Procrastinating

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

I've been taking an extended break, but I really should be getting back to work again. ^_^ I'll just go eat lunch (cup ramyeon!) and force myself back out into the below-freezing weather. Argh. If I didn't need more 8" x 5" notecards, I wouldn't even bother. ::sighs::

Oh, and if you've downloaded my Eyes skin, I've just realized that there was a mistake in the shufrep.bmp file, resulting in a weird black line on the shuffle button. I didn't notice it until now, but I've fixed it, and if you re-download the file here, you'll get a proper version. >_< Of course, that's only if you care about things like that.

I want to watch more Full Metal Alchemist. Do I smell the beginnings of a new obsession? What bad timing. -_- In any case, kiseki-net has FMA pictures, though they're inaccessible right now due to bandwidth overload, so you may be seeing a new wallpaper or skin from me by the end of intersession. Or possibly, quite possibly, a fanfic. If I get any ideas that is. ^_^

Life is so boring during reading period. I get up in the morning, go to breakfast, go to the library, take notes, doze off periodically, go to lunch (or not, depending on the timing of my catnaps), take more notes, feel guilty about not having taken enough notes, go to dinner, come back to my dorm room and fail to do any more work. I would babble about my paper, but currently it is an amorphous blob of a cool topic that refuses to reveal any coherent thesis. -_- Anyway, I think I can only babble about my paper after it's fully written. Sometimes I never really understand what I was trying to talk about until I've gotten to the concluding paragraph.

...Tari

On music

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Okay, I didn't intend to post here again, but...

I bought a Glenn Gould CD of Bach's preludes, fughettas and fugues, which was on sale for about $10 at Tower Records today. And! It has all the two-part and three-part inventions on it! Wah! Those inventions were what made me like Bach in the first place!

See, for the most part, my taste in classical music is very, very plebeian. I like the "shallow" music, either grandiosely cinematic or trivially melodic. What finer appreciation I have for classical music is either due to Mr. Stratechuk's tenth grade course or--who would have guessed it?--books. The only reason why I have a double CD set of Beethoven's piano sonatas is because I was trying to read Mann's Doctor Faustus, which has a long section analyzing one of his sonatas. Only after reading Howard's End did I bother to listen past the first movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony. A collection of biographies of Russian composers (which I picked up for my Shostakovich paper) had a section on Rachmaninov, which is why I now can recognize his second and third piano concerti. It was The Last Samurai (the Helen DeWitt book, not the movie) that got me to listen to Glenn Gould in the first place.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the reason I like opera is because Mother was an utter opera nut during high school. (She idolized tenors the way teenyboppers nowadays idolize boy bands. Or the way her generation idolized the Beatles. Her accounts of her high school crushes are rather bizarre because she's always talking about how she fell in love with Stefano's voice. ^_^) I used to only judge opera on the storyline (hey, I'm a books person, not a music person), but eventually something trickled down. Even now, I prefer the more melodic and accessible Puccini to, say, Verdi. In fact, I don't like Verdi very much at all, which goes to show how bad my taste in opera is. I also don't quite understand the appeal of the Schubert lieder. I know, with my frontal lobe, that they are great artistic works, but I don't actually comprehend why. ::shrugs::

But the reason I liked Bach to begin with was entirely personal and not at all derivative: in my long-ago piano lesson days, the only exercise book that I really, truly enjoyed practicing was the one with Bach's two-part inventions. (All my other lesson books had teeth marks in them. I bit my Czerny savagely when I was twelve. Yes, I had, and still have, a childish temper.) But I didn't mind Bach. For some reason, my mind could appreciate the sheer loveliness of the fugue-like structure and the complexities of counterpoint, despite its normally plebeian tastes. Since then, I've always appreciated the heavy Baroque fugues, though Mother finds them dizzying.

The preludes and fughettas here are pretty simple, but I love them all the more for the nostalgia. ::sighs:: I still remember the notes to the theme for the first two-part invention. Da-da-da-da-dum-da-dum-do-da-doodle-da...

Argh, I want the Goldberg variations too. While I'm making futile wishes, why don't I throw in a full two-CD recording of Turandot, another full recording of Le Nozze di Figaro, and that Scottish Fantasy by Bruch. (See what I mean? Plebeian. ^_^)

...Tari