Vladimir Horowitz and the Frolicsome Muses

They wash their soft skin in the Horses' Spring
Or in Permessus or Olmeius, then
Dance, fair and graceful, on the mountain-top
And whirl their feet about. Then they rise up [...]

From: Hesiod: "Theogony," Dorothea Wender (transl., Penguin 1982)

The Liszt and this passage from Hesiod seem to go together quite beautifully . . . I'm not that fond of Liszt, perhaps unfairly; still, when I heard this piece on television while I was reading this quartet of verse, the two of them melded rather unexpectedly.

(The music itself begins at around 3 minutes and 16 seconds:)

Perspiration, Orange, and Theogony

Yesterday I was so hungry that I went grocery-shopping again. Afterward I baked chicken thighs in the oven, with butter and rosemary and pepper as well as salt and a little artificial seasoning (which both appeared to vanish in the course of the baking); and threw together a salad of chicory, fennel, apple and orange. As for the dressing, I shook in white wine vinegar at first out of panic that the chicory might turn brownish at the edges, then squeezed the juice of half an orange and swirled honey in it; but I have to admit that when I drank the dressing that was left in the dish after the salad was eaten, its taste was hardly tempting.

Lastly, I prepared chestnuts. I had the vague intuition that they might be done after one of them blew apart with a thump — specifically, with a thump that I heard even over the humming computers in the nearby room. I might not even have known what the thump was, if not for a similar mishap with roasting pumpkin seeds that transpired around Hallowe'en.

An Authorly Memo

For the Spain Story, which is mentioned in the last post, I have read in different avenues, not very intensively. Firstly there was a surface investigation of conservative religion in Spain, especially in the Franco era; then of events in 2007, setting up a timeline that I'll (hopefully) lead into 2008, when the story will happen on the eve of the financial crisis. Helpfully, the figure of the protagonist's father became a little sharper once I read about conservative religious circles, though I still don't know whether to make him more of a monarchist and a Catholic or a Catholic or a Catholic monarchist.

What hampers me a little in the imagining of the antihero's father's upbringing is that I had a fairly mild upbringing, and have no direct idea of the uptight, little-man institutions that might have been de rigueur (literally!) in Spain in the forties or earlier.

 I'll  figure out what the schools were like in Spain, anyway; while it might be irrelevant for the father, I'd thought of sending the main character to a military academy. But that feels wrong, and I can't plunk him into a gymnasium without finding out if Spain had any, first.

Still, in the past week I have been 'resting'; the digestion and application of the notes that I take seems as important as the taking.