Well, hello there. A bit of digesting.
Writing: You can read my story that made it to the finals for the Dappled Things J.F. Powers Short Story competition here. Wattpad seems to be a platform mostly for anxious teen and young-adult fiction and worse, but it let me keep my italics, which the other site I was looking at wouldn’t, and people, since I’m lazy, I need my italics.
I thought about submitting it somewhere else, but, eh. It’s got over a hundred reads right now, which is just as many as it would receive in some literary journal, probably. Not that it’s literary journal quality. I’m just saying.
Also, The Absence of War is free most of this week.
I looked at another story that I’ve set aside since the fall and is about 3/4 finished. I didn’t hate it, so maybe I’ll work on that this week.
Writing is challenging for me these days. Everyone’s talking about how a lockdown is an introvert’s dream, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Sure, if you’re an introvert who lives alone – I guess. But if you’re an introvert who lives with other people and those other people are not allowed to leave the house…
…it’s challenging.
(Which, I hasten to add, is not our situation. Yes, we leave the house. But there’s no friend visiting except in the neighborhood, so from dawn to dusk….here we are, mostly. I can’t do substantive thinking when there’s the potential of interruption. It’s always there in the back of my brain, haunting me and holding me back….)
Listening:
Guess what! Son-in-Law’s song was played during the Tony Kornheiser podcast!
Andy’s music website. Repair and sales website.
Same, same, same. Haydn, Brahms, Prokofiev. The competition deadline is June 1, so it’s getting tight. The bike injury set him back a bit, but he keeps telling me that he can make it.
(To clarify – the competition is all online. It was, even before the pandemic. It has four components: to record performances of three pieces, 20-30 minutes length total; a theory test; technique performance (scales, etc); and a paper on one of his pieces. He thinks he’ll do the Haydn. As I mentioned before, we’re calling this a course in Music Literature and Analysis and putting it on his transcript.)
Also! Church! Music!
We have opened back up here in Birmingham. First public Masses in most places will be today, so this weekend will probably be back to normal – playing Mass on Saturday night and Sunday morning (he’s been playing the Sunday morning livestreamed Mass from the parish) – plus there’s a wedding on Saturday. His first non-family-member wedding to play.
Oh, and many episodes of In Our Time, some of which call for separate posts. I need to get to that.
Watching: We’ve been going through Fargo. I had watched seasons 1 and 3, but never 2. We got through 1, and are halfway through 2. It’s rougher, for sure, and not for the faint-hearted, but it’s got that Noah Hawley sensibility that I enjoy – which is all about the randomness of life, how random encounters change lives, and we have to be listening and paying attention in order not to be pulled to darkness by those random encounters.
It’s not for everyone, but I enjoy it.
I also binged/sped watched season 2 of Dead to Me. I wrote about the first season here. It was pretty much a waste of time. Yeah, a total waste of time. I really like Christina Applegate’s performance, but thing as a whole didn’t cohere tonally, and was fairly absurd, and in an annoying, not fun way.
Reading:
My writer/movie son’s interesting post on Terry Gilliam.
I think his ability to connect with actors, combined with his intelligent use of visuals at the service of his (often chaotic) stories makes him one of the strongest voices in modern film. He’s a cinematic treasure with influences ranging from The Thief of Baghdad starring Douglas Fairbanks to Jacques Tati. He’s a singular filmmaker, and, while I don’t think all of his films are complete successes, I enjoy so much of his filmography that I’m happy to take the few stumbles along with the more numerous and incredible highs.
Related to Fargo, last week, we got to go to an actual, real live bookstore. I’m usually a library person, but with those closed for the forseeable future (probably until June 1), I cracked open my wallet and spent some money. One of the books I got was Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall. I’d read one of his other novels, Punch, last year some time, and found it not a waste of time. This was the same. Nothing great, Hawley working through those same themes of randomness and chance, and since those are also my themes, I was there for that. But ultimately, it was a few hours of decent entertainment, with a not-quite-satisfying ending.
Now I’m on an Internet Archive edition of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. It’s short. I hoped to finish it last night, but I fell asleep.
I listened to an excellent In Our Time episode on Crime and Punishment and it has sorely tempted me to tackle it. I’ve never read Dostoevsky beyond some Christian-related quotes and such, but, as I said, this episode almost has me convinced to try.I downloaded a sample of the translation by one of the show’s guests, Oliver Ready.Perhaps I will give it a shot!
Cooking: Let’s see. Jambalaya. various baked things. More cornmeal drop biscuits, which are just the best and have turned into real favorites around here. Chocolate chip cookies made in mini-muffin tins. This cake, without the butterscotch whipped cream.
Getting tired of it. Ready to go out…..
Oh, and add this to the “watching”….
(Sorry for the size. I don’t know how to resize videos on WordPress. I’m pretty sure it can’t be done.)