Piano

In my idle days, I've been playing a lot of piano. I like to warm up with some easy but affective pieces, mostly Chopin Nocturnes or more recently Mazurkas. I'm not a Romanticist in literature, but I do love Romantic music. I'm starting to play a Brahms Intermezzo (A Major, Op. 118), but I have to be careful not to sight read the whole thing and then try to fine tune it. I'm impatient. I need to prevent myself from moving past the first section until it's solid, and start off hands separate. It's just so much more immediately satisfying to sight read through, but that's how one develops bad habits and awkward fingering. I have definitely done that with the Beethoven Pathetique Sonata--I started out just sight reading it because I love it, but I think it'll be hard to make it really good now because of that.

I love looking at sheet music. As the nerd that I am, I like listening to recorded music and following along with my score, making notes. I've been thinking a lot about structure and phrasing, and making sure that it's clear where phrases begin and end. Playing Chopin, I've been using a lot of rubato; I'm trying to resist messing about with time in Beethoven's slow movements. At least I have some liberty with all the ornaments.

What I love most about being able to play is that it's really a fundamental shift in my state of being: my normal everyday (prosaic) state and the instinctive conduit. It's not really an intellectual exercise, though I do have to make certain decisions before and re-evaluate after. My technique may not be perfect, but I am committed to respecting the spirit. It's important to have this sort of meditation, some arational experience--that's why many people pray. I suppose, then, that it's art that I worship. Too cheesy?

Election Post-Mortem

There's a video from The Onion that is funny but true: I feel like a huge part of my life is missing now that the election is over. Honestly, I feel fundamentally and essentially lonely, even though I have lots of friends, because I don't have the companionship of my research or work. I hope I start a job soon, because it's really driving me crazy to be so idle. I've been playing piano a lot and have started reading Ian McEwan's Saturday, but more on that in another entry.

I've always been interested in politics. In the Summer of 2007, I started noticing this Obama guy, the junior senator from Illinois, someone challenging Hillary's seemingly easy path to victory. By the time winter rolled around, I had already listened to the audiobooks of Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope, which are really wonderful not just in their content but because Obama himself reads them (and won Grammys for his performance). I was especially moved by Dreams from my Father, because I felt a lot of personal connections with him. Our lives have been different in a lot of ways (I had two engaged parents, was relatively privileged), but we both lived in many places and often looked different than the people around us. I wish I had even a fraction of his discipline (and intelligence, but that may be too much to ask), but unfortunately I'm a hopeless dilettante.

Before the primaries started, it seemed clear that Obama was running in order to strengthen his national presence. However, once underway, Obama brought up all our hopes that he would win. Those early speeches are incredible, and not merely for their rhetorical prowess. Of course, Obama's race speech was the most significant--the first time a politician spoke to us as adults capable of processing nuance. When accused of being naive in wanting to talk to Iran and other hostile countries, Obama defended his position instead of backtracking; he used the same tactic with Reverend Wright. When I saw the complete videos of Wright, I really didn't think they were as controversial as anything people express on university campuses. It's true that it's not really what Wright said that is problematic, but his vision of America as static. Perhaps Obama is actually a Hegelian--the dialectic movement towards the more perfect union!

I don't dislike Hillary as many do, and she's been pretty good since her concession. It must have been hard for her, personally, to give up what once seemed to be a sure thing. Yet I do think all that shot drinking, gun talking, and of course limited knowledge of whether or not Obama is Muslim demonstrate how out-of-touch she was, and willing to compromise a coherent vision in order to win. This was much McCain's problem too: no central, focused message. And, of course, Sarah Palin...

Many "liberal intellectual elites" detest Sarah Palin, and it is easy to do so. What worries me is not so much her, but how she was allowed to grow into such a large role. I don't think intellectuals are necessarily better than others (though many are, see Obama), but active anti-intellectualism is frightening. Palin is also dangerously incurious. She seems like the anti-Obama: no nuance, inflexible, certain without reason, and mean! I think of her as Regina from Mean Girls, which is to say that of course she has a certain type of intelligence, but it's used primarily to manipulate, not to gain knowledge. At least Bush grew up with smart people around him...something must have gotten in there through osmosis.

The internet was the biggest factor in this election. John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. While I watched MSNBC every night (Hardball, Countdown, and my favourite Rachel Maddow), I spent a lot of time on HuffPost, Slate, and many other websites. I really feel like the McCain campaign's lies would not have been so damaging to him if not for the internet. Much of what they said could be refuted with a simple google.

Election night I had some friends over and overdrank sparkling wine. It was a wonderful, historic night. My new favourite mascara, Chanel's Exceptionnel, had to be put aside in favour of some clumpy waterproof--better that than mascara down my face... It took me a few days to recover physically and clean the kitchen, but it was well worth it and I had a smile on my face the whole time. I am certain that Obama won't live up to the inflated expectations, but I think in his acceptance speech he tried to make them more realistic. Really, it's just wonderful that, besides having the first non-white president, America has a leader who is measured, nuanced, flexible, and wants to learn.

Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, letters and diaries 1941-1973

My thesis on Elizabeth Bowen should have left me looking to read something unrelated, but _Love's Civil War_ was released the same day as I got my reader reports and I felt I had to start it right away. It did not disappoint. Ritchie describes Bowen in one of his first diaries entries about her:

"She is a witch, that's what it is. In the first place how can a woman of forty with gold bangles and the face of a woman of forty and the air of a don's wife, how can such a woman have such a body--like Donatello's David I told her when I first saw what it was like. Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back [. . .]. Would I ever have fallen for her if it hadn't been for her books? I very much doubt it. But now I can't separate her from her literary self. It's as if the woman I 'love' were always accompanied by a companion spirit infinitely more exciting and more poetic and more profound than E herself."

It seems terribly intimate after a couple years of reading and researching a person to hear her lover's description of her. Her voice is so strong in her novels, literally authoritative, but many of her letters to Ritchie display an enormous vulnerability. I tend to stay away from biographical interpretations, but this really does give me greater insight. She writes that The House in Paris seems the most "screenworthy" of her novels: my chapter on that novel was called "Palimpsests and Portals: The Screen Aesthetic of The House in Paris." I felt vindicated. It was also illuminating to read about how she wrote, not only the process but also where and with what she surrounded herself. Much of her writing is about love and innocence; to see her in love, and hear her thoughts on her experiences, is a privilege. It's unearned but welcome.

I'm often quite cynical about love, but I want to believe in it. I feel like the kind of love between Bowen and Ritchie would perhaps not have survived marriage. In fact, it seems like the longest they were ever physically together was two weeks and as painful as those separations were they probably contributed to the longevity of the relationship. They are such strong personalities that it seems like clashes would have been inevitable. Charles had a good marriage with Sylvia because she accomodated him, and he could sleep with other women as he wished. Nevertheless, the fact that this love was sustained, that they had each other, that they were each the other's most important person, is a beautiful thing to try to know.