Watch/Listen/Read: New Year’s Edition

Erika Writes:

I would love to be able to do a wrap up for the year, but to be honest, I haven’t kept track of enough of what I’ve watched, listened to or read this year. I’ll save that for next year, perhaps when there’s a full year of posts to reflect on. 

Looking Back on the Year

As the year wraps up, I’ve been going back in time. I have a strange relationship with this time of year–to me, the real change in the year is some time around September, between back to school and Rosh Hashanah, and that’s when I tend to make more resolutions and plans. That’s the time of year when I feel like seasons change, time changes, weather changes, and I don’t feel that quite as much at this time of year. What I sometimes find myself wondering instead is “how is it that we’ve already gone from Rosh Hashanah to the end of December already?” I needed to let go a little this week and so I reached for Fairport Convention’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”

“Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?”

There’s been a lot of Cat Stevens on, this week. I found myself weeping while listening to this song:

Reading Shakespeare is a Labor of Love (and other Observations)

I’ve finished up Love’s Labour’s Lost and enjoyed it more this time around. I’ve read Shakespeare for fun since I was a teenager, but I really do think that reading Shakespeare as dirty jokes and bad puns has done wonders for how much I enjoy it. I’ve pulled out Twelfth Night, which I haven’t read in a very long time, although I’m not more than a few pages into it yet. I’ve also got Never Kiss Your Roommate by Philline Harms nearby, and I received a copy of the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi from a friend when I mentioned I didn’t own it and couldn’t remember if I’d read it or not. December is always a poetry-heavy month for me though, with winter solstice and New Year’s Day. For solstice this year I posted Wendell Berry’s “To Know the Dark” on Facebook:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Some other recent highlights are Jennifer Chang’s “The World” and Susan Cooper’s “The Shortest Day”, which I read every year along with lighting a candle that burns from sundown to sundown on the solstice. I’ll light another candle like that tonight, but you’ll have to wait to find out what the poem to go with it is. 

Homage to Joan Didion

The recent passing of Joan Didion reminded me of a few things about why I want to write. Her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” was the very first piece we read and analyzed in the first Writing Fiction and Poetry class I took in high school. In it she says, “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.“ I remember reading that and feeling like someone finally had a sense of how I observe the world.

The whole essay is filled with ideas that made me feel validated, like the way she described people who keep notebooks, “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Although the essay was written before I was born, it felt as though someone had been in my head, taking my feelings about writing and putting them on a page.

Reading that essay made me want to write creative nonfiction even more than I had before–and now, in my forties, as I pursue writing in a different way than at any other time in my life, I find that although I’ve been the keeper of a notebook for many years, it’s even more important to me now. I’m glad full text PDFs of On Keeping a Notebook,” and another essay by her “Why I Write” (another favorite of mine, where she says, “All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper,”–another thought that could have come out of my imposter-syndrome-fueled head,) are available online.

New Season of Queer Eye

The new season of Queer Eye premiered today, and I’ve been binging it already. I’ve been dealing with a fibromyalgia flare up that’s really interfered with the amount of time I’m able to do other things and it’s incredibly frustrating, since I have a lot of things I want to be doing and a couple of big writing projects to finish. It’s kind of been a throwback to my baby dyke days in the mid-90s for films though after a conversation about a few favorites on Twitter. Interestingly, the same titles resurfaced on Facebook, and it was definitely a sign to find The Incredible True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, which I’ve watched twice this week, and Go Fish, which I’ll watch soon. 

New Year’s Eve Plans!

Along with some movies and perhaps some time on Zoom with friends I’m planning on spending some time tonight ringing out the year with a real treat though–-an all viola ensemble. It’s just too bad Adam can’t be here to enjoy this with me. He’ll have to find some other way to enjoy the dulcet tones of a hundred and three violas playing together while he celebrates the New Year.

Adam Writes:

This week has been a bit of a mix. I’m moving through my Wheel of Time reread. I’ve been listening to a fair amount of Bach, but also some more recent stuff.

Listening to “New Music”

It’s weird having a moment where I feel like I’m getting old because I’m not down with the hip new music, but the hip-new-music in question is Aleksandr Scriabin, who was born in the late 1800s.

Alexander Scriabin – 24 Preludes, Op. 11

I may as well start by saying I don’t dislike 20th-21st century classical music. I think John Cage is a brilliant philosopher as well as musician, and I like many things I’ve heard from Philip Glass, Steven Reich, Leif Segerstam, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Tan Dun… I think it’s just that the way I process information makes my tastes particularly rigid. When I was about 3 or 4, I threw a temper tantrum because my parents wanted to take me to see Wayne’s World. They convinced me to go and of course I found it funny, and would continue to do so for years. It’s still pretty funny, though I haven’t seen it in ages. 

Sorabji: Fantaisie Espagnole (1919), Performed by John Carey

It took me a while to embrace that that’s just how I approach art. I have to be in a certain mood to take in something unfamiliar; and if I’m not in that mood, I need to talk myself into it. So it’s not that I want to listen exclusively to musicians who were active in a single European city during a single hundred-year period. It’s just that I rely on music for a very specific set of reasons, and music from other places; from other times does not accomplish that function for me.

SCHUBERT – Impromptu n°3 (Horowitz)

Listening to Scriabin

Which brings us to Scriabin. I’d really like to say that I enjoy his music, because then I could be one of the cool kids. If you listen to classical music enthusiasts, you’ll find that there are certain composers who are like shibboleths of cool. Composers you have to listen to to be one of the cool kids who’s into the off-beat, indy composers. One of those is Scriabin… actually a lot of the latter day Russians fall under this category, including Stravinsky, Rachmaninov (and not just the 2nd and 3rd piano concertos), Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Nikolai Medtner… I love me some Rachmaninov and Medtner but I just… I just can’t with Stravinsky and Scriabin. Shostakovich is an exception for me. He’s way more dissonant than anything else I regularly listen to and yet… He was one of my grandparents’ favorite composers. That helps.

So what is it with Scriabin? Well, his early music sounds too much like Chopin (but without some of the things that make Chopin so delightful) and his later stuff just sounds… I don’t know. I just feel lost when I try to listen. It’s possible that the live performances are more to my taste, but I don’t even remember what a live performance is.

I did go to college. I do know the arguments for post-modern approaches to narrative, whether musical or literary. But what to do? 

The Wheel Of Time

As for The Wheel of Time, all I can say is I was told the reread would be better and it certainly is. I’m on book 4 right now–The Shadow Rising–and I can catch a lot more references than I did the first time. There were entire sections that were gibberish to me the first time through. Pages and pages of backstory and foreshadowing that I just didn’t get. But now I do. And they’re surprisingly clever and beautiful. I think they were the first time, too, but somehow this time around it’s all the more satisfying.

I am on the fence about the amount of repetition in Wheel of Time. I understand it’s necessary in order to give cohesion to a world that big. But it can be grating. Especially having to listen to it. The voice-actors do an excellent job of giving life to the characters, but I can’t help thinking this work was meant to be read, not listened to. If you read a work like this, your eyes can scan over all the repetitions without taking them in. If there’s a paragraph you know you won’t get anything from, you can just skip it. Such are the benefits unavailable to a listener.

As I write longer and longer works, these are priceless lessons.

I am glad the first season is being reviewed as a failure. The work they did was so pretty. But Amazon is the Dark One and so it’s not surprising the show failed to prosper in their hands. Writing is the cheapest and best special effect. I hope at least some disappointed watchers will go back to the source material.

Happy New Year!

Anyway, thank you for joining us. Happy New Year to you and your families, whether found or biological. Please let us know if you enjoy this kind of writing; if you want to contribute some thoughts of your own.

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