jazzfish | Journal

*mindblown.gif*

Okay, so, clefs. If you've seen piano music you know how it's got two staffs, one for the right hand / high notes and one for the left / low notes. The staffs have a squiggle on the left end of them: the high one has a sort of loopy thing and the low one has a sort of 7 or 2 with a couple of dots. These are clefs, specifically treble clef and bass clef. They tell you what pitch the notes on the staff represent.

Technically the symbols are a G clef and an F clef: the spiral at the centre of the treble squiggle is always on a note that's a G, and the two dots on the bass are always on a note that's an F. Technically if you put the symbols on other lines you'd indicate different pitches. In practice, these days nobody does that, and 'G clef' and 'treble clef' are synonymous, as are 'F clef' and 'bass clef.'

Violin music is written in treble clef. Cello music is (mostly) written in bass clef. The range of notes you can easily play on those instruments more or less coincides with what you can easily write in those clefs without egregious use of extra ledger lines for notes above/below the staff.

There's also another clef symbol. The C clef symbol looks like a capital B, and the middle of the two humps is always on a note that's a C. It's used to indicate two uncommon clefs. Alto clef gets used for viola music and nothing else as far as I know, and tenor clef gets used for cello music that's off in the upper registers of the cello. Alto clef is... honestly I don't know what its relation to treble clef is, other than "lower," I think it's a sixth lower? Maybe a seventh? I don't read treble clef very well so I don't really know.

Tenor clef is a fifth higher than bass clef. This makes it really convenient for cello music. The strings on a cello (or violin or viola) are a fifth apart, so if you're used to reading bass clef for cello then tenor is the same thing just one string up.

A viola is a fifth lower than a violin, and an octave higher than a cello. If you put 'octave strings' on a viola, it plays the same notes as a cello. A tenor viola is an octave lower than a violin, and a fifth higher than a cello.

Which means it can natively play music in tenor clef. Hence the names.

Here endeth the classical music neepery for the day.

( violistic nattering )

Creakily snoring cat is the best cat.

Got my crown done today, for a mere $250 thanks to the NDP's championing of dental insurance for indigents. My left jaw aches; this is a state of affairs that will likely persist until morning. It's nice to not have a bit of a hole where a tooth should be, though. (I had a temporary crown. It came off a month ago and the dentist said "eh, probably not worth putting it back on again.")

Things in boxes, empty shelves. There's more of the last lousy ten percent of stuff I can pack but it's running into the problem of deciding -what- to pack. That in turn would be easier if I had a better sense of what the apartment will look like without bookcases, which I won't get until after the movers come. Oh well. I can always take later boxes over to the storage unit myself.

Soon I'll get to see what life is like with Less Stuff, at least for a little while.

My great-great-great- (+/- one great) -grandfather or uncle Joseph G. Taylor had a violin that was discovered among my grandmother's things when she died in 2014. Turns out to be a fairly decent instrument: not amazing quality but certainly a few steps above my cello. ("Wilhelm Duerer fecit anno 1900.") Her kids got it refurbished and then had no idea what to do with it, so my dad gave it to me as the only person in the family who plays a stringed instrument at all. It's mostly sat in its case for years; for awhile I loaned it to someone who wanted to learn to play violin, and I'm not sure whether it got any use there or not.

I took it out yesterday just to see what it was like. It's tiny. Tuning is obnoxious; I'd forgotten how much I hate wooden pegs. (I'm spoiled by the amazing mechanical pegs on my viola.) Notes aren't where my fingers think they ought to be, and everything is cramped. I'd expected all that. What I hadn't expected was for it to feel like cheating. I'm accustomed to a certain amount of resistance in bowing, I expect from the thicker/larger strings on the viola (and more so on the cello, though that's a whole different thing). On the violin the bow just ... glides. Faster notes and slurs come so much easier and more clearly, string crossings are trivial. Hmpf.

Other than that... I'm still here. Mr Tuppert has stopped creaking but is still sprawled on his heating pad with his chin on his front paws, and that's pretty cute. Life goes on.

I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.

Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.

Spoke with Rhonda the realtor and she's cautiously optimistic about the condo market. Plan is to put this place up for sale sometime in March. Which is closer than I think.

Started putting books in boxes. Need to get a decent amount of stuff out of the condo and into storage as I can before opening it up to potential buyers. Packing books is physically easy, I've done this enough times that I have it down to a science. The hard part is having them Not Around for awhile. Boardgames, too, and DVDs and who knows what else, I'll sort that out as I go. Gonna be an empty-feeling apartment for a couple of months.

There's also the obligatory Cull. E.g. I've been carrying around Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang for, oh, since before I moved to Canada. At this point I am probably not ever going to actually read it. That sort of thing. I can leave culled books out and see if I end up reading any of them just because they're there, and if so whether they're worth keeping. Small favours.

As for actually moving... as Lou Reed sang ("sang"), I don't know where I'm going. Staying in the lower mainland is safe and fiscally responsible, and it's killing me by inches. Minneapolis is expensive and dangerous (health-care-wise) and far away. Elsewhere in BC is a complete unknown. No good options.

I -have- been keeping up on viola practice, at least. Turns out to be a good thing. Last week I went out with Kevin to a fiddle session at an Irish pub out in Kitsilano. It was pretty great. It's nice to be musicking with people, to get that enjoyable camaraderie and sense of all doing something together.

Viola means that I can't really play most fiddle tunes (viola's a fifth down from violin, so any high notes are unplayable at speed, at least for me), so I end up doing drones or simple harmonies. I'm always a bit nervous about that kind of thing. I've basically no formal training; I'm just doing things that seem like they'll fit in. People did seem to like it, and said nice things about it afterwards, so that was nice as well.

Westrene mountains cold a' winters:
Seil the wind, embrace the snow,
Cleaven to the trail beneathan,
Minden an the fire glow.

The thing about Aspects -- one of a great many things about Aspects -- is that Mike devised two distinct fictitious (as far as I know) dialects, presented them in text without falling into the usual traps of being incomprehensible or cloying, and -wrote poetry- in at least one.

Soon I shall be sad and angry all over again that all we have is seven chapters, two fragments, and a handful of sonnets. (And Zarf's delightful essay on 'the conlang of Pierre Menard.') For now I can be grateful that there's this much.

It helps to see complicated, damaged people who understand and care deeply for each other.

Forest is forest, and sand is sand,
But hearts shall be always debatable land.

Among the better things in life: a cat sleeping next to the laptop while I'm eating dinner.

Sadly he really dislikes the sound of me typing next to him, to the point that he woke up and got bitey. So now I am on the couch with the laptop and he's having a bath on the table.

This has been four-fifths written since mid-September. May as well finish a thing, to the extent that memory serves.

( cathedrals, montmartre, rodin, eiffel )

Potential wrapup of random bits that didn't fit anywhere else coming, um, maybe.

Just finished Lord of the Rings. This may well have been the first time I read the Appendices all the way through (though I did skim the ones on the calendars and the alphabets).

Two takeaways from RotK:

First, the Scouring of the Shire hits different when you're under occupation. It's also perhaps the most fantastical part of the book, since it posits that the citizenry were nearly all ready to rise up and just needed a push, as opposed to a third of them cheering on Otho and Sharkey and a third of them just hunkering down and hoping it would all pass them by.

Second, the meme take on Denethor as 'doomscrolling in the Palantir to Sauron's algorithm' is ... remarkably apt.

Now ebooks for a couple of days, and then once I'm home the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. UT is, as I recall, mostly-complete fragments with some commentary. The twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth reverses the proportions, and is thus less interesting to me. UT also contains a version of the Quest of Erebor ("The Hobbit") as told from Gandalf's perspective, which should be neat.

All quiet on bus stop patrol. Tuesday had a couple of plateless SUVs and a couple of blocks-away whistle choruses; Thursday and yesterday were quiet. It's nice to be out in the snow in my black wool coat and hat, though, and nice to get some smiles from folks driving past.

JOE: We're gonna have to live with them eventually.
HARRY: Who?
JOE: The Protestants, Harry. The other half of the population.

Watching a film set in the Troubles on the eve of travel to Minneapolis and after doing some reading about Palestine may not have been the wisest course. Then again, maybe it was. No time like the present.

"The Boxer" is mostly about Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's characters' relationship, but there's a lot of focus on Harry the IRA warlord and Joe the more political-minded IRA leader as well.

HARRY: And what are you offering, Joe?
JOE: Peace, Harry. Peace.
HARRY: Well, I'm sure you can deliver.

I'll be doing bus-stop watch for a couple of days, making sure kids can get home from school or seeing where they get taken if they don't. It's scary out here.

Little movement this year.

( anno sargasso )

Silmarillion update: I used to have what turns out to be a first-US-edition Silmarillion (not first printing, not in great shape) that was Pop's. Emily had the same edition in better condition and less smoke-infested, so Pop's went before the crosscountry move fifteen years ago, and then Emily's obviously went with her. In conversation Steph determined the particular edition from my vague description ("white-ish dust jacket, big fold-out map of Beleriand glued to the endcover"), found a site with a few copies that were well within my budget, and then while I was dithering bought one for me. So that was a nice end to the year.

The last time I read LotR, some ten or twelve years ago, was the first time I'd read Pop's copies. Before that almost all my reads had been in increasingly-decrepit Ballantine paperbacks from the eighties, bright blue/green/red with Darrell K. Sweet covers. It turned out to be extremely distracting to have the familiar words in different places on the page. Apparently I imprinted hard.

My nice fancy new edition of The Hobbit has an extensive editor's note from Christopher Tolkien talking about the changes they've made to bring it in line with what can be deduced of JRRT's desires for a Preferred Text. Unfortunately this means it's missing Tolkien's second-edition note, the one that begins "In this edition several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers, have been corrected." (AKA "the Watsonian explanation for why I had to retcon 'Riddles In The Dark' to bring it in line with Lord of the Rings.") It felt downright weird to read the book without that note. Thankfully I also have a paperback with the psychedelic pink fruits and emus (no lion, alas; must be a later edition), so I can read the introductory note as is Proper.

... it occurs to me that Pop's hardbacks lack the Peter Beagle essay/encomium that appeared as the front page of my Ballantine paperbacks, which also imprinted though I was far too young to understand it. Text follows, so that I'll have it.

( Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. )

( Lost Highway )

( Mulholland Drive )

( Inland Empire )

That sure has been a year. Further retrospective to come, I suppose.

What are you reading now?

The Hobbit, nth reread. Over at LG&M Abigail Nussbaum is blogging a reread of Lord of the Rings, and that's inspired me to pick them up again. I've a nice anniversary edition of Hobbit with JRRT's illustrations to read, and Pop Shackelford's late-seventies hardbacks of the trilogy. Unsure what I'll do for a Silmarillion but that is a next-week problem at the earliest.

Usually I'm a little annoyed by The Hobbit: it's tonally dissonant from LotR, more of a bedtime story than Serious Fiction. This time through I'm finding it an absolute delight. It's very clearly written to be read aloud, and the prose is just musical. I am also hearing the voices of John 'Gandalf' Huston and Orson 'Bilbo' Bean in my head as I read. Presumably this will extend to Richard 'Smaug' Boone as well once I get that far.

What did you just finish reading?

A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name / The Thousand Eyes duology, which came highly recommended ages ago. Sigh. I wanted to like these, and did like the first third of the first book. Csorwe is an Orc girl who's due to be sacrificed to her god, the Unspoken Name; instead she gets kidnapped by someone who is quite probably the book's evil sorcerer and becomes quite a competent right hand for him. I quite enjoyed Csorwe's point-of-view and voice. I liked it less when she was forced to work with a particular obnoxious character who she had good reason to hate, even less when we started getting his viewpoint and were clearly intended to sympathise with him, and much less than that when her viewpoint disappears entirely a quarter through the second book.

These are doing very neat things with gods and immortality. I wish I'd been less annoyed and more able to appreciate those neat things. If you can get past Talasseres being insufferable, and don't mind character-stretching wisecracking, I'd recommend them.

Before that, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, best summed up by her: "I started off writing this like ha ha, academia is hell, and then it was oh no, academia IS Hell." Cambridge graduate student in magic descends to the Underworld to retrieve her advisor, who she thinks she killed; she's accompanied by a golden-boy grad student for (it turns out) similar reasons. This sneaks in under the wire as my favourite read of the year. It opens with a passage complaining about inaccuracies in depictions of the journey to the underworld:

Dante's account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T.S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner's account was under serious dispute. Orpheus's notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas-- well, that was all Roman propaganda.

I love this, but then I would. It's great. I am deeply annoyed that the publisher (and the author's agent) refuse to even talk to Subterranean about doing a fancy edition.

What do you think you'll read next?

LotR, naturellement. After that, anyone's guess. Lord knows there's plenty on the shelf to pick from.

Ordered replacement zipper sliders for my suitcase. Suitcases, rather; I never got rid of the one that lost its zipper last year. So I've got one to practice on, and maybe I'll have two good checked-bag-size suitcases.

Yesterday I went down to the States to ship my parents' xmas box (the last part of the gift arrived a few hours after I left for Minneapolis), and also drop off used books and thrift-store donations and poke around in both stores. In the event it was like treating myself to Xmas. The used bookstore supplied me with: a paperback of Walter Jon Williams's post-scarcity nanotech/cyberpunk thriller Aristoi, which for typographical reasons really needs to be read in hard copy; Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home, which I have vague recollections of someone recommending and even vaguer recollections of having read at some point; Tom Stoppard's last play, Leopoldstadt; and the collected poems of Hope Mirrlees, who you know (if at all) as the author of the very English fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist but who was apparently also a minor Modernist poet.

And from the thrift store there was a DVD of the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina, which is something of a comfort watch for me, and also two madeleine pans. Yesterday evening and this morning I made two separate batches of madeleines; the first tasted fine but had a texture that wasn't really right, but the second seems to have turned out pretty well. Turns out they're serious about "room-temperature eggs," and also I may have used too much flour the first time. The pans did fine, which is a pleasant surprise for cookery from the thrift store. I suspect they may have been used maybe twice.

On the advice of the catsitter, a month or two ago I got Mr Tuppert a treat-puzzle, with sliders and pivot lids and little pockets for treats. He's been enjoying it, and has gotten quite good at getting the treats out of even the more complex bits. He's been much less impressed with the cardboard thing I got him to scratch on. Not even catnip can induce him to try it out. Ah well.

I'm staying warm, I'm staying fed. Next month is for sorting out What Happens Next.

Yesterday I flew home from Minneapolis. My bag got lost, for the first time in ages, so I slept CPAP-less (poorly) last night. When the bag deigned to arrive this morning, it was missing one of the zipper sliders. Same thing happened to an identical bag last year. Time to stop buying and recommending Travelpro suitcases, no matter how nice the wheels are.

I also had a crown break and pop off on Saturday. And my dentist is on holiday until the fifth of January. Argh. At least it's not hurting. I did speak with him briefly and got "yeah, just keep it clean and be gentle with it, and DON'T PUT THE BROKEN CROWN BACK ON."

We lose our use of colour
Just water on the brush

Minneapolis had snow and sun, which were both a nice change from the overly typical wintergrey here. Contrariwise, it remains nice to be back at home with my kitten.

Small changes, small improvements, day by day. Sunreturn.

The Cinematheque is running a full David Lynch retrospective in December: all ten of his feature films, plus a collection of shorts and the entirety of the new Twin Peaks season. I'm not certain whether I like Lynch's work but it surely is memorable.

Of those: I quite want to see Blue Velvet (seen once, basically no memory of it), Lost Highway (seen at least twice, fuzzy memories), Mulholland Drive (never seen; sounds like a more coherent Lost Highway), and The Elephant Man (never seen; supposedly Very Very Good). I have some interest in Wild At Heart (Lynch directing Nicolas Cage?) and Inland Empire (more Lynchian surrealism; might be more than I want all at once). I have pretty much no interest in Dune (ugh), Fire Walk With Me (ugh, though for different reasons; also, seen it), Eraserhead (from what I've heard I do not need that look into David Lynch's id), and The Straight Story (meh). I do not have it in me to watch eighteen hours of Twin Peaks in four days, though if I did I'd probably also watch Fire Walk With Me. Also no interest in the short films (see above re Eraserhead), and besides those are already over and done.

I'm so glad the Cinematheque exists. It's not as historic as the Lyric in Blacksburg or as fancy as the AFI Silver in DC, but it's comfortable, and it shows a decent amount of stuff I'm interested in. Vancouver honestly has a pretty impressive non-mainstream film scene: the Cinematheque, the more upscale VIFF Theatre, and the more... pop-culture-y, I guess, Rio. Plus the Cineplex in International Village mall that shows random foreign films.

Potential post-xmas schedule below, so I have it written down and can stop saying "wait what am i doing again?"

( A lot of movies )

From today's Ask A Manager update:

I am still job searching. It's extremely rough out there, and I have not been able to get very far in interviews for the same job I left at this company because I am so early career. I've been getting feedback from companies when they do not move forward with me that they just have more candidates with more experience, always.

Money is at least sorted for the short-term. Assuming I can in fact sell this place and find somewhere else to live, it's sorted medium-term as well. Beyond that, I refer you to John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."

(Context makes that quote much more interesting than simple fatalism. Keynes was arguing with someone claiming that certain economic policies would make things worse in the short term but in the long run we'd all be much better off. Keynes believed strongly in fixing what we could now, an attitude I appreciate even when I have trouble implementing it. Can't have a better future if you can't get yourself into the future.)

Books on shelves, roof overhead, food in pantry, snoring cat. Breaking out the xmas stuff this weekend, I think. Could be worse.

The Cinematheque is doing a Hong Kong New Wave action series, which means I finally get to see a bunch of movies I've heard about for ages.

( City On Fire )

( Peking Opera Blues )

( The Killer )

Took Mr Tuppert in to the vet today for his annual vaccines. Apparently when you get a rabies shot they give you a cute lil tag. I may put that on his collar, Just In Case. The odds of him getting out are basically nil but why take chances.

He's got a heart murmur, but it looks like that came up last time, and it's not gotten any worse, so that's just a Thing That Exists. Between that, the one tooth that the vet's been warning me about since he arrived, and what might be early-stage arthritis, this is a cat that is made of Problems (But Not Yet). I'm okay with that. Chaos started showing wear at about this point (thirteen-ish) as well, and he got another four years after that.

I did have a moment of "oh no" when the vet-tech took him to the back for shots and blood-drawing. Nothing real or serious, just the sudden realisation that I'm not nearly ready for him to go away, to be taken into a room by a kind and gentle tech and not come back out again. Of course I'll be there when it happens, this time, but still.

When we got home I gave him a little bit of tunafish, and filled up his treat-puzzle with treats. I don't think he's gotten -all- of them yet but he certainly spent some good time snuffling and crunching. Currently he is sacked out on the bed Recovering. Seems fair.

Profile

Tucker McKinnon

Words are inadequate

Syndicate

Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Words are inadequate

(the poor craftsman curses his tools)

Journal

tenor viola followup

various session options

plan for the best and hope for the worst

as he hits the floor he sighs: 'what a morning'

and i guess that i just don't know

xpost from elseweb

nice mice that suffice for him, or cream

france travelogue V: paris redux

scouring, etc

with their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns

up the down escalator

a bit more tolkien to start the year

"elaborate on that." "no."

into the dark

when you hold your tongue your wounds can never heal

questions here are useless, nothing answers back

lynch etc

at least it's not just me

three from hong kong

eldering cat

Profile

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Adventures in Mamboland

Expand Cut Tags