Tangents

This poem appears in George Bilgere's 2024 chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, and also online at Rattle.com. The narrator, a man in his sixties, comes across the air gun he used to shoot at cans when he was a teen, and tries it out on "a volume of poetry, slim,/ but not slim enough,/ by a poet I never liked":

The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two

... at which point I cackled at the savagery and decided to post about it here. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/186484.html.

3 happy things
1. Autumn Sky Poetry Daily featured my sonnet "Paean to the Pommel Horse Guys" on August 15.
2. I successfully auditioned for the Nashville Symphony Chorus. I'll finally get to sing Beethoven's 9th! (And also some Vivaldi, Ravel, Mahler, and Handel, among other things.) This has been on my bucket list since I was a teenager, and the timing has never worked out before now.
3. Several visits from my honorary big sister, her partner, and their menagerie.

3 vexations
1. I tested positive for COVID for the very first time on July 13. Odds are high that I caught it from the dancers at New London Assembly, as I masked for virtually everything at the festival -- including when singing in performance -- except for meals, and I had lunch with that crew right before five tested positive that afternoon.
2. It's a month and a half later and I'm still coughing violently several times a day. This is not a surprise (this is why I was so bloody vigilant for literal years). I'm on all my usual meds and hopeful that it will be gone by the time I go onstage for the Vivaldi, but it is literally tiresome.
3. Pilea mollis (Moon Valley) is structurally significantly different from Pilea peperomioides (money plant). I did not know this before dividing my formerly healthy Moon Valley plant, purchased a year and a month ago in Philadelphia. It was not an expensive starter, and screwing up is part of the learning curve, but still. *sniffle*


July 2023, in my Muehlenberg College dorm room


The same plant in August 2024, after a year in my sunroom

3 topics I plan to post more about later
1. The 2024 San Francisco Early Music Society Baroque Workshop
2. The 2024 Amherst Early Music Festival Spring Break Workshop and Summer Festival (week 2)
3. The other pilea, which also holds sentimental value (it was a farewell gift from a museum colleague). This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185906.html.

I don't hop on my personal Twitter accounts regularly anymore (professionally ScienceTwitter is still a thing, but the students are more visible on Instagram, and I'm working out systems to post more frequently on and direct more traffic to the department website), but I peeked in this morning, when Paisley Rekdal posted on what makes a sonnet a sonnet. Tl;dr: it's the volta...



The discussion naturally brought forward other sonnets, among them Sam Cha's Motherfuckers talking shit about American sonnets.

( story a-sprawling / cake baked and frosted )

ETA: today's rabbit hole - discovering how the pinyin for "u" with the third tone will appear with the caron to the right of the u regardless of copy-pasting versions of it with the caron directly over the u, typing in unicodes, etc. Ah, typesetting/coding. And it's good to be reminded that the u+haček in Baltic/Slavic languages is a different critter. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185494.html.

The most recent project I sang in:



[audio only for the first 7 1/2 minutes, then video-mosaic for the closing chorale] This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/185002.html.

https://bsky.app/profile/ellenkushner.bsky.social/post/3kehy67jkd42l

(Ellen Kushner quoting Sean Thomas Dougherty's "Why Bother?" on BlueSky; h/t vinia) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/184437.html.

A poem punched me in the face earlier tonight. I stopped by Novelette in search of a birthday gift for a friend. On opening Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), these lines in "I Have Bad News and Bad News, Which Do You Want First" hit me:

One week ago, my mother had two COVID patients.
Now, she has thirty. What? I say. When did that happen?
though when's not the question I mean.

COVID has been around long enough to show up in printed books of poetry distributed by mainstream publishers. Goddamn.

---

The library is about to reclaim its copy of Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom (Union Square, 2019), a picture book with text by Teresa Robeson and illustrations by Rebecca Huang. Robeson is Chinese-Canadian-American and a mentee of Jane Yolen, none of which I knew while reading the book. I had encountered Wu's face and name via the 2021 Forever stamp in her honor, but hadn't remembered anything else about her before now. The book is well done.

---

The back pain and foot injury are still significantly (and literally) cramping my style, but I did venture out, masked, to a dance presentation last Saturday that included an in-progress version of Ink, choreographed by Jen-Jen Lin. I spent much of the evening pondering how I might draw the dance -- cobalt blue and yellow light stands, dancers in black and red on a black surface, the swooping white ribbon of Jen-Jen's solo -- and while I have not put pencil or marker to paper since leaving the studio, dwelling on the lines did engrave them a shade deeper in my memory. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183892.html.

Different takes on the tarantella del Gargano:

With dancers:


With zest:


I dig this band:


On a sofa:


With castanets:


The late Owain Phyfe (our Renfaire and caroling gigs coincided for a few seasons):



Lyrics This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/183493.html.

While I'm keeping "zirconium" at Twitter for the foreseeable future, I've set up http://mastodon.sdf.org/@zirconium (AKA "zirconium@mastodon.sdf.org") to get familiar with the landscape in case #ScienceTwitter and other key circles head on over. As with this blog, updates will be irregular and I don't -- can't -- read every item in my feeds, but establishing and keeping open lines of access is part of the battle.



I actually spent the bulk of my morning on handwritten correspondence, including this season's first holiday card, which is going to a Scandosotan friend I was reminded of when another friend (based in Stockholm) recommended Sallyswag, describing them as "the queer folk soul brass dancehall hip hop band":



(Yes, it's rather early to be sending December holiday cards, but this one is an Advent calendar, and given reports from other friends about letters taking scenic routes to, say, North Carolina, I am not sanguine about this one even arriving before Trinity term. Now that I've said it, watch it arrive before the GOTV postcards I put in yesterday's mail to Georgia...)

In the Department of Plus Ça Change, still feeling crummy but functional. Full-blown respiratory woe has sidelined me from work gatherings and choral commitments (and heavy-duty cough syrups now give me splitting headaches, great). But my sunroom remains a gorgeous sanctuary, I have lamb and Taiwanese spinach stew on my stove, Aaron Tveit is covering "Take Me Home Tonight" on the YouTube jukebox, and being home means other things get tended to, including the sorting of tomatoes (this year's harvest was entirely from volunteer plants, descended from seedlings Miel gave out last year). I'm planning on making green tomato-cheddar hand pies later today or tomorrow.

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182908.html.

The budget-minding gods have smiled on me lately. A pair of eight-pound hand weights at a yard sale for $2. The Bärenreiter score of L'incoronazione di Poppea for $4.50.

And, a playable-enough harpsichord for $500:



This has been good fortune in several respects: I had planned a trip to Virginia in November to attend a ball and try out two other instruments (if they were still available by then), but the timing hadn't been ideal and got borked entirely by some other obligations. I am way less jittery about learning how to maintain and repair an "entry-level" instrument than I would be with something costing thousands of dollars. Collecting it made for a lovely road trip with the BYM, who was a very good sport about all the driving and hauling and has been both entertainingly curious and notably entertained (so to speak) by our new acquisition (Why is this piece in 6/2? What you just played isn't on the page, what the heck? [Adventures in figured bass!]). And Frank Hubbard's Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making is quite entertaining. I read the beginning of Ralph Kirkpatrick's foreword aloud to the BYM; he's a motorcycle mechanic, and it definitely resonated with him:

At some time in the late 1940s, on the occasion of a concert in Cambridge, I was told of two graduate students in English at Harvard who had built what I believe was a clavichord. Such reports usually arrive with an invitation to inspect a cherished and totally unplayable instrument. Having contrived politely to dodge the invitation, I never found out what the qualities of this instrument might have been.

---

In other news, three of my poems appear in the new issue of Tabula Rasa, with "Learning Curve" as an Editor's Choice. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/182491.html.

[The subject line's from Thomas Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman."]

Shuffling to my study at 2:30 am to get a poem out of my head hasn't happened in a good long while. I'm not thrilled about the timing, but I should be able to sneak in a disco nap before I have to drive anywhere, and there are worse fates than communing with Thomas Hardy (while looking up rondeaux and triolets) and the indoor rose over a mug of valerian-camomile tea.



I do not need a Maestro Wu knife, but I am glad to know about it. (Via Grub Street's profile of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry, in Brooklyn. The blades are "forged from scrap metal and bombshells that mainland China fired on Taiwan.")

A new word to me, via Joelle Taylor: lemniscate. She highlights it as one of the six words that summarise her.

Dwelling on this a bit: the first six words that come to mind for myself form a portrait of whom I want to be, not an accurate resume of me as I am. So I shall make myself another mug of tea and then snatch some sleep, with an eye towards the former. (Not that I'm inclined to write specifically about me in my poems these days, but amused, buff, calm, dangerous, elegant, glorious lend themselves to better arrangements of words, and sleep is a means...

In peering at the news: I am laughing immoderately at Russ Jones's characterisation of Jacob Rees-Mogg as "the harrowing outcome of a bout of hate-sex between a Dalek and a bassoon" (and, predictably, someone in the replies has already protested that that's unfair to bassoons; h/t aunty_marion).

I have not been paying attention to Wimbledon. I do miss some of the craic, but my current headspace would rather dwell on transplanting tomato and pepper seedlings and spreading pine straw, so that's what's happening between coding, corresponding, and tumbling into lakes. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181801.html.