The world is too much with us

Whenever I work more than a few days in a row without doing anything real (i.e. reading), I find that I'm not really the same. This happens on weekends, when I go from spending the whole week studying to working late and sleeping late. This summer when this happened I picked up an old Norton Anthology and randomly read some of Wordsworth's sonnets. This one stuck out:

     THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
         Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
         Little we see in Nature that is ours;
         We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
         The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
         The winds that will be howling at all hours,
         And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
         For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
         It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
         A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                         10
         So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
         Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
         Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
         Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Link: Article on English poetry
                                                    

C-F#-B

I am eating sugar from a jar. I used to never put sugar in my tea, but now it's just so enjoyable. Plus, really, at 6-7 cups a day it is basically how I drink water, since the tap is never warm and kind of funny tasting. Sometimes I have the sugar for my tea, then just take a little extra spoonful for myself. (If you're wondering: brown sugar)

I've been struggling for the last two weeks with music composition. It's a minuscule credit-weighting, but the work in it is just so unending that it's a good "what do I do now" activity. Anyway, I haven't had a piano but I just bought a 2-octave USB/MIDI keyboard for 100 euros. After wrestling with technology I still had no inspiration, nothing that I could see as "new music," nothing that I feel drawn to add to the West's distended canon.

I thought about my dreams of becoming an ex-pat writer; I thought about Joyce and Hemingway. I thought, how is writing music any different from writing words? I've been writing and listening to this manic Dublin music from Donnacha (comp teacher, Gra Augus Bas), or the minimalism of John Adams (Nixon in China) or Steve Reich (Music for 18 Musicians); it drew me in, but I could never see myself writing that. I wanted to be able to convey a sense of place just as they do.

Now, whenever I sit down to write or revise or piece together ideas, I put myself in the desert (shrub-steppe, if you will). I've found one chord (C-F#-B, roughly) that hits me. I can't get away from it; no matter what voicing I try it in it gives this sense of nothing, openness, no structure yet some clear coherency. It could be put into a tonal idiom but it doesn't fit there either. It is a wasteland. Wish me luck.

I'm going to name the piece (really, 10 short pieces for string quartet) "Wallace," after both the street where I live and Wallace Stevens. As it's a bit presumptuous naming something after a Pulitzer Prize winner, I'll back this up by giving one specific poem that made me take this on:

Wallace Stevens
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A short interval

(what the Irish call intermission) for my reading.

I've started to accent Ts. As in, "three twenTY" instead of the northwest-slurred "three twendy." I don't say "tree" for "three" yet, though. It's involuntary and only happens at work when I'm talking to the Irish. Sometimes Americans, when I'm trying to fake being not American.

Reading The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien for this contemporary Irish lit. class. It was banned and everything, burned, whatever. I'm not especially enjoying it. It's tough for me to just enjoy a novel that refuses to overwhelm me. As in, a novel that is a telling of a story and not a total immersion. She doesn't capture the voice of the girl the way Salinger captures Holden. And, coming after Katherine Mansfield (last week, modernism), the more beautiful parts of her prose just seem flat and a bit contrived.

In other news, I'm going to read a lot of Mansfield. I intended to skim a few short stories after I finished work (1 a.m.) Thursday for Friday morning but I ended up reading so carefully all the assigned stories. Ironically, after I went to bed at 4 a.m., I slept through class the next morning. I need a coffee maker. I cannot bear to face the day knowing that I have to ride 20 minutes in order to get bad coffee. I took 125 grams of Guatemala Antigua Fairtrade from work tonight and intend on making use of it as soon as I find a french press.

Anyway, better get back to the grind of reading easy fiction. She mentioned "C.K. Chesterton" (the girl gets G.K. Chesterton's name wrong; they're at school in a convent) in the book and it just made me want to go pick up some hardcore philosophy/theology, subsequently failing all my classes and spending all my time reading books that don't apply to class.

Interesting article from Mother Jones (surprisingly more even-handed than originally thought) on Baylor University, and generally the tension between liberal, modern education and religion. At one point in a quip about hate speech the writer suggests that the doctrinal problems of Christian schools are not confined to Christian schools alone; that secular institutions unwittingly are subject to their own doctrines that need to be revealed in the light of liberal education in general.

Professing Faith

Deconstruct that. (My new catch-phrase, a la Seacrest out).

Om-Elette

Through a happy accident where I thought our juicer was a food processor, I now have a huge tub of freshly cooked chickpeas, and a juicer with scraps of chickpeas in the blades. So, when making myself an omelette this morning, I decided, hey, I'll throw in some chickpeas. Turns out they happen to be the greatest omelette (now a "scramble") ingredient of all time--along with wild rocket, basil, rosemary, red bells, infant tomatoes, garlic, and a bit of sea salt.

But now I must digress for a moment. Looking at the word "omelette," I cannot help but see "om" and "elette." Does this imply that eggs softly cradling a seemingly infinite array of foods is in some way related to the natural vibration of the earth? Is the blanket of eggs a miniature representation of the ancient "om," bringing disparate elements into harmony through realization of their inherent interconnectedness? Are we the vegetables; is nature the eggy mess?

It was Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse.

I know, after I posted the last link from Alex Ross (classical critic, New Yorker) you probably all subscribed to the New Yorker, and read his blog every day over breakfast (like I'm doing). But on the off chance that you didn't, I have another New Yorker article on the effects of the internet on classical music. It is excellent. Also, check out Jeremy Denk's blog (linked in the article). I read it forever last night, and his post on Quartet For the End of Time is pretty incredible. Actually, the quartet itself (Oliver Messiaen) is incredible. He wrote it in a concentration camp when he found out that three of his fellow prisoners were a violinist, cellist, and clarinetist.

The Well-Tempered Web

Undressing Mannequins on Grafton Street

I believe this makes me a regional poet. Grafton street is the downtown pedestrian-only shopping district, also where I work. Lots of tourists, lots of street musicians, although I do not address these aspects here.

Undressing Mannequins on Grafton Street

Her left arm reaches round the waist—she pulls
the cashmere cardigan off blended wool;
she wrests the suede purse from the elbow,
unbuckles senseless trousers, with no help
from the passive, blank-faced statuette.

They will not budge, these stoic animals,
nor bend a knee to step into a shoe.
Until they finally stand nude behind
the glassed-in storefront, making no more sense
than they once did when they were fully clothed.

Preview: sounds like "Birds in the gulf - Boo, the nice louse"

Instead of giving you my book list all at once, it will be slowly revealed to you.

Henry James - Turn of the Screw: good lecture, talked about how the "reality" of the ghosts doesn't matter because the narration is all that exists.
Katherine Mansfield - Selected Stories: I think it's Prelude, some "Je ne" French title, and two others. For Wednesday.

I'm feverish, can't sleep, and blogging. That's like three sicknesses at once. I hacked and coughed all through work today. A huge group of foreign tourists came in 10 minutes before closing, and it took an hour and a half to get cleaned up. That's 9 1/2 hours straight. More than I go to school. I just figure I'll make enough money by December and then quit.

I saw the Crash Ensemble (Donnacha Dennehy is the artistic director) last night for their 10th anniversary show. They also played from noon until 10:30 tonight. Insane. Just an assault on aurality. I don't even think that's a word. But it's almost an anagram of "reality" so I have to keep it.

www.crashensemble.com - I know, I'm getting lazy.

Also, first one to guess the book in the title gets cake.

Modernism -- the voice talking at me.

My schedule for classes has changed, and I now have about 7 1/2 hours of class per week. Apparently this is a full load, because everyone is saying that I'll be busy. So far, it looks like I have a novel/collection of poems/play per week in both Contemporary Irish Literature and Modernism, while in Post war/Post nation/Post-1945 British/Irish poetry we're covering an author's collected/selected works every two weeks. Music classes will be as time-consuming as always. Sitting alone in a small room, slowly and deliberately putting dots on a page.

Modernism is my first large lecture class I've ever had. And, for the first time, I recognize why people hate English majors. If, say, I had started at a large school bent towards economics, business, engineering, some other practical thing, and had to take a class like this it would make me hate the academic literary society forever. They stand up there and talk about the context of modernism, the basis for experimentation, the world wars and ex-patriots, and the purpose is not enjoyment of the piece of writing at hand. The purpose is to examine Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narrative in some abstract way, never getting around to the act of reading itself. There is no focus on interaction (therefore enjoyment) with the book, because the class is too huge to give anything other than biographical facts and established interpretations. I will probably enjoy it, though, for the reason that I'm interested in modernist literature and it will basically be an independent study course with an added lecture. Plus I've already read half the stuff on the list.

Of Post War/Post-Nation, my professor Gerry Dawe said, "I really just wanted to call it 'Poetry: A Seminar,' but that wouldn't work with the whole course booklet and everything." Basically, we're reading poetry. He gave us some other suggested reading--biographies, letters between poets, the context of the nations--but said it's mostly going to be the poetry itself. He has recordings of the poets, and at the end he will bring in some living recent poets to chat. That class might be my favorite. I've heard of a few of them, and read a bunch of Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney, but I'm looking forward to finding some new favorites here.

I'm going to have a new housemate soon. One is moving out, and another (Danish)girl is going to move in soon. Apparently she left the last place because they weren't clean enough. So I am clearly the ideal housemate.

I just realized I need a link. This one is probably less enlightening than the last few. Although maybe not the Karl Marx ventriloquism one. That was kind of dumb.

McSweeney's - Lists

Bicycles, Love, Death, Karl Marx's party trick

Last night, coming home from work, someone opened a car door right in front of me and I flew off my bike. I was going about 13-14 mph, too. I was also glad there wasn't another car behind me. They gave me a ride home, at least. So, I didn't go to the hospital because I hate hospitals, but this morning I could barely walk. I ended up calling in sick to work, about 20 minutes before I was supposed to go. I feel bad about that, but it should be okay. Bicycling is actually easier than walking now, since I don't put any stress on my leg. It's probably just seriously bruised, swollen. I suppose it's a lesson to always ride in the middle of the street, even if you have a huge halogen light on front of your bike. Well, it will make a good first-day-of-school-why-are-you-hobbling? story.

If you have listened to the WNYC broadcast of Donnacha Dennehy, congratulations. If not, I would recommend skipping about 16 minutes in, where Donnacha is interviewed for a bit, followed by his ensemble's performance of Gra Augus Bas (Love and Death). It's one of his most-performed pieces, written for the Crash Ensemble of Dublin.

If you would rather read a transcript of Karl Marx as a ventriloquist dummy, go here:
Cabinet Magazine Online: I Can See Your Ideology Moving

There's a great article from the same issue on Heidegger. I mean, if you feel like a trip through nothingness.

Real Irish people!

Pretty busy days. I was supposed to wake up this morning but I just curled up and slept through the meeting with the music 3rd and 4rd years. No problem, though; everyone here is in such chaos that they don't notice. I am taking:

Modernism
Shakespeare
Free composition forum with Donnacha Dennehy
Post-tonal advanced music analysis with Michael Taylor
Ethics: Philosophical and Theological
and Approaches to Theological Ethics with M. Junker-Kenny
Post War/Post Nation: British and Irish Poets since 1945 with Gerald Dawe

I almost took an "Exile in two languages" course covering Beckett and Nabokov, but then at the last minute the English dept. lady said that if I was really going to do poetry I should take Gerald Dawe's course. Apparently he is a real live Irish poet and knew/knows pretty much all the poets on the course list. Sounds awesome.

Donnacha Dennehy is a real live Irish composer, with commissions for the National Symphony, WNYC radio, and some other stuff. Into acoustic/electric things. Sounds really wild.

In other news, I have some digits in my phone now. Like, 5-6 acquaintances, one of who plays the sax. Might play some jazz some time.

I went to the RTE (like BBC for Ireland) National Symphony Orchestra tonight. The program was Tchaikovsky (Capriccio Italien, op. 45), Volans (Trio Concerto, Irish composer, came up for the curtain call), and Prokofiev (Suites No. 1 and No. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64). The curtain call for Prokofiev was around 10 minutes long, with a short encore of one movement. Tickets were 5 euros for students. I think I'll go every week. Next week it's Sibelius, Rachmaninov, and Nielsen. Pretty wild.

I'll leave you with a link to Donnacha Dennehy's WNYC broadcast from Merkin Concert Hall. This is a lot like what the concert in that strange room behind the locked door was like. Except better.

Donnacha Dennehy, WNYC: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/newsounds/episodes/2007/04/11

More Danes, and a new feature

I met another Dane today. Cool guy, Fredrick. Studying sociology for the term at Trinity, with more of an edge toward Marx and Weber than the Chicago-Berkley school. Danes, I've found, are easier to understand than the Irish. The on-campus pub (seriously, Ireland, what do you expect?) is cheaper than anywhere else in Dublin.

I met some others, too, but it was hit-and-miss. Some of them were going to a party tonight, called a Traffic Light Party--where you wear red if you're attached, green if you're not, and yellow if you're somewhere in between--and one guy (American, New York) had to have that explained to him. Ah, college is a time for education.

This is a rather short post, due to my recent lack of reflection and journalistic recordings. Somehow, as I became more occupied my life became less interesting. Pumped through the tubes, I'm afraid, would only amplify my non-activity. So, I read a lot of articles online, and after much deliberation have decided to begin to share them. I have many saved up, but this one is one of my favorites. Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic, has a book and eponymous blog--The Rest is Noise--that I've begun to enjoy. I might buy the book sometime soon. In this link, he critiques Wallace Stevens as "pure sound," which is sometimes true (Tea at the Palaz of Hoon--some things must be read aloud). Come bathe in some Stevens.

Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens:
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/more_to_come.html