Lahm Tag

NaBloPoMo 11 (Make Up Day 1) The external impetus of NaBloPoMo was obviously insufficient to overcome my immense blogging inertia, and the posting streak ended after a mere seven days. Let's try this again, refreshed after a restful national holiday.

Which holiday, you ask?

The administrative staff at BU were mercifully absent today due to Veterans' Day (a somber memorial whose observance I support), and in Cologne they celebrated the start of Karnival, but in this Familie the eleventh of the eleventh is Lahm Tag, being as it is the birthday of the all-time number world class Außenverteidiger, FC Bayern München star and German National Team captain, our Topfavorit Philipp Lahm.





Philipp Lahm is Numero Uno!

Why I Wake Early

Because daylight saving time ended this morning, among other reasons.

For the final day of our recuperation weekend, M. and I were thrilled to attend the season opener for Coro Allegro and to hear the singing of our friends J. & T. The choral concert was held at Sanders Theatre at Harvard and comprised three pieces. The first was In the Beginning, Aaron Copland's first choral composition, musically staging the first verses of Genesis, and it featured the lovely mezzo-soprano voice of Hanna Penn for the solo.

The middle piece, Frogs, set a series of Edo period haikus (all involving amphibians and translated by Harry Behn) to music. Incredibly, rousingly fun, especially the a capella rendition/imitation of

Frog-school competing

with lark-school at dusk softly

in the art of song…

The concert finished with a familiar piece, Why I Wake Early, which melded the music of Ronald Perera and the poetry of Mary Oliver. The verses, written over the course of 30 years, trace a day's cycle through the observed natural world, and though my appreciation of poetry is meager and uncultivated, even I found Oliver's words lovely.

The evening finale (a perk of having friends in the band) was dinner with the musicians, including soloist and choral director, at Rani, the excellent Indian restaurant at Coolidge Corner we'd been meaning to try for quite some time. Delicious.

The music was gorgeous, always, and the meal with friends was a wonderful cap to a terrific weekend. With an extra hour of sleep, I think we'll be able to face the coming week.

 

Bébés

NaBloPoMo Day 6: After M. taught readin' and 'ritin' (but not 'rithmetic) to her German high school students, we took the afternoon off and walked the Battle Trail of the Minute Man National Historical Park. Quite nice, especially since so few people were there, but we discovered that we are far out of practice just walking around. By the time we'd made it to the end and back (four miles at most), the light had faded and we were pooped!

Our postprandial entertainment was the film Babies, which tracks four infants, from Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco, through their first year of life. It was pretty, but also pretty simple. Lesson for would be parents: raise your child in the desert! Life in a marginal environment appears to instill a rough, effective discipline yet does not subtract from playfulness. The children develop faster and the parents don't act like overanxious froofroo goofballs who rolled up their sense with their yoga mats and left it in the trunk of their SUV. Just let the kids roam together (goat and human alike), and they'll probably turn out fine. Worked for me, anyway.

Va, Tosca!

NaBloPoMo Day 5: M. and I have just returned home from an absolutely and deservedly (especially for M.) wonderful Friday evening out. Especially deserved for M. because she mailed off the 400 page final draft of her dissertation to her committee at the start of the week, culminating months of arduous, unceasing, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing intellectual labor. She needed a break (and a round of applause)!

Finally, an opportunity for a date. First we dined at our favorite French restaurant in Boston, the ever-exquisite Petit Robert. Warm, crusty pain baguette, melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguinon, incredible apple tart. Oh la la, c'est deliceaux!

Following this gustatory delight, we attended the opening night of Tosca at the Boston Lyric Opera, which will likely be our only opera this season. This was the first time either of us had seen this particular opera. We arrived with high expectations, and neither Puccini nor the players disappointed. I am too ignorant a music listener to say more than that the singing and the score were beautiful, and the acting near superb. I will say that the BLO's artistic sensibilities impressed (as they usually do): in this rendering, the story was set in 1930s fascist Italy, a staging choice that worked perfectly. Bravo to the director and to the set and costume designers.

And the youthful denizens of Beantown also contributed to an authentically Friday Night Boston experience. Walking from the theater to the Boylston Street station, we were overtaken by waves of rude young men stumbled after by throngs of hooker-chic clad young women in totteringly steep high heels. They pushed past us into the T, but fortunately a clique of more completely dressed students were crowded around us. They were BU students who had also just seen Tosca from the cheap seats reserved for the college constituency. Give them cultural participation points for choosing opera over Bros and Hoes night with the Dekes, but shake your head at the level of rhetorical sophistication $50,000 a year buys these days:

"And you know that Scorpio dude, I was like, girl, that guy is going to play you hard. He was just like downright untrustworthy, you know what I'm saying?"

A Dog's Eye View

NaBloPoMo Day 4: After such a long hiatus, it has been very hard to get back into blogging with any regularity (though of course, even at the best of times posting here has been quite irregular). November's NaBloPoMo challenge seemed to present a good opportunity to use an external stimulus to get back into the swing of things. Even in the midst of a more stressful job application period last year, M. and I found the time and energy to post something each day of November. Yet just four days into this year's NaBloPoMo, I'm struggling to maintain blogging momentum! And the posts have been pretty boring, even by my standards. Yesterday's post satisfies the conditions of NaBloPoMo only by the thinnest technicality, and I would normally be embarrassed to report on celebrity comings and goings in the Twitterverse.

My excuse is that I was in the midst of reading The Hippopotamus at the time, and nothing else popped to mind to remark upon. I finished reading Fry's novel last night, and I can report that it is a satisfactorily entertaining, if thinly plotted, little story, stitched together from the sort of silly, supercilious banter which the BBC has trained us to expect from the waning British aristocracy. Perhaps most enjoyable was the vocabulary — I learned a new word every chapter. (Apologies to Mr. Barfield, my high school Latin teacher, but "balneal" required a visit to Mr. Webster. But then again, I seldom bathe.) And if the author's wit and diction are as fluent in person as on the page, he must be iridescent as a cocktail party guest. Still, the book is only worth reading if you're in the right kind of mood, say you've just watched a Wodehouse adaptation and want more of the same, only a bit more modern. I wouldn't rush out to buy the next Fry novel, but I'd pick it up on remainder and keep it on the shelf for when fancy strikes.

For no good reason, other than my affection for dogs, be they full-furred or fictional, I'll end with a quote:

Soda jumped and barked with pleasure. Never occurred to her to wonder what the fuck we were doing playing games like this late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Still, I suppose if you're a dog and are used to watching humans zooming around at high speed in metal boxes, staring at large sheets of paper at breakfast-time and breathing in smoke from short white tubes, then nothing the species does has the power to surprise you.

Not even supporting the Tea Party?

 

 

 

 

 

NaBloPoMo Filler

Until tomorrow ......

Twittering Hippopotami

Jeeves is giving up twittering because of the uproar/controversy/negative response to some comments he made recently. I have no comment on his comments, other than that they seem pretty foolish, but when it struck me when I read them that they sounded awfully familiar. Indeed, the sentiment, spoken by a dissipated poet making an ass of himself at a dinner party, appears almost verbatim in a novel he wrote some fifteen years ago, The Hippopotamus. Art presages life.

 

Mmm ... tasty!

I spent the middle of last month in Edinburgh attending a vastly overpriced and underwhelming conference on systems biology, a still nascent field which lies (face down in a puddle) somewhere near the intersection of computer science, physics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, statistics, mathematics, entrepreneurial finance, and, to a slight extent, biology. I'd had high hopes for the conference, but by its third day I was thoroughly convinced that my time would be better spent exploring the city and the surrounding area than being bored into a coma listening to another talk whose chief scientific conclusion was "The system turns out to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought."

More complaints about the conference (followed by lauds of Edinburgh) to follow in another post. Here let me just say that though I found the Scots to be far friendlier than their neighbors to the south, but their culinary taste leaves just as much to be desired. Exhibit A: