Monthly Archives: April 2003

New Music

So, orchestra last night, and we got new music (a necessity, since we handed back all the old stuff after that smashing concert). We’re doing the Peer Gynt suite, Haydn’s Military symphony, and Beethoven’s Prometheus overture. Not bad – at least, nothing I looked at and went “eep!” at tenor clef or evil sixteenth note passages by an idealistic pianist. (Okay, the Mendelssohn might have gone well at the concert, but that doesn’t mean I’m not bitter about the months of failure before that.)

My old stand partner and I were the only two cellists there last night, which meant that (a) we occupied the first and second chairs, and (b) we got to be stand partners again, which I’ve really missed. It was slightly harrowing, because we were sight-reading things we’d never seen before, but we pulled it off really well, expect for one place in the Haydn where we had a three-bar compressed rest whose numeral looked like an eight.

All in all, a spectacular night, and we were pretty damn proud of ourselves. Two celli holding their own against twenty violins, a wind section and some violas. There were places where we were supposed to play divisi, too, which is where half the celli play one part and the other half play the second part. With only two instruments, of course, that means one of you is carrying an entire line on your own. We pulled it off, and were heard. Go us.

And I wrote 2,693 words of the Great Canadian Novel yesterday afternoon when Ceri came over to work. I am wonderful. Yay me!

Now I must scurry to work through the – snow? Argh!

Family Visit, Virginia Woolf, Brief Miracles

We had glorious weather all weekend in Oakville until a wonderful thunderstorm during Sunday dinner (mmm, rack of lamb). I saw my grandmother from the west coast, old family friends, and all in all enjoyed a lovely trip. I wish we could have spent another day or so with my parents, but both my husband and I have to work today.

I managed to get a thousand words or so written on Saturday afternoon, too. I’d been dithering about a chapter in the Great Canadian Novel, unsure about how to handle the next step (or, rather, to choose what the next step should be from a pool of four different events). I plunged in and finished the chapter, and even started the next one.

And then, I crashed. Why, you ask? I picked up a secondhand hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. When I read work like this, I wonder why I even bother. (Yes, yes, I know: different styles, all kinds to make a world, different tastes in readership, blah blah blah. I’m sharing. Be quiet.) I despair of ever becoming capable of painting word and thought, of arranging language to convey a depth of emotion with only a few words.

I’ve read scraps of Virginia Woolf’s journals, and she too uses sparse language, and yet conveys something so much larger than what the words say. Is that what genius is? Everything I read of mine seems mawkish and heavy-handed (though not as heavy-handed as some of the published stuff I’ve read, thank all the gods), no longer as airy and bright as it seemed when I set it down. I’ve ordered a copy of Woolf’s journal so I can read the whole thing, not to further depress myself, but to try to understand how it is that she manages to succeed at what she does, even in her own private notes.

When I moved I found a humour coloumn that I’d clipped from the English department newsletter during my BA. It’s an “Ask Your Author Agony Column”.

Dear Author:
Lately I’ve been feeling that my life has no meaning. What should I do?
Signed, Pondering the Meaning

There are several witty samples of what various authors might have responded (“Get your archetypes straightened out,” recommends Robertson Davies), but here’s Virginia Woolf’s imagined response:


Life is just a series of brief miracles. Stay away from water
and for heaven’s sakes get a room of your own.
– Virginia Woolf.

Life’s just a series of brief miracles. This comment was meant to be fun, but it says something important. Juxtaposing the words “just”, “brief” and “miracle” creates a tension that Woolf’s work displays as well. How can something be “just” a miracle? Is it a miracle because it’s brief? Shouldn’t miracles, by definition, be life-changing? Or is it our observation of the miracle and how we choose to be changed by it that defines it as brief or enduring? If they’re brief, is it the knowledge that life is made up of miracles that keeps us going?

More people should see the miracles around them, however brief. And more people should remember that life is a series of miracles; we just have to find them.

Wiktory!

My first ever seminar taught at CEGEP went terrifically well. I was blessed with forty attentive Champlain College students who made eye contact, smiled, and asked questions, some of whom even thanked me personally afterwards. I always forget how young CEGEP students are; they’re almost half my age (let’s not dwell on that for too long, shall we?).

The problem, of course, is trying to narrow down one’s sphere of knowledge to an hour and ten minutes of lecture. What do you leave in? What do you abandon? What concepts are important? How can you explain them simply enough that they will understand, but in enough detail that the depth of the concept isn’t lost? Do you have to present X other concepts first in order to make the final concept understandable?

I know I gave them a lot of information, but they all kept up with me. I mixed my personal experiences and choices in with technical stuff so that they’d have a balance of the two. All in all, I think I managed to prove to them that yes, there are still people out there who live their lives inspired by the same beliefs and principles held by the ancient Celts, which was the point of my guest lecture.

I’d love to do it again. Heck, I’d love to teach a full-semester course on alternative spirituality. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.

Out Of It

The four-legs are tearing around like mad things this morning. Major spring/cabin fever, apparently. They’re not quite making the turns in the kitchen and they’re bashing into each other, which is rather amusing.

I’m out of it and dizzy today. So out of it, in fact, that I tried to reheat three slices of pizza in the oven for lunch, and baked them to a crisp. Convinced that I evidently shouldn’t try to assemble anything to eat that required heat or sharp objects somewhere in the process of preparation, I scanned my fridge and my pantry without success. Then I saw the bowl of apples and decided to have one. The first bite convinced me that I had wanted an apple all along and the lack of culinary focus was in fact a godsend.

Go figure.

Scattershot

Yesterday night was:

– The first thunder/lightning storm of the year. Cool. Very, very cool. (Except when the power cut out for a second or two while my husband was watching the ongoing election coverage. Bad moment.)

– A turning point in Quebec politics as the Liberal party was voted in by a severe majority. Let’s see: my in-laws’ house just increased in value by $20,000; industry will begin to revive; investors will return. My one regret: we don’t own property ourselves. Ah well.

– The last meeting of the Monday night class that I co-teach. There will be plenty of student meetings throughout the summer, and activities planned, but this was really the end of a serious commitment for everyone. Now I devote myself to my Saturday morning class, and the scattered lectures and workshops I will be teaching in the near future, such as the guest lecture I’m giving on modern Celtic Pagan worship at Champlain College this Thursday. I’ve spoken with the teacher, who sounds like a great guy, and I’m looking forward to it. I was a bit at sea about what exactly to focus on — he teaches a humanities class of mythology — but we worked out a basic hour of personal experience talk regarding how I worship, what I do, what I believe in, and so forth. It’s a great opportunity, and promises to be quite the experience.

On Voting As A Responsibility

I’ve been hearing terrible reports of people with no idea where they’re to vote today, stemming from an incomplete distribution of reminder cards with the address of their pertinent polling station. The only reason I know where to go is because I caught sight of a pile of plastic-covered cards tucked into the stack of flyers by the front door of our building. I always wonder if mix-ups like this, or the incredibly long time it took my husband and I to change our address on the voters’ list (and they still weren’t certain it would work) are deliberate. And I always wonder what percentage of the citizenship will actually make the effort to go vote. My personal opinion is that it�s a right and a responsibility – I mean, I live here, so I ought to at least pretend I have a say in how the place is run – and if you ignore it, then you really shouldn’t be allowed to complain when the people who end up in power start doing stupid things. Because, you know, they will.