Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 19

BUSted!

On Sunday evening Isabelle and I went to BUSted!’s Third Anniversary at Stories Books and Café in Echo Park. BUSted! is a monthly storytelling show featuring “True Stories About Getting Around LA Told By People Who Don’t Drive.” It seemed like the perfect event for us, since we fall into the category of people who navigate Los Angeles without a car, plus we exchange stories of our weird encounters in LA, a rather startling number of which have taken place on buses or at bus stops.

We in fact...

Chasing Wildflowers

It’s that time of year again: spring break (ish–it’s actually still finals week), the annual pilgrimage to the Huntington, and, like last year, more wildflower hunting because superbloom.

At the Huntington, we visited the Library Exhibition Hall (I’m pretty sure some of the books and documents had been switched out since the last time I was there, though the stars of the show–and some of my favorites, like the John Dowland songbook–remained) as well as the Beautiful Science exhibit, which I h...

Maui

First, here’s a lovely review of Wildings I stumbled upon!

At the end of February, I went to Maui for a family wedding. After all my friends in the Phonetics Lab went to Honolulu for the Acoustical Society of America’s conference at the end of November, I was particularly eager to go to Hawaii myself, especially since I’d never been there before. I’d never visited the non-continental U.S. or flown over the Pacific Ocean before either.

It was my mother’s cousin who was getting married, and my...

I’m Back!

I passed my dissertation prospectus defense and am now a Candidate in Philosophy or somesuch.

A couple of news items:

ChinaInsight, a monthly Minnesota newspaper about Minnesota/U.S.-China relations, ran a profile on me and my books in their February issue. In early February, I had lunch with the 5th grade book club at the Brentwood School near UCLA. I had a delightful time, and there’s a little write-up (with photo) here.

To celebrate my successful defense, I spent the weekend being excess...

Roxane Gay and the Women’s March LA

A week ago I went to Roxane Gay’s reading at Skylight Books with a friend of mine from high school. Jean and I were in Writers Club together, but we hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Now that we both live in LA, we’d been meaning to meet up, and Jean suggested going to see Roxane Gay. I’d wanted to visit Skylight Books for a long time too, so I decided to seize the opportunity.

While familiar with Roxane Gay, I hadn’t read any of her books, just some of her essays in the New York Times...

The 29th Annual All-California Sacred Harp Convention

After attending the 26th in Los Angeles and the 27th in the Bay Area, I missed last year’s All-California Sacred Harp Convention in San Diego, but the convention returned to LA this year, and I went! It was once again at Angels Gate in San Pedro, in the Friends meetinghouse-like building on the hilltop overlooking the Pacific. Saturday, the first day of the convention, was very clear, so you could see Catalina Island and what I was told was San Miguel Island, though having now looked at a map...

The Books I Read in 2016

In 2016, I read 88 books, 25 fewer than in 2015. I’m going to blame that on 紅樓夢 (A Dream of Red Mansions), which took forever to read. So here are the books. As usual, bolded titles are rereads, and there are links for the rare books I blogged about during the year. Oh, and this year, I’ve included the names of the translators for books I read in translation, since translators deserve recognition. Also, I read a lot more short fiction this year than I think I have in the past. More on that af...

2016 in Review

A lot of people have been saying that 2016 was awful, and yes, there was plenty of awful. Particularly a certain week in November. But there was a lot of wonderful too. Forthwith, my recap of my 2016.

In January, I got glasses! I also worked on Wildings copyedits and hosted a singing party.

In February, I revealed the cover for Wildings, trawled Hmong and Lao dictionaries for loanwords, and coordinated grad student Q & As with the computational linguistics job candidates.

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Celebrating Chandele...

Une Jeune Pucelle

If you, like me, have spent a lot of time reading hymnals, you might know that most hymns, in addition to having a title, have a tune name that identifies the music, separate from the text. The other day I was playing the Christmas carol “‘Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” (I know, it’s still Advent! But it’s in a minor key, so it’s okay!) from a Presbyterian hymnal and noticed (not for the first time) that the name of the tune was “Une jeune pucelle” (French for “A young maid,” where “maid” ha...

Interview at Cracking the Cover

I did an interview for Cracking the Cover recently. You can read the post or, if you want more, the full Q & A. There’s a fair bit of linguistics and music.

Speaking of, I talked about linguistics and music in my radio interview on MPR last week too! As far as I can tell, the segment isn’t available to listen to online after all, so sorry to those of you who missed it and had hoped to listen to it later! The whole thing is kind of a blur. I think I might’ve tried to debunk the strong version...