Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 23

Wildflower Hunting

On Sunday, my mother, my roommate, and I drove to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve hoping to see fields of blooming California poppies. There were actually very few poppies in the park. There were mostly a lot of fiddlenecks. But outside the park, at the corner of Munz Ranch Road and Elizabeth Lake Road, there was a hillside carpeted with orange and purple flowers. We parked on the side of the road and joined many other wildflower seekers in wandering among the poppies.

The Joshua...

Lunar French

In my 2015 year in review, I mentioned that I had helped create a dialect of Lunar French for a conceptual artist. At the time, I promised to write more about it. Now I’m finally getting around to it.

Thanks to our proximity to Hollywood, the UCLA Linguistics Department occasionally receives requests from folks in the entertainment industry to create languages for film or TV. (“Simple but not imbecile” dialect for a Clan of the Cave Bear TV show, anyone?) Last fall, Los Angeles-based conceptu...

Unorthodox Adventures

I swear this is not a French Canadian music blog. Probably.

But today I bring you another recent find, “Les Cousinages” by Genticorum.

The text is from the point of view of a newly wed man. On the first night of his marriage, a man comes knocking on the door, and his wife says he’s her cousin. They invite him in, feed him, and set up a bed for him beside theirs. That night, the husband discovers his wife in the arms of her “cousin.” He sarcastically concludes, “When one has a beautiful wife,...

Cannonballs in April

There’s this very pretty song I’ve liked for a while called “Le 10 d’avril” (“The 10th of April”) by Les Charbonniers de l’enfer, a Québécois group. It’s about some people sailing to France when a corsair (I didn’t know that was an English word! It means a privateer) fires cannonballs at them, wounding one of the officers. As he’s dying, the crew somehow gets some American officers (conveniently close at hand) to fetch his sweetheart so they can see each other one last time. Don’t ask me how...

The Wildings Cover

Last week when I shared the title and description for Wildings, the companion to Sparkers, I had no idea I would be able to reveal the cover so soon. But it’s ready, so here it is!

The art is by Manuel Sumberac, and it reveals something that was not mentioned at all in the book description, namely, that music plays a big role in Wildings! Did you think I could write a book that wasn’t about music? What’s more, I finally wrote a cellist!

This cover is quite different from the Sparkers cover,...

Wildings: The Companion to Sparkers!

The time has come…to stop being coy about Book 2! So, here goes: My second book is entitled Wildings and is due out November 1st. It’s a companion (not a sequel) to Sparkers, and it begins five years after the events of the first book. The main character is Rivka Kadmiel, a wealthy magician girl from the city of Atsan. At the beginning of the book, she moves to Ashara, the city where Sparkersis set. Here’s my publisher’s description:

Rivka is one of the magical elite and the daughter of an i...

Captain Kidd’s Wondrous Jacobites

Yes, it’s another song connections post! At this point, this should probably be a formal blog series/feature, except each post is lazier than the last.

I recently encountered the song “Ye Jacobites by Name,” and as I listened to it, it struck me that it sounded like “Captain Kidd.” You can read a bit about this piratical song here and listen to Tempest’s rock version here. (Funnily enough, one of Wikipedia’s “Selected recordings” of “Captain Kidd” is… Owen Hand’s “Ye Jacobites by Name.” The

Cable Scarf

I relearned how to knit cables over winter break and brought a pair of size 8 needles back to California with me. When one of my fellow grad students hosted an art party last weekend (think stamp making, drawing, and calligraphy, both Western and Chinese), I decided my craft project would be a cable scarf. I picked out some blue wool yarn at Michael’s and started knitting.

The scarf so far. It has a seed stitch border and a four-strand plait on a purl background.

That same weekend, I saw this...