marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote in [community profile] books2025-07-22 11:11 am

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 6

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 6 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers ahead for the earlier works.

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redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-22 08:36 am

Well, I'm home

We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

The trip home was OK as these things go: I ordered a cab to take us to Heathrow, using the service Mom always used, and paid in cash using my half of the British money she'd had in an envelope, including a generous tip for the driver. We had time to finish things like washing our dishes and clearing Mom's data off her computer before leaving, and enough time at the airport to be at the gate before boarding started, but not enough to get bored. I arranged the cab, and got us all aisle seats for the flight home, on Sunday, and then turned everything over to Cattitude and Adrian once we got to Heathrow. By the time we got off the plane, I was so worn out that I was stopping occasionally to lean on the walls in the airport, but fortunately doing better once we got home.

I woke up this morning at 7:30 Boston time, which seemed good--about 7.5 hours sleep, and back on my home time zone. The milk from before we left was iffy but the cut of tea tasted OK. The igniters for the stove burners didn't work when I turned them on, but I remembered both that we have long matches for just this purpose, and where we keep them, so that was OK for the moment, and we can investigate that further when Adrian and Cattitude are also awake.

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.
calimac: (Haydn)
calimac ([personal profile] calimac) wrote2025-07-22 03:33 am

choral celebration

B. doesn't sing much any more - medical reasons have put paid to it - but she dusted off her voice for a special occasion on Saturday. A concert was being held at San Jose State to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Charlene Archibeque, long-time choral director in the music dept. About a hundred of her grateful former students - some local, some from across the country - were gathering to form an ad hoc choir for the occasion, and B. was perforce among them. She's long talked about how much she learned from being in a chorus under Dr. A., and this was the opportunity to show her respects.

I drove her down to the SJS music building that morning (having previously ferreted out the secret back alleyway in so that she didn't have to walk far) to drop her off for the chorus's one and only in-person rehearsal, and then came back for the concert in the afternoon. Dr. A. herself and several former students who've gone into choral conducting led a total of 16 items, most of them unaccompanied, a few with piano. They included pieces that Dr. A. had composed or arranged herself, mostly for her doctoral dissertation; a few classical standards including Anton Bruckner's supremely beautiful "Locus iste"; and several folksongs and spirituals, including this really striking arrangement of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho."

The chorus sound was rich, full, and powerful throughout, and not just because it was a large group. Even after many years in most cases, these were good students who had been well-taught.

Afterwards, most of the chorus members and a few sundry like myself adjourned to a function room at a local hotel that had no available parking, for a reception/buffet and a lot of schmoozing among old fellow students. A small cake was presented to Dr. A. and everybody sang "Happy Birthday" at 7:15, because that was the date of her birthday.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote in [community profile] books2025-07-21 01:10 pm

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 5

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 5 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers ahead for the earlier works.

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calimac: (Haydn)
calimac ([personal profile] calimac) wrote2025-07-21 02:46 am

Music@Menlo begins

The Menlo chamber music festival began on Friday, so I've got some catching up to do. Friday featured not a concert but a lecture. Aaron Boyd was to speak on the history of chamber music. I went because I'd heard Boyd lecture in past years: his profound erudition and eloquent lucidity always make for a delightful experience.

He began by saying that the size of the topic had thrown him for a loss. Seeking some guidance for a road through his topic, he turned to A.I. But while he tried a vast variety of prompts, he found that invariably the A.I. gave him what he called "completely useless blandnesses."

So, having already covered much of the central history in previous years' lectures, he focused on the edges. The first half was a prehistory, tracing from the first medieval definition of chamber music as any music played in private rooms, as distinct from church or theatrical music. (There were no public concerts then, apart from theatrical performances.) Instrumental music evolved from adaptations of vocal forms, and through Renaissance and Baroque forms like viol consort music and trio sonatas, chamber music as we'd know it had a long history by the time Haydn developed the modern string quartet; he didn't work in a vacuum.

The second half explored works fitting the definition of "late style" as coined by the critic Theodor Adorno, and then proposed that chamber music itself is in a "late style" crisis, identified by Milton Babbitt's infamous 1958 article, "Who Cares If You Listen?", proposing that new classical music should be addressed to a hermetic audience of specialists and not to the general pubic, hermetic obscurity being one of Adorno's hallmarks of "late style." Boyd went on to say that even the reaction against Babbitt's total serialism was still "late style": the general public isn't going to listen to a five-hour piece by Morton Feldman, either.

I think he's excluding a middle, here. The composers inspired by Feldman and Cage eschew their extremes too, and produce music that concert audiences want to hear, as any number of Menlo contemporary music concerts have demonstrated.

Still, Boyd is right in a larger sense, that even the general concert audience for classical music is a hermetic group now, preserving the relics of a grandiose lost past civilization we cannot re-create.

But there was some music on Friday after all, a Prelude concert by the International Program artists having preceded the lecture. A crunchy and urgent version of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op 1/3 was followed by Schumann's Piano Quintet with strikingly vehement solos in the slow movement by violist Sofia Gilchenok; I'll be looking out for her in later concerts.
elynne: (Default)
elynne ([personal profile] elynne) wrote2025-07-20 02:12 pm

Dreams of Dead Stars, Part III, ch. 9: Anatomical Investigations

Note: this chapter is very NSFW! My apologies for the rather abrupt end to this rather short chapter. I’m still working on getting myself back into a regular writing groove, and for that I’m going to skip another week, so the second half of this scene will be posted on Sunday, August 3rd. Thank you so much for reading, and for your patience!

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote in [community profile] books2025-07-20 04:53 pm

Outlaw of the Outer Stars

Outlaw of the Outer Stars by John C. Wright

The adventures continue!

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redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-20 09:14 pm
Entry tags:

National Gallery

We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

So we went to the National Gallery, a few bus stops away, and looked at paintings. I wasn't up for a huge amount of walking, but bny the time I was ready to leave, so were Adrian and Cattitude. We spent a few minutes just enjoyong being in Trafalgar Square on a sunny afternoon, then walked to Charing Cross to get the Underground. Annoyingly, while it was (as whichever app Cattitude was using said) only a few minutes walk to Charing Cross, there was a lot more walking underground, and we had to go down several flights of stairs.

ETA: I was emotionally worn out to the point that I was glad it was just t he three of us yesterday, not socializing with anyone else. I hadn't realized that beforehand, only that I was tired enough that committing to anything involving other people seemed imprudent. Being around my brother for most of several consecutive days was a lot of 'there are people here,' even though, or because, much of it wasn't socializing so much as being near each other and sometimes asking whether we needed, or wanted, various items.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little my joints hurt by the time we got back to Mom's flat. I took both naproxen and acetominophen before we left, and wore my better walking shoes and a pair of smartwool socks, and the combination sdeems to have done me a lot of good.

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).
jesse_the_k: Scrabble triple-value badge reading "triple nerd score" (word nerd)
Jesse the K ([personal profile] jesse_the_k) wrote2025-07-20 12:38 pm

Nifty New [community profile] fan_writers Community

[community profile] fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by [personal profile] china_shop and [personal profile] mific

Banner shows busy hands typing on laptop and handwritten edited page

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-19 10:36 pm

Mission accomplished

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

rocky41_7: (Default)
rocky41_7 ([personal profile] rocky41_7) wrote in [community profile] books2025-07-19 09:47 am

Recent Reading: The Goblin Emperor

I first read The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison last year, but I never got around to reviewing it, in part because I didn't know what to say about it. My friends had loved it, and while I'd found it enjoyable, I was still percolating on what I liked (or didn't!) about it. Listening to The Witness for the Dead, a book in the same universe, got me thinking about TGE again, so this month I gave it a re-read. This time, it all clicked.
 
This book is truly such an enjoyable read. The basics of Maia's tale are not unfamiliar—a seeming nobody is thrust into a position of power no one ever expected them to have—but Addison puts her own fascinating spin on it. It has the same feeling I got from The Witness for the Dead, where the story prioritizes doing the right thing and many if not most of the characters in it are striving to be good people (whatever that means for them). It makes a nice contrast to the very selfish, dark fantasy where you know from the start every character is just in it for themselves (and I do enjoy those too, not to say one is better than other!) The protagonist Maia in particular is put in any number of positions where he could misuse his power for personal gratification—such as imprisoning or executing his abusive former guardian, Setheris—but he, with conscious effort, chooses differently. That is not the kind of person—not the kind of emperor—Maia wants to be. And honestly—there is very gratifying fantasy, particularly today, in the idea of someone obtaining power and being committed to some kind of principles of proper governance, of having some code of honor above their own personal enrichment.
 
  
 
 
 
 

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird ([personal profile] redbird) wrote2025-07-19 10:43 am

not quite done

We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that \I hade worked steadily for longer that the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

We reached a point yesterday that I could be satisfied just packing everyting the three f us have decided to take--photos, the gorgeous candlesticks Mom left to Adrian (officially tp me, but she had discussed them with Acrian), and a few other s,mall mementoes, but there's a stack of paper that Mark wants to take a second look at: he was lookinmg both for financial paperwork as well as photos and other mementoes. It felt like it might be 45 minutes more work today, but could take tjhree times as long if we had tried to push through last night.

I told Andy and Adrian to go out and play yesterday, so they spent the afternoon at Kew Gardens. It is raining steadily now, and foercast to do so for several hours. I#m thinking I want to do not much today, just finish the tasks here, and maybe go out and do something interesting tomorrow, before leaving for Boston on Monday.

I am very glad we saw [personal profile] liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.
rocky41_7: (Default)
rocky41_7 ([personal profile] rocky41_7) wrote in [community profile] books2025-07-18 05:43 pm

Recent Reading: The Sapling Cage

Oof. Today I threw in the towel on Margaret Killjoy's The Sapling Cage because I'd rather be alone with my thoughts than sit through another three hours of this book. This is a fantasy book about a "boy," Lorel, who disguises herself as her female friend to join a witches' coven (She's a transgirl, but her journey on that understanding is part of the book, and she refers to herself as a boy for much of the story.)
 
First, I will say that I think Lorel is a protagonist written with love; clearly Killjoy wanted her to be relatable and sympathetic, and someone eager for a trans fantasy protag may be willing to forgive the book's many weaknesses for that. That said...
 
I was shocked to realize this book is not categorized as Young Adult/Youth literature. Lorel is 16 at the start of the book and she's very sixteen. She makes all the sorts of stupid, immature mistakes you would expect from a teenager, which makes her a realistic character, but also deeply frustrating to read as an adult, particularly since the first-person narration puts us right in her head. The book feels young even for a sixteen-year-old; it reads more like a preteen novel about teenagers.
 
The book itself feels incredibly juvenile, both in prose and in narrative. The writing is simplistic, the narrative barely there, and the worldbuilding painfully thin. The book infodumps on the reader constantly, going into detail about things that are then never relevant again and don't connect into any kind of overarching picture of what this world is like. Reads very much like the author just throwing a bunch of things she thought were cool at the reader without actually thinking about how they would impact her world or the characters in them.