Tangents

Today I retrieved my seam-ripper and extracted broken nosewires from three masks: they'd been washed and adjusted so often since March 2020 that the metal had snapped. I was off-camera during two of the three events I attended during my virtual college reunion today, and I liked being able to deal with much of the mending pile while listening to the presentations. (As for the on-camera social, I cackled out loud when a friend DM'd, "Dude you put on lipstick" . . . )

I had to bail on the two choral projects I mentioned in my previous post. That didn't feel good, nor did heading into today's Bach workshop with no real prep. But summer is not yet here. One of my former choir directors often ended our read-through rehearsals with "You know what you need to do." Yeah.

The front garden received several compliments this week. ("Your flowers are lookin' good, hon.") A volunteer French hollyhock is at its peak, front and center with tiers of blooms. Friends brought by a rosebush that I settled in the back yard, along with some tomato seedlings that Miel had culled from their garden. Some of the cherry tomato plants are showing clusters of tiny green globes. The radish seeds from 2013 or thereabouts have germinated, as have two of the basil seeds from a packet sent by the United Negro College Fund. The basil starters from the nurseries haven't thrived in my outdoor planters, but an aging tiny-leaved plant I'd been neglecting has now put forth a new cascade of white blossoms. It's too early to tell if the parsnips are going to materialize.

I harvested some mint and kale to go with the chicken tikka masala I pulled from the freezer, and doctored today's orange slushie with honey and sumac. I need to plow through a fair amount of work + paperwork tomorrow, but I am pleasantly achy from this morning's workout (2.5 hours of kayaking and paddleboard yoga), and I expect to sleep well. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/176172.html.

Today's subject line is from Bachelor's "Stay in the Car," which has been earworming me since I heard it on WXNP earlier this week.

Dance recommendation: Anna Morrissey's All Together Alone, a modern take on "Ebben? ne andrò lontana," which I've adored since playing viola for it eons ago. Up until May 29. Warning for light-sensitives: there is some strobe action in it.

I keep meaning to mention the Stay at Home Choir's recording of Christopher Tin's "Sogno di Volare," which I sang on. (I chose to participate audio-only on this one.)



A Catholic composer who had also been involved with "Sogno" contacted me via Instagram about joining the virtual choir for one of his recordings, so that's in my practice folder now. I've sat out most of this year's SAHC projects, but they're doing another run at Ode to Joy, this time with a new German text by Michael Köhlmeier, and there's no registration fee for this one. It's unclear if there will be a recording involved, nor can I make the first alto sectional, but I do not care -- any time I can spend with that piece will help me refuel.

Today I squeezed in two dance sessions -- one for a reel that will be shown at a UK folk festival in June, and Karen Arceneaux's Beginner Horton class with Ailey Extension, where we're learning a combination to Billie Eilish's "Lovely" that Karen choreographed with Mental Health Awareness Month in mind. My back and shoulder are not 100%, and I stepped on a splinter last night (ow!), and there's like forty hours of work to fit into the next fourteen, so I'm pleased with myself for showing up (on camera, even!) and staying more focused than not.

It's not all wine and roses here, but my roses are doing very well this year, and my mom-in-law brought two bottles of prosecco to lunch on Sunday, along with this bouquet:



What I served (for four people total):

deviled eggs

bacon jam balls on red pepper strips

cashews

pickled garlic

tortellini with shrimp in a radish-lemon-anchovy sauce (adapted from an Anita Lo recipe)

green beans seasoned with butter and raspberry balsamic vinegar

zucchini soufflé

almond layer cake from Sweet 16th

The next afternoon, the other two members of the museum editorial team came over for our production meeting. I made another plate of deviled eggs, the junior editor brought Russian tea cookies, and we collectively put away more cake while having ourselves a merry time and discussing at length All the Things Due.

A week ago, something decided to eat every mallow seedling in my back yard. It left the adjacent zinnia seedlings alone, and I hadn't spent too much time thinning out the mallows, so I was amused as well as annoyed: I mean, clearly it was a really tasty snack for the critter? It had even consumed the scraps I had pulled from the ground earlier that Friday.

Being slightly ridiculous, I had put some of the bigger thinnings in water in hopes of transplanting them, and by yesterday some of them had developed long plump roots, so they went into some of the dirt patches out front. Fingers crossed . . . This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/175706.html.

The subject line is from Vienna Teng's "Level Up." I've been rewatching the video with new appreciation, now that I've spent more time practicing combinations within the past five years than during the previous forty-five. (I have not become good at combinations, but neither am I trying to be Xin Ying or So Young An or Masazumi Chaya. I am aiming to become the healthiest I've ever been . . . )

Given that Teng and her partner aren't professional dancers, the choreography in the opening minute really impresses me now. The sequence between 0:57 and 1:03 has always made me catch my breath.



I was thinking about Vienna because I first saw Alex Wong and Ben Sollee perform with her at the Belcourt. Alex, in turn, has recently introduced me to an array of performers and artists I'll be paying closer attention to (and have, in some cases, put on my next Bandcamp Friday list): Ruby Ibarra, Rotana (a Saudi-born artist whose songs on Sunday included one about self-pleasure), MILCK, and Surrija.

My favorite Surrija track so far is "Sylvette," which is ironic, because I spent dozens of hours this past year wrangling content about Picasso (becoming a Françoise Gilot fan along the way, as well as ever more firmly Team Braque), and not once did Lydia Corbett ever come up.

The past few days have been rife with derp -- sunfried tomato seedlings, pizza sticking like tar to its pan, and other mishaps -- but I managed to deliver some thises and thatses, and also didn't get killed riding my bike to the East Nashville Farmers Market (I rewarded myself with a tangerine popsicle when I got there).

Then there are the guys in another league:


(The dude cruised up at least a block on just the back wheel. His buddy behind me cheerily bellowed "Awww yeah" when I snapped the pic.)

Elsewhere, in other negotiations with movement, there's a virtual formal ball for English country dancers next week. The band's recordings include "Ransom Note," which I'm going to hope is on the program because the tune is so beautiful, and I have a lovely memory of whirling around to it in Decatur two Septembers ago.

Vicki Swan was kind enough to invite me to join the dance mosaic she compiled for "Bonnie at Morn." I'm in the third tile up from the lower left corner:

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/175161.html.

[The subject line's from Gwendolyn Brooks, "Boy Breaking Glass." Because.]

My culinary mode the past two days could probably be classified as Southern Weird. Lunch yesterday was green tomato and okra soup, seasoned with leftover Easter ham. And breakfast was a 5M sandwich - mortadella, Muenster, and mint with mayo and mustard. I also cooked three pounds of bacon. Any fool who wants to insist that I'm not Southern or American can stuff it.

Harvesting the mint reminded me that I had no idea what had happened to the Kentucky Derby field since January. So I checked in here and there, and for you hunch bettors, the longshots in the field include a bay colt named Midnight Bourbon and a gray colt named Soup and Sandwich. (And they even shared a recent headline because they worked out the same morning . . .)

Tonight's English country dance gathering featured beautiful playing by Dave Wiesler. And speaking of ECD, I'm in the leftmost file in this mosaic a UK nyckelharpist assembled earlier this month:

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/174757.html.

First, a signal boost for the next two weekends:



I first saw Alex Wong perform when he toured with Vienna Teng as her percussionist. He moved to Nashville a few years later, and I've since been to his house for food (an earlier edition of Angelhouse Family Dinners) and music. He's now raising funds for AAPI justice/assistance orgs through a virtual tour, and the first four sessions were terrific (including a beautifully filmed capoeira duet to Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather"). The lineup for this weekend includes a book artist, poet Ciona Rouse (who was terrific in Nick Cave: Feat. Nashville a few years ago), and Kentucky cellist Ben Sollee (whom, come to think of it, I also first heard via a Vienna Teng tour, and whose "Bury Me With My Car" had me doubled over laughing during that session).

---

Life hurtles on. Many people hurting. Many platters spinning. Many postcards to write.

This week I've edited in both French and English, next week will include some Spanish translation, and I'm blasting Gaelic punk as I power through some of the prep for the museum's next big show.

I caught most of last night's White Sox no-hitter against Cleveland, which was fun.

The chenille basket is definitely doing better outdoors, especially since I've been making a point of putting in full sun for the recommended 4 to 6 hours. All the kale plants may have come home or come down with something bacterial; the roses may have not one disease but two, but are also putting forth lots of clean leaves and buds, so I swore and snipped and sprayed yesterday and am opting to be optimistic. The irises are spectacular. I need to clear ground for the tomatoes and other starters from my church's herb fair, and some zinnia seedlings are emerging in a patch I've started in the back yard. Indoors, the Paula Jane fuchsia is gorgeous, most of the chocolate cherry tomato seedlings are doing well, and there is a lopsided bloom on the never-quite-healthy miniature rosebush.

I went on a Poshmark tear earlier this week (splurging on five cute dresses for $58 total) and picked up my two new pairs of glasses (sun and standard). The latter torched my FSA but were definitely overdue. One of the Poshmark bundles I've been rolling my eyes at the hot takes on various platforms about upcoming fashion trends. Some of us who wear ratty pjs all day when no one's watching AND don heels and bling when we feel like turning heads do so with no one's permission and nary a pang of existential torment. FFS.

One of the Poshmark bundles included hearts and other shapes cut out of a variety of publications, including The Hobbit; a multilingual census or healthcare help line handout; a twentieth-century novel involving typewriters, trains, and failed love; a handwritten flyer seeking a renter; and a Phinney Center newsletter. I don't quite know what (if anything) to make of it, but it certainly raised the week's surrealism quotient. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/174087.html.

One year in, I dance with imaginary partners and corners maybe once every 1.5 weeks. There are virtual contra and English country dances, concerts, classes, and presentations pretty much every day of the week, along with offerings from my early music and editing and public health circles. There isn't time for even a tenth of what I'd like to sample, never mind dive deeper into. (In other news, it's a day ending in "y" . . .)

Dancing alone also triggers unhappy memories of being a wallflower, and an envy of people whose partners enjoy waltzing and pousette-ing. It balances out: I literally doze off on motorcycles, which makes me less fun than our friends who are into them. I wouldn't want anyone else as my housemate, but my fantasy wishlist does include a dance spouse (along with a double manual harpsichord, a Citroen, an all-expenses-paid month in Barcelona, and the Bottega Veneta shearling coat I petted in San Francisco back in 2017).

On the flip side, drilling waltz steps was on my at-home list anyhow, practicing waltz holds tones the arms, and going through the figures revives happy memories as well, such as teaching "Volpony" during a Monday night class, being perfectly in sync with partners (and in demand) at past balls, and improvising a dance with another actor during last year's photo shoot for Grand Magnolia. ("Ah, Theater!" he declaimed afterward. "Where you gaze with all your heart into another person's soul -- and then move on . . .")

Anyway, one of the dances on tonight's NCD program was "Volpony." I felt an urge to double-check the source while Cathy was teaching (having mentally misfiled it under Molière instead of Jonson) and found it opposite "Wa Is Me, What Mun I Do":



These are two of the achingly loveliest tunes in the ECD canon. Some I get tired of, and some I have never liked (I'm with the minority that cannot abide "Softly Good Tummas"), but my heart lifts when I see these on a program:

(this recording doesn't quite capture the yearning I hear in Purcell's music, but will at least give you a glimpse of real social dancing, with elegance and errors in abundance)



This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/173811.html.

The subject line's from a Willow Branch Song by Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1582 - 1664; translated by Irving Yucheng Lo). The full verse:

A crescent moon hangs on the tip of the willows,
New leaves are like eyebrows, the moon's like a hook.
Wait till the moon is round and reflected in a mirror
To lift from my eyebrows ten thousand layers of grief.

I generally try not to be around people the week of St. Patrick's Day. It's the anniversary of my mother's death, and today is the anniversary of Mama Nancy's death, plus even years outside of pandemics it's mid-term and not-quite-close-enough-to-the-end-of-the-quarter and almost everyone is so tired of winter and more than a little frayed.

Taking the whole week off wasn't feasible this year; to stay logged off on Wednesday, I worked until 4 a.m. that morning, and I'll be marking 40+ pages of proofs this weekend as well. But it did feel good and right to do some deep cleaning that afternoon, which included tossing out scraps of paper with topics I'd meant to blog about, but the moment(um) had faded (George Clooney's love of writing/receiving letters, contemporary songs about dementia/memory loss, the Megan Rapinoe/Sue Bird feature in GQ . . .).

Nashville journalist Natasha Senjanovic has an invitation for y'all:

It's been ages since a Diary Collective update, but I'm starting back up again, and want to know what people are proudest of about themselves in this incredibly difficult year. But @tedtoons turned the tables, like the emotional ninja that he is. https://t.co/fvQTpQraAn

— Natasha Senjanovic (@nsenjanovic) March 14, 2021

You can hear me talking about bao and Duolingo and reading "Climb" at https://www.bestofpossibleworlds.com/audio.

Also recently published: "Truth and Dare," at Autumn Sky.

Finally - written ten years ago, and published the following spring:



Measured Extravagance is out of print, but if you'd like a copy, send me proof of a donation ($6 or more) to NAPAWF, Tupelo Pres, or Postcards to Voters, and I'll beam a PDF to you. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/173113.html.

So, between allergies and scratches and figurative kicks in the teeth and waking up hung over (which seemed profoundly unfair because it was one flute of prosecco during a retirement-party Zoom and one flute of vermouth after dinner, but apparently that's one digestif too many for my metabolism these days) and nearly putting antibiotic ointment instead of toothpaste on my brush -- well. Hello, dregs of February.

But I slogged through this, that, and more, so some deliverables got delivered, some reportables got reported, the house is cleaner, and I pulled together a lemon-rosemary-olive-panko-parmesan-macaroni thing for dinner. It was mild enough today to walk to the Little Free Library in sandals. There have also been three rabbit holes: One was the lore surrounding St. Matthias, in the course of pulling together twelve lines for tomorrow's Tupelo poem; I was also intrigued by the why and wherefore of coppices, but that didn't make it into the draft. (Today's contribution was 14 lines of dog-gerel, so to speak . . .)

The second was triggered by Sam's Tumblr post on Sargent's depiction of Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson. What an intricate household that was. I did not know that Fanny and her daughter Isobel were both cougars (with the same writer-illustrator).

I have not watched this video of "Let Beauty Awake" in full yet, but even a few seconds . . .

The last is a current memory-melody worm: there's a Swedish cradle song in a 1957 textbook called Singing in Harmony that one of my elementary schools discarded when I was a kid. (The Commonwealth of Kentucky Public Instruction stamp inside the front cover has a line where one was supposed to indicate "White" or "Colored" . . .) The setting is similar to some Beethoven art-songs I'm fond of; the next-to-last measure particularly gets me, and I've played it several times today:



Last night I looked up the composer and lyricist. There doesn't seem to be much online about W. Th. Söderberg (though the song got around enough to merit sheet music for mandolin and guitar -- published in Seattle . . .), but the author of the English words, one "Auber Forestier," turns out to have been the formidable Aubertine Woodward Moore, whose many roles included serving as music director of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. (For some other day: she apparently gave Whitman season tickets she couldn't use and may have been on a first-name basis with Alcotts and Emersons and fiddlin' Bulls . . .) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/172559.html.

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)] This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/172060.html.

https://jackielaubooks.com/ The Ultimate Pi Day Party is currently free, and the Nashville Public Library has some of her titles.

1. The settings include small-town and urban Canada, and coping with a wide variety of parents, siblings, and friends . . .
2. . . . some of them refreshingly and hilariously down-to-earth, and others exasperatingly "why can't you be more like _____," which is a dynamic I totally feel from multiple angles. I have cried with relief when people step up for protagonists who disappoint their parents by not having a "real" job.
3. That said, there are a quite a few scientists and CEOs in the mix. They're often driven and/or grumpy. I can relate to that too. (One geologist wears a has a "Schist Happens" shirt mug.)
4. Abortion is discussed as the right choice for characters who had them. More on that by Emmalita. #RomanceForRoe
5. There's a lot of good food. Including mooncake ice cream.
6. There are brutally honest little girls (often nieces) who know what they want. One five-year-old is a food snob who "has a better chance of enjoying blue cheese and Kalamata olives than pepperoni pizza" and delightedly samples (and critiques) "the green tea-strawberry, the passionfruit, the black sesame, [and] the matcha cheesecake" flavors at the shop her anti-ice cream uncle takes her to (observing that the place looks like a unicorn threw up in it) but also names a unicorn "Havarti Sparkles." Another corrects her uncle on the pronunciation of dinosaur names. Another really digs venomous spiders, which her uncle can't stand . . .
7. Several protagonists don't speak Mandarin/Cantonese well, if at all. I feel seen, both in terms of the awkward situations they find themselves in and the recurring frustration of being expected to be good at / comfortable with something one has zero natural facility for. (Not incidentally, I tested out of a half-dozen levels of Spanish Duolingo last night, but my next super-basic, hint-heavy Mandarin lesson may require a full glass of verdejo for me to chill out enough to get on with it.)
8. Love doesn't magically cure clinical depression or other chronic/recurring conditions, and it was horrible-great when one of the heroines starts yelling about how infuriating is when people insist or imply you haven't tried hard enough or spent enough on finding a solution while knowing fuck-all about every last exhausting potential treatment you've already tried or considered.
9. There's plenty of humor and sass, from friends and siblings (and sometimes parents) who take the heroine or hero's goals seriously but not their taste in clothing or pizza or beer.

[My previous mention of Jackie Lau's books.]

In addition to reading Lau's two most recent books, I also binged on some picture and chapter books this week, including:

Most of the Princess in Black series by Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and LeUyen Pham

Real Cowboys by Kate Hoefler, which will be featured trilingually (English, Spanish, ASL) later this year as a storytime video produced by my colleagues.

Jules vs. the Ocean by Jesse Sima

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/171655.html.