Caveat Lector

On balance, I have had a pretty crappy week. It hasn’t been entirely crappy, mind you, but the not-so-bad bits have mostly served to throw the truly astonishingly craptastical bits into sharp relief.

Today my gaming group came over and we played Kill Puppies for Satan. No, it’s a real game and everything, and it’s every bit as wrong and twisted as it sounds.

And the amazing thing is? I feel much, much better now.

My husband knows what to get for his geeky wife. Full first season of Babylon 5 on DVD, squee!

“How’d you know I wanted that?” I asked him.

He laid a finger beside his nose. “Psi-Corps training,” he said.

Heh. That’s my man, that is.

My friend Sarah Monette has the first chapter of her second book The Virtu up on her website. (Less pretty but more accessible version here.) It’s a sequel, so those of you who haven’t read Mélusine won’t entirely get what’s going on… but that just means you need to go out and get your hands on Mélusine.

There’s a wee bit of anti-academia snark that I quite enjoyed. (Monette is Dr. Monette, so she comes by anti-academia snark honestly. Unlike, you know, scrubs like me.) If you ask me, sci-fi and fantasy authors do anti-academic snark better than anyone.

I picked up one of those David Lodge books everyone raves about. Thought it painfully obvious, annoyingly sexist, and (worst of all) so dull I didn’t even finish it.

But I love The Dispossessed, in which an academic pissing contest threatens anarchist utopia. Or The Gods Themselves, in which the gods themselves contend in vain (?) against the rank stupidity of an academic’s ego.

Sure, I’m mean and small-minded and all that. Granted. Don’t let that stop you from reading The Virtu, ’k?

When I knew for sure that I’d landed the job I now occupy, I went looking around for Things To Do. You know, fun stuff. I found the Fairfax Choral Society (beware loud music clip) and clicked over to their calendar page.

Wow! Cool! They’re doing the Lord of the Rings orchestral suite!

Oh. Damn. They’ve already done the Lord of the Rings orchestral suite.

Well, I didn’t hold it against them that they didn’t wait for me—and that turns out to be just as well, because WE MIGHT HAVE A CHANCE TO DO IT AGAIN!!! and I’m all squee-y and excited at the prospect.

Think good thoughts. I really want to do this one!

Octavia Butler died unexpectedly today.

I know nothing of her save her writing, so I don’t even know where I should direct condolences.

But what a loss to people who read!

Or: Sometimes It’s Good When You’re Not Who They Think You Are

Last night’s chorus rehearsal was one of the ones that reminds you why you bother. We actually started making some music. Not consistently, and not all the way through, but we definitely rose above the notes on the page here and there. The Holst is still sounding pretty rough, but Divine Grace will eventually start dancing. The Duruflé is helped along by half the chorus (not including me) already knowing it; but really, it’s hard not to have fun firing a big old high E-flat (in exCELsis, baby!) into the back rafters. I like the Chilcott Canticles more every time we sing them. The Ravel is still loathsome and vile, but at least it’s getting to be correctly-sung vileness.

The Liber Usualis isn’t generally accorded pride of place in pr0n collections, I shouldn’t think, but our conductor read out a few bits about the proper accentuation of Latin that turned out to be, shall we say, a wee bit ecstatic. “Oh, look,” he deadpanned. “This is all on page xxx.” Well, that explains it, then.

Some conductors (one in particular I once sang for) would have gotten all offended and self-righteous about our flippancy in the face of the Holy Thing that is Ye Musicke. Not our guy. He laughed right along with us before using the energy generated by the laughter to launch into a pretty ripping practice of the Duruflé “Sanctus.” I point this out to lend color to what follows.

At break, one of the silent auction backers got up to talk about some of the donations. “And we have,” she said, “three Lord of the Rings posters inscribed and signed by the guy who did the Tolkien language translations for the Peter Jackson movies!”

Which yes, they do, because I bought them and chivvied David into decorating them, because the choral society did the orchestral suite last spring and I thought they’d be appreciated.

“Him?” scoffed a woman sitting behind me. “He’s such a jerk.”

Er, okay. Um. I happen to be married to said jerk.

Turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Seems the choral society called upon a local expert to help them with pronunciation for the choral bits in the orchestral suite. The woman who had spoken up regaled me with the whole story at break, though she couldn’t remember the guy’s name, and the Tolkien-verse has quite a few people it could have been, so I’m not speculating.

Anyway, seems he swallowed up an entire rehearsal, which is bad enough, since members of this particular choral society pay handsome amounts for the privilege of singing, and at rehearsal we expect to, you know, sing. And he did not stick to his brief, which was pronunciation, either. He went off on a huge tirade about how much he hated the movies, how they Sacreligiously Diverged from the Holy Book of the Blessed Tolkien, how lousy David’s work was, how lousy Howard Shore’s work was, and so on and so forth ad (according to my informant) nauseam.

He did not win any fans in so doing; that was perfectly clear from the nods and grimaces greeting my informant’s recitation.

Me, I’m just glad they didn’t mean poor David!

So I saw the big three-hanky tearjerker movie today. Bawled like a big baby. Such a sweet love story.

Yeah, yeah, you all know I mean King Kong.

Boy, I haven’t seen a work of art this meta since I quit reading intentionally meta-tastic fiction after my comp lit degree. Wow, meta. Hugely meta. This movie didn’t miss a single chance to comment on itself, right down to completely undercutting its own final line. There’s simply no way to believe a single word that character says by then. He could say his own name, and I’d run to the court records looking for stolen identities. And, of course, we’ve had ample evidence contradicting the line.

Linguists both pro and am should see this movie; I contend that language and sincerity are the flip-bits that turn Kong and Denham into opposites. Even the Skull Islanders (as David well knows, though I was right about his lack of a credit) have language—though all in all, I think I agree with Jackson that the most one can do with that portion of source material is use it as little as possible.

(The ultimate source, of course—the book, not the 1933 flick—is stunningly racist from soup to nuts.)

I liked it. As many others have said, I could have used a bit less of the creature-feature, but Jackson is a creature-featurer from way back, so if that’s the price of a smart script otherwise, I’ll pay it.

With the gift-card my secret-prezzer from work gave me, I treated myself (okay, and David, seeing as how he lives in the same place as me) to the full recordings of the Fellowship of the Ring score. So I am now firmly ensconced in the Realm of Ultimate Squee, because this is some shiny damn music.

(Yes, I am mixing my fandoms. Cope.)

I apologize to my downstairs neighbors for polkaing the night away to Bilbo’s party music. With any luck, they aren’t actually home.

I missed a chance to sing the orchestral suite; the chorus I’m now in did it last May. I shall just have to ask around to see if anyone will sell me their score, which has been on my I-want list for a while. I hope there’ll be another chance someday, because completely aside from getting to sing kick-ass music, singing words my husband translated would just, well, kick ass.

Since it will be fresh in their minds, however, I’m emailing the chorus manager to see what we can give them for their silent auction in February.

As consolation, I am busily teaching myself all the parts to “The Passing of the Elves,” which is the real reason I had to have this recording. David, bemused, kindly went into his files to find me the words…

Thanks to Pascale for pointing me to this lovely wordhord for the Anglo-Saxon geek. Made my day.

My Old English is purely secondhand (reading over my husband’s shoulder while he took it, many years ago), but this does look to be the straight-up deal. Take leohtspecca for “pixel.” Light-speck. Makes sense. And “feorransprecagewrit,” far-speak-written, for fax.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some weagebetung to do with my gifgaderung.

So the smart-camp folks I was involved with as a wee sproglet are doing yet another research study. (One of the things they don’t really emphasize about smart camps is that they’re constantly used for research guinea-pigging. Each time I went to smart camp, one night of camp was set aside specifically for us to guinea-pig for the education researchers.)

I’m all “up with research!” so I filled out their lengthy survey. (I expect I’ve got some smart-camp readers, so I won’t mess up the researchers’ results by talking about the study’s subject matter.) Lo and behold, they sent me $15 at -m-z-n.c-m as a thank-you. Nice of them.

I thought about Weighty Library Tomes, but I haven’t indulged my inner geek-child for quite some time, so I let smart camp pay for half the cost of the Firefly DVDs instead.

Happy geek am I. I dig that show.

(And no, nobody needs to know what my seventh-grade SAT scores were. Yes, I could have gotten into college on the strength of them, but so what?)