We celebrated Saturnalia on Sunday, ourselves, because the weekend was the most convenient time to open presents and prepare our Roman feast. This year it was leg of lamb, lentils, cucumber salad, barley, and our old favourite olive relish. Mmmmm. Olive relish. I could just scoop that stuff into my mouth with a shovel, and I don’t even like olives particularly. That’s the wonder of Saturnalia.
I’m sure you’ve got celebrations of your own up and coming, or already celebrated. Best wishes for a joyful season to you all! I, for one, am seriously ready for the days to start getting longer again, but even the anticipation has cheered me up immensely. We’re almost around that corner, and winter in Vancouver is only ever a prelude to spring, really.
Seraphina got a lovely mention on an NPR best-of list today. My heartfelt thanks to Maggie Stiefvater for that.
Last but not least, a favourite bit of never-fail seasonal cheer, whippet style:
A number of you have asked me very specific questions in the comments recently. I just wanted to pop in and apologize for being slow to answer. I was in bed all weekend with what appears to be the Actual Flu, hoping for my first fever-free day today. I’ll get to you soon. I just need a few more naps.
Thanks for your patience! Here, enjoy a little “pocket bassoon” music while you wait:
All hail the glorious rackett, prince of wind instruments!
Seraphina is a Morris Award Finalist, as you probably gleaned from the title of this post! You’re super clever that way, I realize. Here’s the official announcement from YALSA. I am so very honoured and excited, I can’t even tell you.
To celebrate, let’s join Metsatöll in Finland! That’s a great idea!
Play it Lauri! And the little conductor dude is adorable. Ah, I’d have loved to have been there.
Last week a friend told me an interesting idea about art, and I think I need to write it down. She’d told me before and it fell right out of my head. Clearly, there’s too much in my head if stuff this interesting is falling out, but the blog is just going to have to be my auxiliary brain for the moment.
The idea, most simply put, is that art is medicine.
It doesn’t sound so earth-shattering put that way, though. And what does that even mean? Art therapy? That’s not a new idea.
Art therapy tends to focus on doing art, though, which can indeed be a very healing activity. My friend’s angle was slightly different: when we make art we are not just healing ourselves, we are facilitating other people’s healing. It can take so many different forms: a blanket around someone’s shoulders; a forceful blow to the diaphragm that will dislodge airway obstructions; a strengthening elixir.
(Note: this is not the only thing art can do, and not all art does it. But it’s an interesting reason to make art, I think, and an interesting by-product sometimes when you think you’re doing something else)
Whatever we’re suffering, someone else is suffering too, has suffered before, will suffer again. We think we’re isolated and alone and unrelatable, but we’re not. We’re non-unique in the best possible way (to paraphrase John Green in An Abundance of Katherines)(My favourite John Green book for precisely this reason: Colin and I have suffered many of the same doubts and revelations).
Anyway. Just laying that out there to remind me, because this is something I’ve forgotten before. If it jogs an idea loose in you as well, hooray, and welcome.
Hm. I guess if I wanted to be alliterative, I’d have waited til Friday. I know from experience, though, that waiting begets procrastinating, which begets forgetting, which begets embarrassment, which begets more procrastinating, etc. It never ends. The time for fan art is NOW! I have proclaimed it thus, and thus mote it be!
Two lovely pictures after the fold. The second image is possibly spoilery. You have been warned.
School Library Journal has also included Seraphina on their Best Books 2012 list!
In other news: November is almost over, which is a relief. It is always my most challenging month, for some reason. The waning of daylight? The ceaseless rain? Maybe it’s the fact that the year is ending, and I’m not ready for it to. We can’t have 2013 yet; I haven’t done everything I wanted to do. It’s like, the midlife crisis of months. By December, I’m old and resigned to it and actually kind of looking forward to starting a new year.
No idea. But I think next year, instead of keeping my head down and trying to muscle through November, I’m going to do it differently. I haven’t quite decided how yet, but stay tuned. I’m sure you’ll all be holding your breaths.
Edited to add: Ooh! I also got mentioned on The Beat, which gives my old comic-loving heart a little thrill!
Oh, November. You always do this to me. We get toward the end, and I’m like, “Oh good, only a week left!” and then that week lasts two or three weeks. Time dilates in November, I’m convinced of it. There’s way more than there needs to be.
This year’s Quest for the Cure (for November) brings us back, as is so often the case, to the sublime Iarla Ó Lionáird. Here he is when he was young, already the prince of singers:
I find sean nos – Irish “old style” a capella singing – particularly suited to gloomy days. It’s music to be sung in company, cup in hand, around a fire. It’s the musical equivalent of a fire burned down to the mournful embers, to my mind. The bitter winds may blow, but here is understanding, humanity, and warmth.
Here’s the somewhat earthier voice of Lillis O Laoire, who I also enjoy. I wish there were more songs of his to choose from on YouTube, but we take what we can get.
A while ago, someone expressed astonishment at my musical tastes, surprise that I didn’t listen exclusively to classical music while writing, since Seraphina is so evocative of classical music. This got me thinking: I was raised on classical music, almost exclusively, but I don’t really listen to it much anymore. I’m not sure why that is, if I just got tired of it, or if it’s simply that I’m drawn toward the new (to me) and that new (to me) classical music is a) harder to find, and b) requires more work to listen to, and I just don’t have the spare brains for it right now.
I imagine this is one of those questions one could delve into for a long time to little purpose. The upshot is, I have decided to go back in time a bit, to some of my favourite classical pieces I haven’t listened to in ages. A trip down memory lane, as it were.
Here’s some Ravel that one of my sisters reminded me of recently: Le Tombeau de Couperin. I own a recording of it, but I never listen to it, not because I don’t still love the piece but because in my recording they just play it too damn fast. Have a listen (and a look! And check out the awesome oboist!).
I had been baffled by my too-fast recording, but some of the comments below this video have brought something into focus for me: the oboist has to use circular breathing for some of the longer passages. Um, WOW. Playing it faster would mean you got to breathe sooner; maybe that’s why they take it so fast in my recording. Their oboist wasn’t as good as this Albrecht Mayer fellow.
What this really suggests, though, is that I need to look for a better recording for myself. Albrecht Mayer and the Berlin Philharmonic are a good place to start, it sounds like.
Ah, isn’t it gorgeous, though? Pastoral, lively, bright. I first listened to this piece when I was about 11 years old and was just reading Tolkien for the first time, so it’s still inextricably (and absurdly, perhaps) associated with hobbits and elves in my mind. But oh, that flute trill at the end is like audible sunlight. Good times, happy memories.
Rachel Hartman 