Alas, no pictures taken this week.
One of those busy sort of weekends, preempting what will promise to be a hectic week and a stressful next weekend. But for now, I have officially been in a mosh pit, albeit one quaintly categorized as the pussy, European variety by Paul, the resident expert on everything penile and American and metal. Excellent time-I got to shove the Canadian in all his angry bulk around without anyone giving us trouble about breaking things. Likewise got to experience metal, in the form of Skálmöld (ostensibly folk-metal, but I'm not sure the fact that they have a couple of harmonies qualifies them as folk), as it is supposed to be, with violence. The egoising of the guitarists and the utter lack of tonality is much less troublesome with violence involved.
Likewise saw my first opera, on Saturday, (as I mentioned to someone recently, I am revealing how decidedly uncultured I am)-in a broadcast from New York, but by my standards it counts. Sigfried, all five hours of absurd theatricality, delightful basses and baritones, buxom sopranos and flamboyant tenors, barely-hidden antisemitism and happily didactic primitivism. I was sort of amazed at myself for enjoying it as much as I did. Possibly you read enough scholarship and everything else simply loses the capacity to bore you. Having David around, to share in the rediculousness of the lead's thick Texan accent and the possible mathematic proportions of Fafnir, probably helped.
But alas, all revelry's passed, and I must finish these proceedings of the International Symposium of Runes and Runic Inscriptions and move into the collected essays of R.I. Page soon enough to get a presented together by next Monday, read Sigurður Nordal and acquaint myself with the traditional narrative of Icelandic scholarship, and at some point get started on two other papers of possible greater importance but less immanent judgement. Got an 8.9 on Haraldur's mid-term, which seems to be somewhere near the class average, except for a few people who dropped the actual mean down into the 7's somewhere. Cheers to you good folks! But the final promises to be more difficult. So translation and paradigms will abound, in the meanwhile.
My mandolin callouses are growing soft. I'm sort of looking forward to a relatively isolated Christmas, to play and try to read modern languages and perhaps even read a novel of some fantastical variety. I have some Gene Wolfe on the kindle that calls like a siren.
Mosh pits scare the shit out of me. They are also a lot more fun than they have a right to be. What gets me is that there are people here who get offended when they're pushed into the mosh. If you don't want to mosh, you'd best put some large, solid objects between you and the crowd.
ReplyDelete