From Haloes to Hospitality

This week I have been fired by the wish to show up to all of my classes virtuously, at an excellent juncture as it turns out since a great proportion of the students are staying away in a presumable spillover from the holidays, so I feel the beginnings of a halo glimmer around my head whenever I — exquisitely on time — tread into a classroom these days.

Since this semester's schedule combined with the necessary repetition of the prelanguage course demands that I be at university at 10:00 on Mondays and 8:30 every day thereafter, I have been going to sleep before midnight and waking up spontaneously between 3 a.m. and 7, then relaxing as I like to do in the tranquillity of nighttime, and then taking as long or as little time as I like to dress and pack things together, and then going out the door.

Today I had a prelanguage course Greek grammar class preceded by a first-year Greek grammar class, followed by the overview of Turkish literature lecture which has set in since two weeks before the Christmas holidays after all the Persian literature was overviewed by a different professor.

In the first-year grammar we reviewed the present active participle — ταξιδευοντας, etc.— in sentences which were so incredibly depressing that I had no idea what was going on until I realized that the chapter's theme was criminal justice and prison sentences. For the prelanguage course there was a little vocabulary mixed in, and we had to complete small, much more cheerful exercises surrounding the four seasons: ανοιξη, καλοκαιρι, φθινοπωρο, and χειμωνα.

In the Turkish literature class I recognized the letter wāw on the chalkboard from my small discursions into Persian vocabulary and felt tremendously pleased with myself. I should have known the kāf, too.

***

Anyway, I've had little projects at home going on, and one of them was to dabble in modern music again and figure out what I like. I did this in possibly the stodgiest way thinkable, by looking at NPR's 2012 best-of lists and then listening to over a hundred songs on YouTube. In terms of genre I felt quite undiscriminating, but I wasn't especially taken by electropop and nostalgic folk music from urban types (along the Mumford and Sons line, which I — probably unfairly — now think of as 'fauxlk music') and the kind of punk music where pale young women who seem on the verge of passing out sing feebly off-key whilst playing the keyboard, and that while I felt less self-conscious when my parents walked into the room when I was listening to jazz I found most of it incredibly boring, and I really do like rap music because I think it has more substance than most other stuff. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but the real rap like the Wu Tang Clan separately and collectively do intimidate me because they can feel so hard and joyless and genuinely aggressive, but the rest is kind of easier to hear.

'Skyfall' bowled me over, but I only listened to part of it once and I wonder if the reaction was proportionate; at least it is nominated for an Academy Award, so . . . Arvo Pärt was on the list, and much to my surprise because contemporary classical music all falls under unoriginal, neurotic, self-indulgent overintellectualizing minimalist tosh concocted by academic aesthetes in my mind, I liked the song, as it was performed by an Estonian choir.

The musicians I had heard of before were Bonnie Raitt and Neil Young, and perhaps unsurprisingly I also liked them best. Above all, both musicians' voices are like instruments which they have learned how to use, with the twang and the colour and everything beautifully calibrated and mature (like a fine wine, to add another cliché to this paragraph), which less experienced singers seem to try to replace with lovely sincerity but little originality through Bob Dylan- or Dolly Partonesque affectations. Bruce Springsteen, I was surprised to find, seemed anodyne despite the persona.

But the only songs which have stuck in my head this year are "We Are Young" from fun., as well as "Whistle" from Flo Rida and that song from One Direction, which I had already heard because the apprentice in the bookshop and I listened to them together during the summer. I've heard 'Gangnam Style' and 'Call Me Maybe' the requisite number of times, too, but I thought that Gangnam Style was kind of harsh and degenerate — though I think that most people who look at the cheerfully absurd-seeming music video will probably wonder what on earth I mean.

As far as the singers accompanying themselves on the piano went, I considered it best to ignore the offerings in that line, excepting rare cases like Diana Krall's. Because if the piano is to have no tone and no expression at all, and a rather sparse score, one might as well prod around a well-tempered and multicoloured Fisher Price keyboard for noise-loving two-year-olds. But I consider the horrendousness in this area more due to the absence of effort (or of respect for the instrument) than of talent.

In the end, I pruned these 100+ songs into two shortlists — one for fun songs and bands, and one general list which I am planning to revisit:

A Sleep-Deprived Account of the New Year's Concert

The traditional hatchet job, with my apologies for hyperacidity or inaccuracies, follows:

Yesterday morning, as is our wont, we watched the New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic on television; this year it was an unusually large contingent, as Papa, Mama, Ge., J. and I were there, laughing and groaning and minding the music as the moment demanded. I had been up for some twenty hours and was as a result in a vague and grumpy frame of mind.

This year the conductor was Franz Welser-Möst, on his home heath, though rightly or wrongly I felt that his musical terrain was more Wagner than Strauss, just as with Daniel Barenboim I seem to remember that there was a hint of Beethovenishness throughout. The music encompassed not only the Strausses and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who as the ORF commentator noted was an early conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic and is therefore honoured regularly in the programme, but also Verdi (a charming morsel of Don Carlo) and Wagner (something from Lohengrin) in honour of their impending 200th birthdays. For the Wagner the brass section melted together into an almighty unisono roar which had the subtle heft of, though more harmoniousness than, a sledgehammer. It felt in my view a little ponderous for a classical, rectangular concert hall. In terms of musical bells and whistles, grating boxes came out towards the end of the concert, there was a harp, and the triangle often came into play.

I approved considerably of the flower arrangements, at least insofar as to find them uncommonly tasteful, arranged to give an overall impression of pink rose colour. There were, as customary, roses, anthuriums, orchid-like flowers, and for a change snapdragons, nestled in greens, and though the anthuriums were anthuriums they were so pale pink and beigey-yellow that I barely noticed them, which is as it should be.

For the first half of the concert I was inattentive or out of the room, preferring even to begin translating a Greek text for a course presentation to sticking around in my grouchy mood, but then I arrived for the cinematic pièce de résistance which is the intermission tourist video — an experience much softened by the aforementioned sleepiness.