thoughts for today

I share the same birthday with Woody Allen, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, and Mary Martin. When I see good Woody Allen films (I've only seen a few, though) I realize how very much we have in common.

Some movie with Diane Keaton is on right now (Turner is celebrating his birthday--it's not Annie Hall, btw). Woody is flipping out and is going to have people over and can't decide what would be the most impressive music to play, so Diane suggests he puts on Oscar Peterson and put out the Bartok so everyone can see it. Classic.

I saw Hannah and her Sisters about a year ago--I'd seen it in the theater when it came out but I was about twelve and had no idea why anyone would find Michael Caine remotely sexy. But I love it now. It's a wonderful movie. All these couples in it love and care about each other but mess things up anyway. No one is stupid or clueless or malicious at all--they're just people. I think the whole movie is about love and how it can be misguided sometimes.

Woody and I are both totally paranoid and neurotic, and have fantasies about having big, happy families with big, happy family get-togethers over holidays. We share the same taste in music and the same reverence for the Marx Brothers. I wish we were friends.

Anyway. Mercury, by the way, can work wonders as well as disasters. Sometimes things just fall *together* when Mercury is in retrograde. My license expires tomorrow (it being my birthday) and it's a Colorado license. So I packed a backpack full of activities to do while camping out all afternoon today at the DMV. I went into the conservation lab this morning and a woman who works there told me that the DMV sets up an office on campus once a month. She thought it was the last Wednesday of each month. Well, this being the 30th and a Wednesday, that worked out nicely. Furthermore, I got interviewed by CBS and will probably be on the telly. I had to take the written test and missed SIX out of fifteen signs. Of course, I know what the fucking things are when things are written or drawn on them--these were blank yellow trapezoids and sideways triangles and stuff. Hello. How am I supposed to remember shapes?

the two funniest things I've heard so far this week

1. my friend told me she would also be bummed if she had to sing Bruckner on her birthday.

2. a couple of my friends can't make it to my Balkan Ensemble concert (but can make it to my birthday party afterwards) because it conflicts with the Physics Revue.

an illustrated example of Murphy's Law

Mercury is in retrograde. I know I've said this before and everyone looks at me as if I'm crazy. But this time, I didn't know it until circumstances became so ridiculous that I knew it just HAD to be. And sure enough! It went into retrograde on Nov. 14 and will be so until Dec. 3.

Now, I can well understand why people might not understand why heavenly bodies would have any influence whatsoever on the mundane doings of people on Earth. I would agree. However, it's pretty amazing how sometimes astrological bullshit can be quite on the dot. How many plane crashes have happened in the past week? I think I've already heard of two. Mercury is supposed to be the planet of communication and so computers crash, planes crash, and genuine mayhem usually occurs to some degree. The last time it was in retrograde, I had to fly to New York, and I can't tell you how many crazy things went wrong. I lost my luggage for the first time in my life; I had to choose to fly into Westchester instead of La Guardia because otherwise I'd have spent the next fourteen hours on a cot in O'Hare; etc., etc.

Anyway, here's how I knew this time. I had to fly back from DC and had a connecting flight in Chicago about 45 minutes after my first flight was supposed to arrive. Then we waited on the runway for 45 minutes, so I called the airline to tell them that I thought I would miss my connecting flight. I was told that I had been put into the system on two completely different flights, going into and out of St. Louis and not Chicago. But since I had the Chicago ticket in hand, I would be much better off connecting to my scheduled flight.

We managed to make it into Chicago at about 12:50 and my flight was supposed to leave at 1:25. But then we had to sit and wait while the paramedics removed a sick passenger (circa twenty minutes). At that point everyone was really anxious to get off, even though one of the stewardesses told everyone that she was sure everyone would make their connecting flights (she must have seriously spaced out mine). I was in the very last row of a packed plane, too. So fifteen minutes after that, I finally got off the plane and had to run what I think is quite literally the equivalent of two miles. Here's a little diagram--I had to get from the very, tip-toppy end of G to the very, tip-toppy end of H In two minutes. Luckily that flight was delayed and I wasn't stuck in Chicago until 11 PM!

crazy feel-good movies

like Love Actually are so incredibly ridiculous. I can't think of a single happy instance in that movie that actually reflects anything that has ever happened for anyone in real life. Of course, I'm at the point right now where I think people are inherently foolish, weak, and absurd and stay in stupid relationships, and make stupid decisions. A good example of this is throwing away true love for an insipid little 21-year-old at a community college who presents no challenge, no threat, no meaningful conversation, and thank God, would never make true feelings soar.

where I am at this moment

Well, at this actual moment, I am living life temporarily as a tuber in my brother's basement apartment in DC. But other than that, I've made some major decisions in the past week.

The biggest one is that I intend to withdraw from school should I land a job by the beginning of February. I only stand to get more in debt doing another semester. I am no longer staying for a second degree and I'm 100% focused on moving out of Urbana ASAP. No looking back.

Strangely, I don't think this is likely to change--I think this is my firm decision. If I can't land a job by the beginning of February, I'll obviously stick around for another semester and take the courses for which I'm registered, but finally getting one's ass out of town for a bit makes you wake up. I'm extremely unhappy in Urbana and I always have been. I've gotten by OK and met some great people and made the right decision to move there for the degree and not do the online program, but it's beyond time for me to leave.

my bro and me

P1000327
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

Thanksgiving 2005. My brother is a much better cook than I am. :)

people all 'round the world, join in

There is nothing quite like listening to Love Train by the O’Jays when riding a train. We have a gramma announcer who likes to chastise us and nag us and tell us not to walk around without our shoes on, etc. I really wish I had some kind of minidisk recording device or something so I could record these priceless moments.

I am using my noise-cancellation headphones and streaming in a ‘70s soundtrack, so I don’t really hear the gramma announcer when she comes on. My neighbor told me that she just announced that the dining car is open and that a movie will be showing soon. For some odd reason, that reminded me of the brilliant movie showing Smith College had when I was in orientation my first year. They showed Jaws in the swimming pool. I guess they used one of the white brick walls as a projection screen, and had everyone who wanted to see it blow up inner tubes and just…well, sit in the water and watch it. At the time I couldn’t deal with scary movies in any way, shape or form, so I missed out. However, maybe that was a good thing because that pool was always insanely cold.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so much instruction or bossing around getting on a train in my life. These dorks in Chicago could learn something from Penn Station in NYC, let me tell you. Transportation folks in NYC can’t fuck around with bad organization skills. They just have too much traffic. You would think Chicago would, too, but whatever. The woman in charge of opening the gate kept yelling at people who were standing around waiting to board and telling them to go sit down elsewhere. She was very particular about who was supposed to stand or sit where and it didn’t ultimately have any rhyme or reason. Now we have this very chatty woman on the overhead announcement system yapping about how we need to be considerate and keep the bathrooms clean and how we need to be mindful of little kids and how we shouldn’t smoke on the train because they’d have to stop the train and throw us off and we don’t want THAT, do we?

on mlship and careers

I've decided temporarily (this week) to forego getting a master's in musicology right now in order to become a music librarian. After looking into it a bit and observing some interesting things around me, I think I need to have a penis to really succeed in the field. Since I don't have one, I'm going ahead and applying for jobs now and hoping to get the fuck out of here sometime soon.

I told a friend of mine this in the lab today, and he said, "You want to borrow my penis? My wife has absolutely no use for it, but sometimes she takes it out and shows it to me and says, 'Remember when this was yours?'"

rehearsal today

was rather amusing. There's a lot of mediocre choral music out there, even by otherwise-thought-of-as-great composers. This Bruckner mass we're working on has some nice moments and some pretty lame ones.

About a year and a half ago, I had to sing Dubois's Seven Last Words of Christ. I have no idea how that work managed to get into standard reportory, but it sounds like something he might have written for eighth-grade composition class.

Oh, well. I suppose not everyone could write like Brahms. :)

you know...

if you don't like or appreciate what I have to say, then don't fucking read my blog. Some of my stuff may be lame, some of it not so much. Posting anonymous comments that are obnoxious and rude is immature and pathetic, not to mention cowardly. If I know you, then pick your bone with me in person. If not, then be a grownup about it and discuss it with me--you'll have the chance now since I changed my settings on postings.

waah

I can't drink coffee anymore. I didn't really drink it often at all until about a month ago. For the past month, my boobs have been really, really sore. Turns out caffeine can make your boobs hurt. I don't know why men think they're so great--they're really a pain in the ass in ever so many ways. Groan.

I know, TMI. But at least I'm not complaining about lactating or something. I must say, even though my aunt thinks my mother was completely insane, I'm going to have to go ahead and agree with my mother on not breastfeeding us. The whole concept of breastfeeding completely grosses me out. Not when other people do it, but I do not ever want to breastfeed. Call me sick and twisted and I know it's healthier for babies to breastfeed, but the whole concept of things flowing out of my breasts and occasionally getting blocked--totally skeeves me out. ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

later sunday

I can't believe I convinced my choir cohorts to go to Hooters tonight. They wanted to go to Chili's after the concert, but they were closing. Which left us with the options of: 1. Steak 'n Shake or 2. Hooter's. After Missy Pants and I tried to go to Steak 'n Shake after my opera and they wouldn't even seat us (they just looked at us for a long time), we went to Hooters and found the food and service eons better.

Furthermore, our conductor joined us. Hilarious.

Anyway, we got through the concert without too much of a hitch. I messed up the part in the de la Rue that I'd practiced before the concert, but I think pretty much every voice part screwed up at some point in our small group. We weren't prepared enough, I'm afraid. I hope it wasn't tooooo obvious....

I wore heels, which was dumb. Now my feet have fallen off. I just figured that heels would look better since I was in the front row. I don't think I've ever been in the front row in my life since I'm so tall. Strangely, the first altos in that choir are pretty damned tall. Beth is over six feet, I think, and a couple of the others are at least my height if not taller (I'm 5'10). The poor second altos are, by contrast, quite short and they always have to stand behind us. It was amusing when no one could see the conductor in the second row at the president's inauguration.

traviata

traviata
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

Here it is. Isn't it gratuitous?

last night

I went to Traviata, and then tried to get into Cowboy Monkey. I was very impressed by Desiree, as everyone said I would be. Furthermore, I'm used to hearing that huge aria at the end of the first act sung by Joan Sutherland, who, on sound and sheer volume, is very hard to beat. But I was pretty damn pleased and blown away last night. The tenor actually has a great deal of promise and might have a good career ahead of him in several years.

I still think that the stories of most Italian operas are gratuitous bullshit, and I figured out last night that I really have zero interest in victims and victimizing, which pretty much is the case with the female leads in most tragic Italian operas. I bought a book several years ago that I need to read. It's the English translation of a French book called Opera, or the Undoing of Women.

Then, as I said, I went to Cowboy Monkey to see Heidi and Mike play and there was this huge line outside that wasn't moving, owing to the place being at capacity. I was ready to wallop a woman from my program, who always means well but somehow without failure always manages to offend me when I'm around her. And it's not easy to offend me, so she's particularly talented. She acted quite shocked that I wasn't going to hang around longer and try to get in, because she said we were supposed to be supporting our fellow classmates in their cultural and performance endeavors. OK. Needless to say, I am the very last person in the world to whom she sould be saying that. I clock in, on my official class schedule, eight solid hours a week of singing rehearsals. That's not including all the other stuff I do. Does she come to my concerts and gigs? No. Do I announce them? Yes. Does ANYONE from my program come to my gigs? Two of them do on occasion. That's it. Furthermore, M and H haven't been to any of my gigs over the past year and I make an effort to go to theirs. So I was pretty angry. I have a concert tonight in the Great Hall in Krannert. Is she coming to that? I'm sure there's no fucking way she or anyone else is from my program. So I don't want to hear ever again about how unsupportive I am.

So I went to the Blind Pig and my friend met me. We laughed our asses off and then her very nice boyfriend came and picked our drunk asses up at 2 AM. And now I have to go to work and somehow after that miraculously pull off a very difficult bit from a Renaissance work without a major hitch this evening at the concert. Yeeks!

i.n.s.o.m.n.i.a.

grrrr. Yes, it's here again. T--sorry, but I can't sing We Built This City on Rock and Roll over and over and play basketball. I hate that song so much I'd have to kill myself, and then kill myself all over again in my sleep. And then I'd be deader than dead.

Right, Fred?

Fred and I went to a haunted cornfield once and there was all this deadness. And it was, like, totally dead like.

Yes I'm tired.

I went to Sonya's for dinner and came home and tried to go over the fucking Renaissance music I'm singing in an octet on Sunday night that's going to kick my ass. I have to go rehearse it tomorrow morning. But that didn't mean I didn't have time to watch Beavis and Butthead Do America. That movie is so hilarious. I know a lot of people just don't get them, but they make me happy. And even though it's a cover, that movie does have Love Rollercoaster in it. Not as good as the Ohio Players' version, though.

haunted memories

While I love the album and the songs, I will never be able to listen to Lauryn Hill's Miseducation of Lauryn Hill cd without thinking of the terrifying time in March 1999 when Amy Watkins was murdered in Brooklyn. That album was being played within an inch of its life all over New York at the time.

She was a couple years older than I was and lived in the same building my friends did in Prospect Heights. She was getting out of the subway stop I always used, on the same side and staircase I always used, at about the same time I often got home, and she was stabbed clean through with a kitchen knife just a few blocks away from the stop. It could have been me. It could have been any of my friends. She was a white woman from Kansas who was in Hunter's social work program. This killing was for the $8 she had on her.

The guy who did it was detained close to the time of my departure from New York and I wasn't following it. I wish I had been because to this day, I just don't understand what the point was. I think that murder has disturbed me more than anything else has in my life, and frightened me more. Supposedly she screamed for help but died before she got to the hospital.

Her fellow students at Hunter set up a scholarship fund in her name and it is awarded yearly.

I suppose these sorts of things can happen anywhere, but we do expect them to happen in New York. Similarly (but luckily not fatally), a woman very close to my age was brained with a brick by a madman at the corner of 40th and Madison that fall, I believe. Again, I was only a couple blocks away at the time of the incident. She was from Texas. She survived, but man. Random acts of violence galore certainly happen in that city.

la boheme

may have one of the stupidest, most insipid libretti on the planet and mealy-mouthed characters to boot, but none of the storyline problems weigh at all against the fact that the opera is f-ing gorgeous.

Audra before trick-or-treating

Audra before trick-or-treating
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.

how adorable is she?

do voices come back?

My mother lost her voice this weekend in a major way. I had to talk to my therapist about the trauma of hearing my mother sound like she's 100 and on her death bed. I hope my mother lives to 100 (in a healthy, happy way of course) and she's able to speak on her death bed, but right now, that's more than 40 years away and I was quite disturbed to hear her sound like that.

When we were little, she lost her voice completely. Right before it was gone, she told us she was losing her voice and I was really, really upset. I thought that her voice would never come back. I also thought that it would be like losing your arm or something. I remember asking her if it hurt. I'm surprised I have never completely lost my voice like that. My brother carried strep throat at that time and I continually had it. My mother told me this weekend that she was very glad she no longer had small children--when she lost her voice when we were little, she just threw things at us to make us behave since she couldn't yell at us.

My mother lost her mother when she was my age. Actually, she was about a year younger--just a month shy of her 30th birthday. I have strong memories of my grandmother, even though she died when I was two. I remember that her voice was like my mother's, the smell of her perfume and cigarettes, and that I adored her. When I last saw her, she was boarding a plane in Boulder to fly back to Lebanon, MO. She was wearing a houndstooth-print suit and a black turtleneck (my mother never wore black in my life, so I remember the black standing out) her squash blossom necklace (that has a story of its own--she loved it so much that she wore it with her bathrobe) and I sobbed, afraid I'd never see her again. Two-year-olds do that, I suppose, but it was accurate that time. She'd actually been babysitting me when she had her second heart attack. My mother was in the hospital, having my brother. A month and a half later, she had a stroke (in the Springfield hospital) and the family decided to take her off life support. She was 56. I suppose congenital heart problems as well as a love of smoking were the culprits.

On several occasions, my mother and my aunt were crazy enough to pile my brother, me, and my cousins into one of the Volvo station wagons (they each had one) and drive us all to Missouri. We have some extremely entertaining pictures from our drives across Kansas (here are the kids looking bored to tears sitting in an old school house in Dodge City; here are the kids looking thrilled and the mothers looking murderous at McDonald's). I always thought it was weird when we went to Lebanon, because every time my mother and aunt saw our cousin Martha, they'd all start crying. They said it was because they reminded each other of my grandmother. People would also just stare and me and my cousin Meg to see if we looked like our grandmother.

Interestingly enough, my grandmother was always pretty ticked off that she never had any offspring with brown eyes. Mine turned brown just after she died. All babies have blue eyes, and they usually change within a year, I believe, but I was two and a half.

I've inherited my grandmother's and my mother's dislike of beer.

I remember my mother crying in her room a lot over her mother's death, even when I was eight or nine. By that age, my mother had her own brush with death--she developed bacterial pneumonia. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, although rarely (in those days...back in the old days...there were major restrictions on children visiting hospitals). I also remember the rare treat of getting to go to McDonald's a lot--I don't think my father felt comfortable cooking. I had no idea how close my mother was to dying until a few years ago. My aunt, who was a nurse in the Boulder Community ER, had seen my mother's X-rays and was positive her sister was going to die.

But my mother survived and is now a healthy Democrat-cum-Bush lover, who lives on a farm and is currently dealing with EIGHT dogs (they already have six dogs of their own and are taking care of my stepsister's), a bunch of birds, and my stepfather. I'm trying to get her to apply for the LEEP program so that maybe she can feel a little more purpose in her life (and secretly get out of her Republican funk).

It's Turkish!

"My hairdresser tells me everything's going to be Turkish this year!" (Peter Shaffer, Amadeus)

I'm getting obsessed. I've fallen in love with all the Turkish music we're doing in the Balkan Ensemble. For some reason, there seem to be "signs" everywhere. My closest friend here in C-U last year had just moved back to the States after living in Istanbul for three years; I was considering going to Istanbul over Christmas; and now I'm getting way into the music. On Friday I went nuts on www.tulumba.com, and bought some Turkish CDs and evil eye stuff. Then I ran into one of the Turkish people I know yesterday evening, while I was with an ethno friend who's in Balkan Ensemble with me, and we'd already been talking about Turkish music and studying Turkish music for ethnomusicological purposes. And TODAY I ran into this woman from the program and her new baby, whom I hadn't seen since the spring, and SHE'S Turkish. I think Beth and I might take belly dancing soon.

victorian song

On comparing songs written during the Victorian era: one by Bantock called "The organ-grinder and his monkey," and a song by Stanford called "The monkey's carol," Stephen Banfield writes:
“On the subject of organ-grinders [Stanford’s ballad] shows an attitude of indifference where Bantock’s social conscience produces artistically disastrous sentimentality.”

Banfield continues:

"The ballad twilight-land is in truth enormous; the style is sensed in some of the songs of Elgar and Somervell (e.g. 'Sweet and low'), Gurney juvenilia ('I would my songs were roses', 'Dearest, when I am dead'), Holst's self-styled 'early horrors' (the worst of the published ones being 'Dewy roses'), the whole of Graham Peel's song output....Cyril Scott, who stigmatised the ballad concert as 'an institution, the unmentionable tastelessness of which no country in the world but England would tolerate...." (Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century, Vol. 1-2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.)

opera, wagner, buffy

This is my friend Arie's wedding cake. She and her mom made it.

Argh. What the hell is up with Firefox? I wrote this huge long post and it just disappeared. Grr.

I saw the posters for next week's production of La Traviata and they're hilarious. They're photos of a white begonia or something, splattered with blood. Are they trying to show what it would look like if Violetta coughed on one?

My father called and told me he saw Carmen last night and was unimpressed by the story. This is inherently my problem with opera. Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, and Weber (and many, many others) used the most melodramatic bullshit for their libretti. I personally never care about any of the characters. However, I find Wagner to be completely different in this respect. While his characters are gods and heroes and dwarves and giants, somehow he manages to imbue his characters with the full gamut of human emotion and he can break your heart. At the end of Walkure, Wotan has to punish his beloved daughter because she has gone against the fate of the gods and has interfered and meddled with the outcome of human lives. It deeply saddens him to do it, but he must. It sounds silly here, but if you saw it, you would understand.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer also has fully fleshed-out characters with whom one can sympathize to a deeper extent than most shows or movies I've seen.

from Becky's blog

This is so hilarious!
I love Super Mario Brothers!

at the party

IMG_7433.JPG
Originally uploaded by sundaykofax.

tee hee. With Maggie. She TOTALLY looked like that girl from That '70s Show.

better now

OK. Now I'll stop being so angry. :) My therapist is trying to get me all zen, which my friends find hilarious. And perhaps impossible. But nothing's impossible.

I realized that I should probably be thinking about getting something published. If I'm making all this sacrifice to be a music librarian, then I'd better get started on anything that will make my resume look stellar. I'll have to think of some interesting topic.

We're singing stuff by Jaquet of Mantua in a small group out of chamber singers. I'm having to read in a different clef, and it's pretty challenging. I've never sung nothin' by him before. In fact, I know very little about him. I didn't realize that we have a concert in just over a week. Ack! I'd better get cracking on finetuning my part.

OK, I'm boring today. Sorry. But at least I'm wearing fishnets. I'd post a picture, but of course, I broke my camera. At least my ipod's not broken.

cultural differences

I think I'm really feeling the difference between my background in the Western states and the backgrounds of many here who grew up in Illinois or the midwest.

For one thing, I find that people here often marry quite young. My immediate response to many of these young guys who show up (especially in the musicology program) married is: What are you so afraid of in life that you had to get married so young? Now I don't mean for this to be a blanket statement. G and R got married young and are crazy about each other and obviously should be together. Same goes for other people I know. But by and large, the statistics show that many marriages at a young age just don't work out. It's particularly freaky that so many of these music guys' wives are also *pregnant*. I just see a lot of mess in their futures, that's all.

In Boulder, you just don't run into a lot of young married couples. Or if you do, they seem to be getting divorces. I worked in a bridal shop in Boulder and most of the brides who came in there were well into their thirties.

I guess I'm also at a weird age. I'm mad that I don't have more dating options, to be honest. I tried very hard to be a lesbian when I was in my early 20s, started dating men when I was 27, and now that I've been through my "saturn return" and feel pretty solid in who I am, have come to terms with the fact that I've probably always been more or less straight. And now everyone's taken. Men are even more committed to their girlfriends than to their wives, interestingly.

Before the last year, men would show vague interest in me but they wouldn't wind up dating me. In the past year, I've found that men do want to date me, but then, when we've dated awhile (or sometimes not long at all), they inevitably decide that I'm not right for them. I thought for a time that perhaps they didn't think they wanted someone as strong and confident as I am. But then they almost always move on to some other woman who actually controls them. So they may not think they want a strong woman, but they certainly seem to want to be bossed around.

Grr. It's just enough to make me want to pack up and move to another planet.

b and b

I'm sooooo psyched! MTv2 has been showing Beavis and Butthead shows. I missed them! (And no, I'm not joking. They're hilarious.)

grrrr....alma mahler take two

I was writing all this interesting stuff about Alma Mahler and the Web suddenly quit on me.

I'm trying to decide if I should take a book arts course or the Gustav Mahler and Fin de siecle Vienna course that I really wanted to take. I should probably take the Mahler course since he's unbelievable.

I was telling someone today about Alma, his wife. There was a movie made a few years back about her called Bride of the Wind. Alma really got around Vienna. She was involved with Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka (the "Master of Expressionism"), the poet Franz Werfel, the conductor and composer Alexander Zemlinsky, and the famous architect Walter Gropius. They said she was the most beautiful girl in Vienna, but I think she looks like a linebacker in the pictures of her. She was a big woman at a young-ish age. Not enough can be said for pheromones, eh?

She supposedly once said,"Nothing tastes better than the sperm from a genius."

Clearly I have been hanging in the wrong circles.

Here's a song by Tom Lehrer about her. I can't get it to work on my browser, though.

My father never listened to Mahler when I was growing up. I saw all his symphonies for sale when I sold classical CDs for awhile in college. Then I took a course on aesthetics called "Portraits of the Artist" and we studied Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and also watched the movie, in which the director, Vischonti, made the leading actor (Dirk Bogarde) look just like Mahler. Music from Mahler's 2, 3, and 5th symphonies are used for the score. I fell in love with the fourth movement of the fifth symphoy, "Sehr langsam," which Mahler supposedly wrote for Alma. It's a great first thing to hear by Mahler to understand how intense his music is. Hmm. That was the semester when my friend and I were completely obsessed with the German professor who taught it and we followed him all over campus and turned bright red every time he came into the classroom.

on conservatism

Gee, I wish I'd taken a course with this guy or at least went to a lecture of his at Mount Holyoke before he retired (when I graduated from Smith). The New Yorker has a fascinating article this week about Peter Viereck, "The First Conservative." Unfortunately, I can't access the full text online, but there's a synopsis here. While looking through the online material, I also came across this messed-up article in National Review, of course. William F. Buckley founded National Review in the 1950s and was actually interviewed for the article in The New Yorker.