NaBloPoMo thoughts

I'm not sure what the Pillsbury dough boy has to do with it, but today is the last day of National Blog Posting Month. I have thoroughly enjoyed the month and found many wonderful new blogs and blogging friends through it. I have found it is not so easy to post something worth reading every day. On the other hand, participating in the event has allowed me to experiment with posting in ways that I might not have otherwise and not to worry about whether anyone is reading.

I am happy to report that Katie (see yesterday's post) did indeed finish her NaNoWriMo novel and said my NanoRhino helped. She really helped me enormously, too, and I thank her for that.

Today is also the last day of my most recent crazy-round-the-clock work schedule, and I look forward to having a little more time for practicing next week, and for art and reading. And perhaps twiddling my thumbs for a bit. Christmas is upon us, but we've decided to keep it very simple this year.

Unfortunately my flute/cello group will not be playing our regular holiday party this year. The sponsoring organization has decided they need the space we would ordinarily take up for more party-goers. They did invite us to attend as guests, but that is not the same! We will probably play at a nursing home instead, but we have a two-hour program of music and will have to cut a lot to play our usual 45 to 60 minute program for a nursing home. I love playing Christmas music and hate to cut any of these pieces! One year we had five performances during the holiday season, including New Year's Eve performances in two different towns, but perhaps that was excessive. :-)

There are two fiddler events this weekend, the women's practice session, and a performance of the whole group on Sunday as part of the weekend's Christmas parade and activities (we start early). However, it will be just fiddle tunes, no Christmas fiddling tunes, unless we learn some really quick!

Have a good weekend!

NaNoRhino

This NaNoRhino is especially for Katie, who also likes to draw, to encourage you to scamper across that 50,000 word finish line before Friday's deadline. Good luck!

Just imagine he is chasing you. I know it doesn't even look like he can stand up straight, but just imagine. I know you can do it!

(The rhino is from this week's Drawspace challenge. )

Cello lesson

I brought my four-flat version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and my treble clef version of "Gesu Bambino" to my lesson this week. My teacher gave my a few fingering improvements on them both, but all in all she was very happy with my playing of both pieces. I am feeling good about them, and still haven't transposed the Bambino to bass clef. Hmm, maybe I can actually read from treble clef now. It's probably better to play from the score anyway, so I know where the vocalist is.

The organist has said that the vocalist likes to sing freely not according to any strict tempo. Fine by me. A fiddler once told me, at a fiddle session, that I was holding out some notes too long. He said he could understand why, because they sounded so beautiful on the cello. :-) I took that as a compliment, though I could tell he was frustrated because I wasn't playing the tune (Star of the County Down) the same way he was.

He was playing 3 quarter notes per measure. I was playing dotted-quarter, eighth, quarter in certain measures, so yes, my first note was more drawn out than his, though not because I was mesmerized by the music, but because I was playing the standard version of the tune. In a typical fiddle session, the person introducing the tune gets to play it the way she or he wants to, so I eventually won that discussion. I will apply the same logic to Gesu Bambino. However the singer wants to sing it is fine with me (so long as all three of us can all stay together).

5 things about the New Yorker

Melissa tagged me for either the 5 Things or the 7 Things meme recently. Since I already did the 7 Things, I'm going to just do 5 today (I'm tired).

Because I was reading the New Yorker when I was thinking about this "5-Thing" thing, I have decided to do this one, as "5 Things about Me and the New Yorker."

1. I have subscribed to the New Yorker since I was 18 (42 years).

2. I used to read the New Yorker front to back, story by story, looking at cartoons in the order they appeared. This was in the day before the New Yorker had a table of contents. It just seemed the right way to read it. It the New Yorker didn't want me to know the contents, then I would just let it be a surprise to me. Now, I read the cartoons first, and more often than I care to admit, the cartoons only.

3. I used to be an abstractor/indexer for a quasi-government research agency in Washington D.C. I would read research articles, write a summary of them and select keywords to describe the articles. This was all done on worksheets, because computers were huge things kept in large rooms, not on people's desks way back then. I used to open the New Yorker on my desk and spread my research articles around it so that I could take a break and read the New Yorker when the research articles got dull, and no one would know the difference (today's equivalent would be surfing the web when you should be working). Despite this distraction, or maybe because of it, I was always the most productive worker.

4. I have always wanted to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker. I have never even had an idea for a cartoon, so it seems unlikely this will happen. I appreciate the cartoons though. My mother always admired the little filler drawings in the New Yorker, not the cartoons. Because of her, I admire the filler drawings too.

5. My mother also subscribed to the New Yorker. She read the articles, but did not like the contemporary fiction and I have to agree that much of it seems pointlessly plotless or unnecessarily incomprehensible. Here is an article I like on certain types of contemporary fiction: A Guide to Literary Fiction.


And, because they haven't been tagged for anything lately, I tag GottaGoPractice and Guanaco for this 5 or 7 Random (or organized) things about yourself. Have fun!

NaNoDone!

I am very happy to announce that I have crossed the 50,000 word mark and am officially a NaNoWriMo winner! The novel isn't actually done yet. There is still the big concert at the folk music festival and the resolution of the environmental pollution/cartoon animation mystery, but that should be no problem to wrap up, making up chemicals and chemical interactions as I go.

However, I have decided to completely reorganize this novel-like object and start all over again, from a different viewpoint, in a different point in time, and with slightly different characters. The new novel will have sparkling dialogue, creative wordplay, subtle intellectual humor, and a twisting and turning plot that ultimately makes sense and leaves you with a nice fully resolved feeling in the end. My current novel is lacking some of these things! But I can't tell you how happy I am that I participated in NaNoWriMo, and that I made it across the finish line.

My review of August Rush

Not enough cello.

Even when Lila is playing the cello, the guitar music from her lover's band across town overwhelms the sound of the cello, and Lila seems distracted by his music and not fully involved in her own cello playing.

My daughter loved the movie and thinks I am much too critical. You have to go see this movie with the idea it is a fairy tale, not a real story. It does have an nice, fully-orchestrated sappy, feel-good ending designed to reduce one to tears. Love and music! What more could you want?

Above is an interview with Keri Russell about playing the cello in the film.

Fiddle practice

I practiced some fiddle tunes today, and finally came up with an arrangement of Arkansas Traveler for cello that I like. There are so many, many ways of playing this piece, and sometimes you get attached to a particular way.

The way I have written it out here will work with the way our fiddle group plays it, but avoids shifts to fourth position because our group plays this very fast, and shifting takes time. Well, for me, anyway. So, this is my "Easiest, Speediest Arkansas Traveler for Cello." You can make it even easier by playing every other note, as quarter notes, in measures 10 and 11 and 14 and 15.