Holidays
I really will get back to posting about books...
Busy times right now. Apollo is home from the vet's, but has to be isolated for 2 weeks while he wears the Cone of Shame and waits for his stitches to heal up... meaning, a certain amount of extra work (and time) looking after him, and making poor Damsel sleep in a cage. (The alternative is making her sleep downstairs - all my dog-owner friends said that'll make her wonder what she's done to be exiled from the bedroom).
But, it's being a lovely Christmas season. A friend gave me a ticket to the annual Messiah Sing-Along at Disney Hall last night: pouring rain, frightful traffic, and the place was still packed to its architecturally significant rafters. Choirs from all over Southern California make it an outing; across the hall, I could see parents sharing songbooks with their kids. I only joined in on a couple of the choruses - the one about "And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor..." My singing voice is as erratic and truly terrible as my spelling and I cannot carry a tune. At the insistence of the audience, we sang the Hallelujah Chorus three or four times. Then most of the audience went down to the Founders Hall (I think - it's that place where they have the wine and cheese parties, that looks like a box-canyon in Utah) and sang CHristmas carols.
I suppose there's a whole meditation somewhere about how singing together unites peoples' hearts - whether it's Silent Night or Deutschland Uber Alles; like all magic, it can be used for good or ill. I wonder about the generation of students I'm teaching, who don't know words like "coup d'etat" or "encirclement" (these are honors students)... Will even the Christians among them understand what's going on in The Messiah?
Busy times right now. Apollo is home from the vet's, but has to be isolated for 2 weeks while he wears the Cone of Shame and waits for his stitches to heal up... meaning, a certain amount of extra work (and time) looking after him, and making poor Damsel sleep in a cage. (The alternative is making her sleep downstairs - all my dog-owner friends said that'll make her wonder what she's done to be exiled from the bedroom).
But, it's being a lovely Christmas season. A friend gave me a ticket to the annual Messiah Sing-Along at Disney Hall last night: pouring rain, frightful traffic, and the place was still packed to its architecturally significant rafters. Choirs from all over Southern California make it an outing; across the hall, I could see parents sharing songbooks with their kids. I only joined in on a couple of the choruses - the one about "And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor..." My singing voice is as erratic and truly terrible as my spelling and I cannot carry a tune. At the insistence of the audience, we sang the Hallelujah Chorus three or four times. Then most of the audience went down to the Founders Hall (I think - it's that place where they have the wine and cheese parties, that looks like a box-canyon in Utah) and sang CHristmas carols.
I suppose there's a whole meditation somewhere about how singing together unites peoples' hearts - whether it's Silent Night or Deutschland Uber Alles; like all magic, it can be used for good or ill. I wonder about the generation of students I'm teaching, who don't know words like "coup d'etat" or "encirclement" (these are honors students)... Will even the Christians among them understand what's going on in The Messiah?
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