Kristin Cashore's Blog, page 33

Simply Trying to Hear It

This video by "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart, called "Twelve Tones," is half an hour long, in addition to which, once you watch it, you'll want to watch it again. It's so worth it. I'm not sure how it'll be to watch if you have no music literacy whatsoever, but in case it's helpful, here's the Wikipedia page about the twelve-tone technique. (Personally, I think you can get a lot out of the video even if you don't understand everything that's going on – and it may make you want to go out and learn new things! It did for me.)



(Thanks, D!)

A note to anyone who's been trying (and failing) to watch those dance videos –

I just discovered that Fox has started posting the SYTYCD dance routines on YouTube and enabling embedding, so I went back and revised all the links in my earlier post. I also embedded a few of the dances so you can watch them right on my blog. So, if you wanted to see them but Fox's website has been making it impossible, try again!

Money Memories. (Also, Dancing.)

When I was a little girl, probably six or seven, my mother sent me to school every day with my lunch and a quarter to buy milk. At some point, I figured out that if instead of buying milk, I saved my milk money for two days, I could buy an ice cream, which cost 45¢, instead. It was a magnificent discovery. I can't remember what I did with the extra 5¢, but as I was an arithmetically-inclined and goal-oriented child with clear priorities, I'm guessing that every 9th day, I added that day's 25¢ to the 20¢ accumulated over the last eight days and used it to buy an ice cream. I wish I could remember where I kept the money. I have a vague memory of a little oval green plastic change purse that opened like a fish's mouth when you squeezed the edges.

Then one day, one of my sisters caught me eating an ice cream she knew I wasn't supposed to be eating, and ratted on me. She ratted on me! What a lack of foresight. I'm sure it felt good to rat on me, but not nearly as good as it would have felt if she'd started saving her milk money to buy herself ice cream.

I'm reading a book called Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building A Healthy Relationship with Money, by Kate Levinson, who is a psychotherapist. It's a book that acknowledges something hardly anyone acknowledges: Money is emotional. Our attitudes toward money are deeply tied to our childhood experiences of money, our most complicated relationships, and, most likely, a lot of ingrained habits and unquestioned assumptions we would do well to examine more closely. (So far, I see no reason why this book should be only for women.)

***

This season of So You Think You Can Dance is flatly (and out of the blue) one of the best seasons ever. I'm so glad someone had the idea for previous contestants to come back as All-Stars, helping, and dancing with, current contestants. When they come back, they're all grown up, they're even better dancers, and I'm guessing they're a lot less stressed out; in a lot of cases, I like them so much more. Even the ones I loved from the start (like Travis, Twitch, Catherine, and PASHA), I like more!

(ETA: Hurrah! Fox has apparently gotten the message and made its videos available on YouTube – and for embedding. I've changed the links below so you don't have to deal with their crappy website, and embedded my favorite dances.)

This season, someone came up with the wonderful idea of an episode in which All-Stars both choreograph for and dance with the contestants. We viewers have gotten used to the stunning choreography of previous contestants Travis Wall (contemporary) and Dmitry Chaplin (ballroom), for example, but what fun to get to watch them dance again, and their own choreography, with current contestants! (Here's what happens when Mark Kanemura choreographs for himself and others.) Travis was always my favorite contestant the year he competed; what a pleasure to see him dance his own work with current contestant Amy Yakima. (I can't find a working clip, but Travis and Amy will certainly perform this dance again during the season finale on Tuesday.) (ETA: Yay! Here it is, and I'm embedding it below.)



Dmitry, on the other hand – I couldn't take Dmitry seriously when he was a contestant (because he was always ripping his shirt off. ALWAYS). How things have changed; Dmitry's rumba, which he choreographed for and danced with current contestant Hayley Erbert, knocked my socks off. (ETA: And now I've embedded it right here.)



I could link to twenty great routines from this season, but since Travis is a favorite of mine, I'll limit myself to two recent routines choreographed by him, just for fun. First, All-Star Robert Roldan and contestant Tucker Knox, in Travis's second beautiful routine for two men on this show. (If you only watch one routine, watch this one.) (ETA: Embedded below.)



Second – I've been waiting all season for contestants Fik-Shun and Jasmine Harper to dance together, because she is MUCH taller than he is, and the show tends to try to avoid matching tall women with short men. Travis did such a beautiful job choreographing them together in this "underwater" dance. These two contestants have been among my favorites from the beginning, and I have to say, for the world's most adorable hip-hop dancer, I'm always amazed at the way Fik-Shun can inhabit serious roles. (ETA: The routine embedded here.)



Finally, since this post is already a mess of edits and weird formatting, it seems like a good moment to remind those readers who receive my posts as emails that if you can't see the videos I've embedded, just go to my Blog Actual.

Cavalia's Odysseo

I went to see Cavalia's Odysseo, which is this beautiful show involving horses, trainers, acrobats, riders, aerialists, and musicians currently taking place under an enormous tent here in Boston (Somerville). One of the acts involves four aerialists doing a silks show up high on a spinning rig that's being spun by four white horses below. It made me so speechless that I confess I barely clapped for the next act, not because it wasn't amazing, but because I couldn't move. In case you're having trouble imagining what a show involving horses, trainers, acrobats, riders, aerialists, and musicians is like, here's a little video. :o) (You can watch the silks show for a few seconds around 1:59.)



My absolute favorite parts of the show, by the way, were those moments when all these unsaddled, unbridled horses would be running en masse across land or water in graceful formation and suddenly one of them would be like, "Meh, I'm not into this. I'm going to go stand over there and watch. Yep. You guys look great from here!" Or, on one occasion, "I don't feel like running with this group anymore. I like the looks of that group all the way over there. *run* *smash* *SQUEEZE*  Yes, this is much better!" The trainers, sometimes laughing, would just adapt the act to accommodate what the rogue horse wanted to do. Oh, and speaking of water: during the intermission, the staff distributed towels to the people sitting in the first row.

After the show, I got to visit the stables!

A lot of the horses were getting their manes braided after the show...

...or getting some love from the riders.
Horses are kind of amazing to look at. LOOK AT HIS FACE.



The rider who was scritching the horse in that picture above kindly explained in Spanish
to a nice Spanish-English speaker, who kindly explained in English to me, that the marks
on the horses are the signs of what farms they were born on and bought from.
They are marked at birth.
This horse really wanted to play.
This horse engaged me in a lengthy staring contest.
He won by a resounding margin.

Sunday Randutiae on the Fly

Just taking a few minutes to say a few things on this busy Sunday…
My dear friend Amanda MacGregor has a new website called Cite Something! where she's providing research and writing advice to high school and college students. Plus, she has a sense of humor. Go check it out, look around a bit if you're interested. Amanda and I were grad students together at Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature and I am deelighted by her new project!In case you live in Cambridge and love cookies, you should know that the workers at Insomnia Cookies are currently on strike. They are fighting for a living wage, healthcare, enforced breaks, and the right to be in a union. I'm very grateful to the friend who told me this (thanks, B!), because otherwise I might have accidentally crossed the picket line for a cookie! Now I'm telling you, so you can avoid the same error. Support the strikers! Reject the cookies! The news about Jane Austen on England's 10-pound note worked its way through my convoluted brain and led me to the earnest wish that the funny bird from Edward Gorey's The Epiplectic Bicycle were on our 20-dollar bill instead of Andrew Jackson. If it were, I would love my money and I would probably spend more of it. It would be good for the economy. Plus, the bird is giving good advice to consumers.

... and one game.

I'm not a gamer, and most of the games I could play on my iPhone would hurt my hands and arms. So I'm very happy to have discovered Flutter, which is technically a game but doesn't feel like one. It feels like I have my own butterfly sanctuary where hardly anything ever happens, pretty butterflies flutter around, maybe occasionally I catch a falling flower petal, maybe occasionally I feed a treat to the frog, now and then I hatch a new species of butterfly, then I go away for a few hours and when I come back not a whole lot has changed. FLUTTER IS SO SOOTHING. (It's also free! There are ways to make it fancier and faster if you feel like spending money, but I don't.) (Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 6.1 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.)

My butterfly sanctuary.
This caterpillar is sleeping.
This caterpillar is plaintively
waiting for me to feed it that leaf.
This chrysalis will hatch soon.
This bird enlists butterflies and sends them on
important adventures. Like, warning our ant
friends that an anteater has moved into the forest.
 This frog is waiting for me to
feed it that glowy bug on the left.
That bug looks mad.
Butterflies hanging out.

"The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea."

For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

I'm listening to and loving Recorded Books' production of Moby-Dick, narrated by Frank Muller. It's over 21 hours long! I tune in and out as I'm listening, perhaps starting back to attention to find that it's been fifteen minutes and Ishmael is STILL listing white things (!!!) (see "Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale"), tuning out again, then sitting straight upright as Melville says something so beautiful I could die. I read this book in college, I wrote a paper about it. What a pleasure to enjoy it for itself and be allowed to space out when I want to. :)

I'm also referring occasionally to The Arion Press's 1979 printed edition designed by Andrew Hoyem, with (wonderful! and helpful) illustrations by Barry Moser. This is an expensive edition; check your library.

Cabin Pressure

*intercom dings*

First Officer Douglas Richardson (voiced by Roger Allam): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're now about halfway through our flight from Hong Kong to Limerick, and I just thought I'd let you know that I... am... BORED. Bored, bored. Bored. Bored...... BOOOOOORED. We are, unbelievably, still flying over Russia, which continues to be STUPIDLY BIG. Really enormous. Far bigger than necessary. We've been in the air now for about a week and it doesn't look like we'll be landing until the last syllable of recorded time. So, if anyone on board knows any card tricks, ghost stories, or would like to have some sex, please do make your way to the flight deck. Thank you.

*intercom dings*

Captain Martin Crieff (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch): Ahhh, ladies and gentlemen, I do – I do profoundly apologize for my first officer and his badly misjudged attempt at humor. I do hope you weren't distressed by his outburst and – and let me just say in his defense that up here in the flight deck it is… UNBELIEVABLY BORING.

First Officer Douglas Richardson: SOOOOO boring.

Captain Martin Crieff: So very very very VERY boring!

Both together: BOOOOOOOOOOORED!!!

Cabin Pressure is a radio sitcom produced by the BBC and starring Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole, Benedict Cumberbatch, and John Finnemore. It's also written by John Finnemore, who is BRILLIANT. :) It's about a tiny airline struggling to subsist on a single, shabby plane; one good but careless and dishonest pilot (Allam); one bad but careful and correct pilot (Cumberbatch); one extremely bossy owner (Cole); and one flight attendant who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer (Finnemore). Each episode involves funny antics. Currently, four series of six episodes each and one Christmas special are in existence, though my sources tell me more is planned. If you're thinking of buying it, it is MUCH cheaper at AudioGo than on iTunes. Fans of Anthony Head will be pleased to hear that his character makes semi-regular appearances in later series.

Writing Homework

Greetings from the back of beyond, dear readers.

I love Deborah Kaplan's recent post called "Writing Homework for You, My Loyal Readers." Last fall, Deborah and Amy Stern co-taught the fantasy course at Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature. After they'd started the semester, they realized what the opening assignment should have been. Now that they're no longer teaching the course, they're sharing that assignment with us, and it's a great one. It involves learning to better appreciate the differences between all the many ways we can write about books. From the post:

Current students are so incredibly proficient at writing about reading, because what with blogs etc., they do so much of it. And yet at the same time, they are proficient in some very specific kinds of writing about reading (primarily personal blogs and Goodreads-style reviews, with some amount of professional blogs), and the process of showing people the requirements of the different kinds of writing is different than it used to be. Without devaluing existing proficiencies, we hope to show that high quality reactive blog post, for example, is not the same thing as scholarly forum discussion.

The point here is that all the styles of writing are valuable, but they're not the same as each other, and they require different focuses and styles. Deborah delineates nine different possible styles. Check it out if you're interested!

This summer is wonderful and intense and I'm not online much. But I have great hopes of coming back a few times in the next couple weeks to recommend one BBC radio play, one audiobook, and one game.

A Book, Plus, Some Resources on How to Talk about Things When You Know You'll Never Agree

It's birthday month on the blog, but life this summer has been so jam-packed (in all the best ways) that I haven't given much time to blogging. So. Um. Happy birthday, everyone, including me. :o)

In my limited time today, I want to point out one online resource for learning to talk about abortion, then mention one really interesting book about women and eating problems.

First: a decade ago, my mother brought an article at the Public Conversations Project to my attention. It's about a secret, six-year-long dialogue between leaders on both sides of the abortion debate, a dialogue which took place in the wake of John Salvi's December 30, 1994 shootings at the Brookline Planned Parenthood and Preterm Health Services that killed two people and wounded five. The participants in this dialogue held passionate and opposing views on the abortion issue, but didn't come together hoping to change each other's minds. From the article: "Our talks would not aim for common ground or compromise. Instead, the goals of our conversations would be to communicate openly with our opponents, away from the polarizing spotlight of media coverage; to build relationships of mutual respect and understanding; to help deescalate the rhetoric of the abortion controversy; and, of course, to reduce the risk of future shootings." Called "Talking with the Enemy," the article is a wonderful read, and a helpful one, too, if you're interested in learning how to talk about things with someone with whom you know you'll never agree. The Public Conversations Project has assembled a whole bunch of links on talking about abortion, including "A Hard Conversation Made Easier: Tips for Talking About Abortion." I'm now eager to poke around the rest of PCP's site, which includes information about dialogues on things like science and technology, child labor and cocoa, same-sex marriage, and human sexuality and the church.

Next, I read a book called A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A multiracial view of women's eating problems, by Becky W. Thompson, released in 1994. From the flap copy: "Becky W. Thompson shows us how race, class, sexuality, and nationality can shape women's eating problems… [This book] dispels popular stereotypes of anorexia and bulimia as symptoms of vanity and underscores the risks of mislabeling what is often a way of coping with society's own disorders."

Here's an excerpt:

Vera's experience raises the question of whether there is something inherently wrong with using food as a comfort when something terrible occurs. If it soothes someone in a time of extraordinary grief – why not? For some of the women, a sign of recovery was coming to see eating as a reasonable way to cope with adversity given other "choices." These questions bring the discussion full circle, since answering them rests on social and political analysis. The "just say no to food and yes to life" approach to eating problems, like the "just say no to drugs" ideas of the Reagan-Bush years, reduces complex issues of social justice and access to resources to psychological issues of self-control and will power. As long as the violence and social injustices that women link to the origins and perpetuation of their eating problems exist, women may continue to binge, purge, and starve themselves.

The link between eating problems and the traumas these eighteen women described to me indicates that prevention of eating problems depends on changing the social conditions that support violence and injustice. Making it possible for women to have healthy relationships with their bodies and their food is a comprehensive task: we need to ensure that children grow up free of racism and sexual abuse, that parents have adequate resources to raise their children, and that young lesbians have a chance to see their reflection in their teachers and community leaders. We must confront the myth of a monolingual society and support multilingual education; change the welfare system in which a household that is eligible for the maximum amount of assistance receives an average of forty cents worth of food stamps per meal; dismantle the alliance of the medical, insurance, reducing, and advertising industries that capitalizes on reducing women's bodies to childlike sizes; refuse to blame women who are anorexic or bulimic; and dispel the notion that large women automatically eat too much. Women must learn to feed themselves along with – not after – others. Ultimately, the prevention of eating problems depends on economic, cultural, racial, political, and sexual justice.