Sunshine and Lollipops

Here I am, posting in a second consecutive weekend.

Our apartment is full of food. My folks and grandfather were here to see Ivan and stocked our larders to overflowing. It's entertaining, but I feel like I've done nothing but eat for the last three days.

Friday was an afternoon for odd encounters. I briefly met Herr Vogler, a friend of a friend, in the lobby of Ferguson Hall. I also ran into a gentleman whom I knew only through a UPA coaching clinic at a colloquium on music's role in Brazilian diasporic communities. Never mind that it was actually behaving like spring outside.

I don't have any grounds for an esoteric discursus today. Gotta save it for the paper I'm supposed to be writing at the moment. I'm just indulging in the devouring narcissism of internet culture and spewing words into the blogosphere because it's there. I wonder if there are pollution-induced blogozone holes developing at the poles of the blogosphere.

And if there are, what will they let in?

I'm hoping for civil discourse and good grammar. Or maple syrup. The expensive kind made from real tree-blood.

Colder on Easter Morning than Christmas Morning

Such is spring in Minnesota.

So yeah. Infrequent updates are the name of the game. This summer, though, when I'm home with Ivan and trying to make myself study French, perhaps they will be more frequent.

First, a product I'd like to plug for the writerly among us who also deign to use the Mac OS: Scrivener. This is a great piece of software. It allows you to pile together bunches of documents and fragments into a single project folder, so you can move smoothly between them. The documents can range from .pdfs to movies to other text files, and you can shift between them without leaving Scrivener. For somebody like me, who generally writes inward spirals towards the finished product, it's great. I can have multiple brainstorming sessions in one part of the project file and easily access them when I move to drafts. Scrivener doesn't format, but it's got a lot of export options.

Second...hmm. I'm back onto the Twin Cities ultimate scene. TBA has had two practices under marginal conditions (yesterday, with windspeeds above the ambient temperature and frozen ground, was particularly bad). I'm also coaching the St. Paul Open School ultimate team. They're brand new...the school has recess and that's where they've done all their previous playing. Fortunately, our first two games are at home so we should manage decent numbers and hopefully some parents in attendance. Hopefully it will warm up soon and I can put the track across the street to good use.

Third, Amanda's got a blog. She updates it fairly often these days with photos and videos of the child. You can find it here. Thanks go to my folks for the ingenious little digital video camera we use to shoot these mini-movies.

Fourth, the paper I'm putting off at the moment will likely involve a monstrous agglomeration of Althusser, Hayden White, and Paul de Man, with a strong possibility that Barbara Hernstein Smith and/or Jan Mukarovsky will also make appearances. The subject matter will revolve around the intersection of irony, ideology, narrative and the approach to art. Hopefully tidy, likely to sprawl, and all too probably finished at the last minute.

I'm feeling a jones to compose again for the first time in ages. Part of it may be the flurry of activity and busy-ness that comes with a new child (activity tends to promote creative impulses for me). I think it may have as much to do with renewing my listening habits and finally adjusting to being out of the "composing equals bringing stuff to weekly lessons" mentality. Of course, I'd also rather spend my time writing poems and working on a novel than going to class, but a man's gotta do what he decides he's gotta do.

I still dig music and musicology, but I've realized now that it is something I am doing more because I am good at it and it's an avenue towards a stable professional life than because I am truly enamored of the subject. I have finally hit the point I reached my sophomore year at Macalester studying literature: the things people have to say about the music are not entirely made up, but they've become so abstracted from the thing itself that they seem rather pointless. I feel this more keenly some days than others, but it has been a steady undercurrent to this semester's coursework. But hey, the professorial lifestyle, once you get your foot in the door and hop the tenure-train, is not a bad one at all.

row, row, row your coracle
gently towards the debacle
warily, warily, warily, warily
your boat is your obstacle