmine tea, then it’s word-making. I think I’ll work on writing till noon, have lunch, then do a rough patch of the hearthcraft lecture from the bits in the book I want to focus on. Tomorrow I can add and remove things, make it pretty, then remove elaboration till all I have is a bulleted list of points to make and talk about. Okay, that won’t all happen tomorrow, but it will happen over the next couple of days. I’d do it from memory except I know that I wrote things down in the book that I won’t remember off the top of my head while drafting a lecture.

To work! And more jasmine tea!

What I Read This August

Mountain Solo by Jeanette Ingold
The Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft by Mindy Klasky
Thin Air by Rachel Caine
A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi
Charlie Bone and the Wilderness Wolf by Jenny Nimmo
The Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris
What Would Audrey Do? by Pamela Keogh
Rostropovich by Elizabeth Wilson
Just Play Naturally by Vivien Mackie and Joe Armstrong
The Mirador by Sarah Monette
Boccherini’s Body by Elisabeth Le Guin
Hell and Earth by Elizabeth Bear
The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

Not much to say this month, really. Sarah Monette’s series keeps getting better and better. Hell and Earth was an awesome conclusion to The Stratford Man duology. I couldn’t read very far into Boccherini’s Body, although I desperately wanted to. My full review of Ms. Hempel Chronicles is here. Plain Truth was my first Jodi Picoult novel, and I will read more.

That’s about it.