Thoroughly Discombobulated

Freedom, it is said, is a wonderful thing.

And yet here I am, feeling like a balloon whose string has been cut, waiting to find out if I'm filled with helium and just waiting for the right gust of air to float out into the blue unknown, or whether it really is just ordinary air in my rubber lungs, and it's only a matter of time before I sink, shrivel, and collapse in on myself.

For those of you who didn't know, yesterday I delivered my final honours presentation, thus effectively completing my degree. We celebrated afterwards with cake (lemon meringue pie with a M:L ratio of at least 5:1) and these beautiful flowers appeared, courtesy of my mum. Seventeen and a half years of full-time education and all of a sudden I'm expected to actually do something with it. Fortunately, I appear to have forgotten everything I ever knew about logarithms and trigonometry (occasionally I amuse myself by trying to solve the problems left on the blackboard of one the classrooms I teach in - at the moment year 8 are getting into surds and year 9 is making headway with quadratic equations, which is fun) so at least you are spared my hey-it's-a-triangle-look-what-I-can-do rant. Instead you get the musicology-why-oh-why moanings. It's all very well for shiny new architects and engineers and, I don't know, chaos theorists and highly trained theatrical waiters and teachers who are actually qualified to warp young minds and don't just make it all up as they go along, like I do... but where is the thriving musicology firm for me to work my way up in? Where is the musicological newspaper with a distribution in the millions that I can go and be a lackey for? Where are the helpful hints from Musicology For Fun And Profit?

So this is an alert. Would all musicologists reading this please write in and tell me what it is they actually do?

On the shelf

Since I have never quite gotten around to actually telling anyone I was doing this - largely because I suspected (as seen below) that I would never be able to keep it up - I have taken the liberty of tagging myself with a meme from Anni's wonderful website. Because I like books. And lists. Both of which you have undoubtedly spotted by now.

So here we are.

1. One book that changed your life
At this point, right at the start, I really ought to say the Bible. But since it's been a part of my life since the year dot, I'm sorry to say that it doesn't always feel like that. Come on people, I was a Sunday School nerd. I got attendance awards and end-of-year prizes and everything. And I beat the other teacher's son in a verse race. Ha! (Now, if that's not a particularly virulent outburst of Vainglory, for all you WAMmers out there, what is?)
Studying Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion at school introduced me to Phenomenology, a wonderful theory of ideas that put into words a lot of ideas I'd had but had never been able to describe properly. Infinite subjectivity may be old hat to everyone who grew up with Levi-Strauss on their bookshelves, but I still like it.

2. One book you've read more than once
Only one?!!!!
Richard Llewellyn's How Green was my Valley is one of my all-time favourites. And not just because I like seeing my name in print. The prose has such a lovely limpid flow. Where oh where has my copy gone? It took me years to find it!

3. One book you'd want on a desert island
The Complete Works of Dickens. Or Shakespeare. Or Oscar Wilde. Anything good and fat with the whole world inside.

4. One book that made you giddy
Now, is that supposed to be giggling giddy or head-spinning giddy? Because I read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in three and a half hours and I can tell you that being alone in a silent house after that made me feel that my brain was about to melt.
In the middle of the continuum is William Goldman's The Princess Bride - if anyone can tell me where the truth stops and the postmodernism starts, I'd be grateful.
And on the lighter end of things is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh; it's not always laugh-out-loud but never fails to keep me smiling.

5. One book that wracked you with sobs
I wouldn't call it wracked, exactly, but I always cry in Little Women when Beth dies. And likewise in the Anne series for Ruby Gillis. Characters who die young always leave me with a bitter resentment towards those who go on in the next chapter as though nothing had ever happened.

6. One book that you wish had been written
I wish there were a better biography of French composer Germaine Tailleferre available. Her music is sweet enough, if not exactly spellbinding, but she had a remarkable life - friends with Coco Chanel, someone significant (Stravinsky?) described her as "his musical daughter", her husband attempted to shoot her while she was pregnant... a very operatic life! The only one that I've found was disastrous, to say the least. I'd also like a nice colourful biography of whatshername, another French woman - the one with the red hair that most of the artistic community of Paris was madly in love with. But that's because I'm an old sook, I suppose.

7. One book that you wish had never been written
I had great difficulty with Flaubert's Madame Bovary - the main character swallows arsenic and dies in agony, her death throes are described in detail over several pages, and yet it's dull. Honestly.

8. One book you're currently reading
I've had a lovely time in the past few weeks, investing in and reading books. It's a wonderful feeling to have new books around, I haven't done it in ages. In order of reading, they have been Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and I'm just about to start Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. Yes, I know that's a lot more than one, but my mind is full of them. And yet, strangely enough, having so many stories inside seems to make me more like myself, and less like a moth trapped between the pages, which is my usual state while reading. Strange.

9. One book you've been meaning to read
Every time I go to get Catch 22 from the library it seems to be out. I'd also like to become better acquainted with the Arabian Nights (Rimsky-Korsakov has made me fall in love with Sheherazade)... Apparently Karlheinz Stockhausen used to discuss Adorno's Negative Dialectics with his friends on the train on the way to school, so that's a challenge to crash-tackle!

10. Now tag 5 bloggers
Gracious, do I even know 5 bloggers? I suppose I can re-tag Anni again (it's a bit like ping-pong for her) and also Dennis (who had his garden variant of this from Anni), and John's terribly amusing effort (make sure you visit the colours that Derwent rejected while you're there. I'm rather fond of Baby Navy).

Oh, the doing and undoing

Alas, my prescience has once more come to haunt me.

Not that it happens often, mind you. You can count on the suckers of one tentacle the number of times I've been right about things recently. But I can always count on my procrastinating nature to take its rightful course. In other words, I apologise to the void for my long absence. Hello void! I do hope you haven't missed me too much.

Often, in the past few months when I have been struggling with my thesis (All You Never Wanted To Know About Birdsong and Modern Music, although my supervisor wouldn't let me call it that) I have come across ever-present examples of the unusual, the macabre, the whimsical, which would have fitted beautifully here. And of course I can remember none of them. But I am soon to be a free entity, so perhaps Blogging will not go the way of International Funny Hat Week or the Sydney Feuilletonists' Society. Perhaps I may even be inspired to resurrect these as well!

In the meantime, here are my current plans for the next few months. In a spirit of wild and useless enthusiasm, I intend to do the following:

1. Learn French.
2. Polish my German.
3. Get to grips with Latin.
4. Learn to recognise herbs by sight, smell, and taste (rather than by label)
5. Learn to cook - or at least to extend my range beyond biscotti and impossible pie.
6. Resurrect my neglected correspondance.
7. Ditto my neglected friends.
8. Read. Read anything that isn't tied down. So much to catch up on!
9. Practise. Get my piano tuned and give it a run for its money!
10. Write something. Write anything. Who knows?


Today's heading comes from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Yeomen of the Guard, quite a wonderful work which up until yesterday I was playing for. The number in question is a nice, winding quartet... and in D flat, which helps matters!