Wordy, Nerdy, and Ready to Go

The Shadowman, Part 1

2008-04-15T03:25:18Z

I wrote this last night. Part of it came from a previous idea about setting, part of it came from a dream. No idea where it's going. I like the way my unplanned writing sounds. If only it made sense.

"Are you the devil?” I asked the Shadowman.

“There is no devil, said the Shadowman, “there is only us.”

I would have asked him if there was a God, but by then he was gone and I was alone, standing on top of the rubble of what used to be a section of our city wall, looking out into Chaos.

I should not call it that. Those who live in the cities of the borderland, or far beyond where the great empire of order reigns, call it “the Chaos,” but for some reason, those who have been there refer to it without the definite article as if it is simply another country, their homeland even.

I have not been there. I have never stepped outside these walls. But here on the border, Chaos will come to you. It has walked the city and it has touched me. I put my hand up and feel the chain of jet that lies heavy on my throat. The Shadowman gave it to me.

It was the holiday, Fool’s Day, when the world is upside down. In the empire, it is a day of festivity and even rare debauchery. Here, where the world is like that all the time not far from the walls, it is a day of solemnity, and day with the citizens gather to hold vigil together at night, walking the streets with torches to mark our territory, to bind our community. This year was no different. The walls have been breached for months now. Those who wish to be elsewhere, who have somewhere else to go are already gone, but for the rest of us, life proceeds much as usual. Perhaps one day Chaos with overtake us. Until then we go about our trades, care for our families, pass time with our friends. I help my mother with the house, my brother with his studies, and walk through the market with my friends looking for hair ribbons. Doom may or not be on its way but I cannot control that, and for now I focus on finding something in dark blue.

Yes, Fool’s Day was no different this year, except in one way. When we walked, others walked with us. I was with my family, as I should have been, but trailing behind. I got dizzy, I got lost in the streets, in the darkness, but at first I wasn’t worried since there were so many others.

But then, I was by the wall, by the huge gap the left by the most brutal attack of the previous summer. As if in a dream, I walked towards it. The people of the city suddenly seemed dark and insubstantial. They had left free the area closest to the wall and where the Greylings walked with torches. Their very bodies shone fainty, but I did not find them worth looking at, they were featureless and shifting, like pencil sketches given life.

The Shadowman faced away from me, his blackness in contrast to the Greyling’s glow but with the same quality of shifting insubstantiality. His left foot dragged slightly as he walked. I though perhaps he was the devil but I did not fear—emotion seemed far away. Behind him was the Phoenix. She turned as she walked by me. I think her face was beautiful, but I was dazzled by the light. Her dress was of orange and red, with fluttering tattered sleeves and set with gems and tiny mirrors that reflected the fire held by the Greylings. Her hat was strange, set not only with feathers, but with the head of a long-necked flame-colored bird with crested plumage.

There was one more bright figure who walked among the Greylings. Her dark, berry-colored gown was cut low and wide at the neck and high-waisted, trimmed with gold ribbon. Her hair was dark and her curls were pinned high on her head. Her face was pretty, but her mouth was set in an unpleasant expression, just enough genuine anger to keep it from being a pout. I still do not know what to call her, the names of the others came to me as I watched and the Shadowman spoke to me later of the Greylings and the Phoenix, but did not name the other woman.

As I watched the Shadowman turned toward me for just a second. I raised my hand to my throat and felt the chain there. The strange procession walked through the gap in the walls and their lights went out as they passed, or perhaps it was my vision going dark—I remember nothing that follows, except waking up in my own bed in the early morning.

A dream, I thought to myself. There was a faint knock and I realized that the same sound had woken me. “Come in,” I called softly.

“Where were you last night, Hana?” asked my younger brother, holding a single candle and leaning sleepily on the door.

I tried to remember. I have no idea how I got home, no recollection of changing into my nightgown and climbing into bed. “I got a bit lost, is all. We’re Mom and Dad worried?”

“Yeah. But we couldn’t very well stop the ceremony to look for you. I thought we’d have to comb the city for you, but when we came back here you were already in bed asleep. You skipped off early, didn’t you?”

“I did not,” I hissed as loudly as I dared. I thought I remembered hearing the midnight bell, but that coincided in my mind with the image of the strange figures of my dream disappearing into darkness. “Where were you all when midnight came?”

“Over by Four Horse Court.”

“Well, I got lost close to home. All those twisty streets near the breach. What time is it?” I asked, groaning.

“Almost two. Mom and Dad must be asleep by now.”

“What did you wake me up for?”

“I dunno, I thought you’d have a better story than getting lost ten blocks away.”

“Go to bed, Jeph,” I said, annoyed, brushing the hair out of my face, and rearranging my pillow. Jeph’s eyes widened and he suddenly stood straight.

“Where did you get that necklace?” he accused.

“What necklace are you...” my voice trailed off and then I remembered with absolute clarity and was terrified for the first time that night.

(Very) Short Story-The Pages

2008-03-09T04:29:27Z

I found them lying underneath my shoes at the bottom of the closet, I found them pushed under the bed. They were folded up and tucked into the pages of my books, slipped between my pillowcase so that I heard them crinkle as I lay down. Sometimes they kept me awake all night. When they didn’t, they haunted my dreams with ghostlike white fluttering.

I tried to gather them together, but most slipped through my fingers and coasted on cushions of air until they came sliding to a stop on the scuffed wood of the floor. I tried to ignore them or throw them away, I stayed out later and later to delay facing them, but even if I waited until the sun came up and stared me straight in the eyes as I walked home, they were waiting, nestled between the sheets now, making soft whispery noises as I tossed and turned, trying to grab a few hours sleep before my first class.

I denied them when they began cropping up in my backpack, hastily stuffing them back inside when my haste to find a working pen caused me to expose them to the world. I named them Nothing. And it killed me to claim them even that much, to bury them under an outdated syllabus and candy bar wrappers, crush them down with a textbook. Still it was better than letting them go out into the world.

Everyday I felt them driving me mad, heard them rustle, saw them dance around the room on the breeze. Finally I captured one and signed it with my name, affixed it to the pages of my notebook, and I slowly began the task of taming the stories one by one, but it was no good, it was never any good. And one day I opened my window as far as it could go, folded them all, frantically fast, into paper airplanes and let them fly out into the world, and when I followed them into the street I saw them floating above me and saw that they were living their own lives and so was I.

Book Review: Stardust

2007-08-14T18:00:36Z

I thought it would be fitting to post my old review of Stardust, what with seeing the movie this weekend. I'd like to post a more in depth review once I get a chance to re-read, but that might not be for a while.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Tristran Thorn lives in a very unusual village which is located next to a stone wall with a portal into the land of faerie. Every few years the gate is opened so that humans to go the fair there. Tristran is a very unusual young man, but he seems not to notice this at all, despite the fact that he is closer in age to his sister than he should be, and everyone in the village knows more about him that he does. He never does anything strange, until one day when he decides that he will go find a fallen star in order to get the girl of his dreams. Unfortunately, a) the star has fallen into the land of faerie, b) there are others out to get the star, and c) the star doesn’t want to go with him, and tries her best to get away from him. I loved the fact that the star was a girl, and she was my favorite character. I thought this book had all the elements a good fantasy novel should.

By the way, Yvaine is still my favorite character :)

Book Reviews: Non-fiction

2007-08-07T15:22:12Z

A couple of reviews I wrote back in high school for our newspaper (*gasp* I feel old), slightly updated

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Marji is a rebellious teenager of the ‘80s who likes denim jackets, Nikes, Michael Jackson, and punk rock. She has just purchased some tapes and is walking home when she runs into big trouble. Why? She lives in Iran and her improperly placed veil and western clothes have gotten her spotted. This graphic novel is the true story of the author’s tumultuous childhood and amazing family story, told with both sadness and humor. I consider this an absolute must read. I loved the art as much as the story. There's a sequel (maybe more than one by now), which I also loved, though not as much, largely because I loved the growing up aspect of this one.

The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Spaceflight by Martha Ackmann

Have you ever wanted to be an astronaut? These amazing women did, and underwent secret tests almost identical to those taken by the Mercury 7 astronauts. Although they were all pilots with stunning records, it was the ‘60s, and NASA said that there was no need for a female astronaut program. They tried to sue NASA for gender discrimination, but lost, even though it was obvious that it was impossible at that time for an American woman to become and astronaut. Although these women did not make it into space, they paved the way for future astronauts like Sally Ride and Eileen Collins. The book makes for an inspiring read, especially if you like airplanes or space.

Ghosts of Childhood

2007-08-03T00:55:20Z

ghosts of childhood flicker
under the great tree like fireflies
the high-pitched calls carried on the wind
belong sometimes to the real children
who run beneath it now
they run towards tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
and leave more ghosts behind

Music, the Middle Ages and Me: A Journey

2007-03-07T02:45:47Z

Title: Music, the Middle Ages and Me: A Journey
Description: The strange love child of an academic paper and a personal reflection, written for a Medieval Literature class.
Genre: Essay
Rating/warnings: G/none
Word count: 1681
Disclaimer or copyright statement:The following work, originally entitled "The Experience of Instrumental Music" is entirely the property of the author. Any information incorporated from outside sources has been cited, and a bibliography is included.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Professor Szell for her commments and corrections.
Status: Written fall 2006. Completed, turned in, graded returned. Not looking for concrit, though you are certainly welcome to comment.

Imagine that you are a musician in the Middle Ages. Your feet are very sore. You’ve been walking on this road for longer than you care to think about, and only now are you coming to a village. Tired as you are and as attractive as more settled employment at the court of a king or nobleman now sounds, you value your freedom and the variety of experiences you get by being a constant traveler. Also, your travel provides a meaningful service beyond that of the spread of music: the spread of information. When you finally make it into the village, you simply walk up to a door and ask for a meal in return for a performance. Music is too rare and valued a thing (Yudkin, 17) to make it likely you will be turned away. In a dim and stuffy room, people begin gathering to hear you play and sing. Most have never been more than a few miles away, and you will soon be asked for news of the wider world. In turn, you will listen to their stories and carry them on.

Your lute is a stringed instrument has a fretted neck and a teardrop shaped soundboard with a rounded back (Yudkin, 443). It doesn’t look quite like anyone else’s lute. In fact, the lutist you met last month had an instrument with no frets and fewer string than yours does. When you decided to play together, you had to retune your instrument to match his instead of the way you usually tune it, which is based on your own vocal range. You usually play by yourself, making up an accompaniment to your own voice as you go along if the song you learned didn’t have one before.

The music you play is nearly always monophonic, meaning it consists of a simple melody without harmony. However, since you often play alone, you must be able to accompany yourself to some extent. For this reason, all your strings except the highest are doubled. This adds to the resonance and volume. Since you strum the strings all together with a quill, the sound has a droning quality.

You don’t read or write music. You depend on memory in order to perform, and when you can’t remember how the song goes you draw on your experience and improvise the rest. Some of your best songs were written that way (Yudkin, 433). If you want your music to survive you, the only way is to teach it to someone else. Passing a song down this way may not be completely accurate, but neither would it be completely accurate if someone were to listen to it and try to record it with the current musical notation. Most likely, if someone is to record your music in this way, it will be a century or so in the future, when musical styles and the system of notation have changed and it someone playing based on that record simply will not sound the way you do now. There are some very talented musicians and composers who have a high status, and for some, musical talent is a way to move upwards in a society whose classes are usually rigid (O’Neill, 2). But such men are usually at least merchant’s sons, and your own position in society is fairly low. You are a public performer and often regarded with suspicion because your music, mainly love songs, is considered by some too attractive and sensual. They believe it distracts people from proper values and pursuits, unlike the sort of music associated with religious rituals (Yudkin, 433). On the other hand, music like yours is an uncommon treat, and most people embrace it.

***

After a bit of research, this is the idea that formed in my head as the medieval musician’s experience. I’m a musician myself, so I felt a certain connection to my somewhat romanticized fictional construct of a quintessential minstrel. I’ve traveled across states to perform and even gotten free dinner out of a chamber ensemble performance. However, though Western music is formed on foundations from the Middle Ages, my experience of musicianship has been very different from the medieval one I imagined. I learned to read music before I ever touched a violin, and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve memorized an entire song. I also don’t have the slightest idea of how to improvise, though, of course, this is extremely important to jazz musicians. I rarely play alone when not practicing, not having the ability or temperament to be a soloist. To me, music is intensely communal. In the orchestra in school, I would be playing with at least ten other violinists. All our violins looked and sounded the same, tuned uniformity by the use of electronic tuners. The orchestral music we played was very complex with intricate harmony parts. We played music from many times, baroque to classical to modern, but nothing from as long ago as the medieval period.

In looking for the medieval instrumental tradition in New York City, I wanted to see what ways of performing and experiencing music remained similar, and also what had failed to leave much of a trace, and why. I started out looking in Columbia’s music library and found some books about medieval music, but no scores, which makes sense since most music from that time was not recorded, and few of those records survive. I flipped through the books for pictures of such manuscripts and found that even in cases where the notation system looked very close to the music I’m used to reading, there were striking differences, such as the fact that there was no division into measures. To me this indicates a more fluid way of conceptualizing rhythm and tempo than we have today.

I considered going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they have a very nice instrument collection, but there are few examples of medieval instruments that survive. In addition, there’s not as much fun in looking at an instrument behind a glass case as there is in actually hearing and seeing it played in front of you. Besides, I’ve looked through the instrument collection before, and though they are very beautiful and diverse, and though tracing the development of a wide range of types of older instruments form into the familiar standardized instruments we see today (Yudkin, 432) would have mostly fit with the theme of my paper, this was my chance to do something new, not re-experience the familiar.

I toyed with the idea of going to hear the choir at Corpus Christi Church, at 529 West 121st Street, whose professional choir sings church music from a variety of time periods, including medieval plainchant, demonstrating that the important connection of music to worship that existed in the medieval period still exists today. But sacred vocal music just didn’t have the connection to my construct of a minstrel that I truly wanted to find. Therefore, I was going to find someone in New York who played a medieval instrument and I was going to listen to a performance. Ironically, the Internet became the only feasible way I had to find the continuance of a tradition from about one thousand years before the Internet came into existence.

On Polyphony.com, a site devoted to performances of early music in the New York metropolitan area, I found what I was looking for, and it was 30 blocks directly downtown from me. I found a lute. More precisely, I found a performance featuring Jessica Gould, soprano; Charles Weaver, theorbo and guitar; and Carlene Stober, viola da gamba. A theorbo is a type of lute that didn’t develop until the late 16th century, with bass strings and without the string doubling that its medieval predecessor had. Still, despite the fact that the trio was playing music from counterreformation Rome, Charles Weaver is the closest thing to my imaginary lutist I’m likely to ever find in Manhattan.

The thing that the concert drove home visually was the variety of instruments that did not make it into what I’ll call the classical canon, for lack of a better term. The viola da gamba, for instance looks like and is played like a cello, but has six strings and frets. The theorbo does not look like anything I’ve ever actually seen played before. What it also made me realize is the fact that even though music is always around me, as testified by the presence of an mp3 player in my handbag, there’s a visceral connection with music that only occurs when one is listening live or actually playing it oneself. They played Arcangelo Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, which I had played in high school. It wasn’t listed on the program, and I wasn’t expecting it, and when they started playing the Adagio section my insides shattered, in a good way that I can’t really put into words.

Today, in New York City, music is always around us. Even live music is a constant presence, in the form of street musicians, the modern version of the minstrel. But most of us just pass these people by. We may stop for a moment and even drop a dollar in a hat if the performer is particularly talented. But it’s nothing special. Music is rarely an event to us, and even though I’m glad that today so many types of music are so easily available in a variety of formats from digital to down the street, I don’t think we treasure it the way a medieval person would have. I know I’ve let the importance of music in my own life fade into the background. I think my almost unconscious goal in choosing the topic of medieval music was to reconnect with my own identity as a performer, or at least a player, that has been fading ever since I came to college and decided not to audition for any musical groups.

The day after I went to the concert, I made my mother bring me my violin when she came to visit.

Works Consulted

“Gregorian Chant and Medieval Music in New York City.” Medieval Music in New York. 7 Dec 1996. Fordham University. 23 Sep 2006. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/medny/gregorian1.html>.

"Lute." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 3 Oct 2006. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 5 Oct 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=lute&oldid=79188204>.

“Music.” Corpus Christi Church. 13 Feb, 2006. 23 Sep 2006. <http://www.corpus-christi-nyc.org/music.htm>.

O’Neill, Mary. Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Page, Christopher. Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Polyphony.com, Historical Performances in NYC. 1 Sep 2006. 23 Sep 2006. <http://www.polyphony.com/polyphony.asp>.

Yudkin, Jeremy. Music in Medieval Europe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989.

Toast

2006-11-24T04:33:38Z

I have just invented the Dover-Delaste Law of Toastedness, and felt I should mark the occasion with an entry. More on this later.

8,297 words.

Ears

2006-11-21T04:25:03Z

My poor roommate is so very good about listening to my great plot rants. She even contributes helpfully. I almost have a plot, with almost an ending.

7260 words.

Characterization

2006-11-09T04:45:30Z

Ok, so I'm writing in limited omniscient, becuase I didn't want to be stuck in first person, and anyway, the storyline switches around a bit between at least four characters. My main problem is that I've started wriiting with Kreigh's viewpoint. I basically know what I want him to be: impatient and ambitious, but having learned better...mostly. Mind you, I'm going to have to fix a heck of a lot when the end of November comes around, but even if Narissa isn't quite right, I think she's coming out better than Kreigh. Because I can just show what she does and report what she says, while with Kreigh he needs to come out in his thoughts I guess, but that's not totally working. I guess I have to come up with ideas on what he would think, not just how he would speak/act. He's the one who's head I'm getting inside. That should make me feel closer to him, but I feel distanced. The really weird thing is that I suspect if I tried to write now with Narissa's point of view, I'd start having trouble with her.

Sigh.

About 3,500 words.

Inaugural Post

2006-10-31T03:32:40Z

Hello, and welcome to my writing journal, which is solely a NaNoWriMo journal for about the next month. Any of my posts that contain parts of a story will be friends only, so make sure you comment and ask to be added if you want to be able to see that. Otherwise, this is the place for my thoughts about writing, and by "thoughts" I mean "incoherent ramblings."

So far, I have a clear idea for how my novel is going to start, but then don't know where to go from there. My working title is Strange Angels for reasons that don't actually make any sense if I don't put this one bit of conversation somewhere in the novel. I've got two male characters, Kreigh and Evard, and two female characters, Narissa and one unnamed who I'm referring to as "Lady Legs" for my own amusement. Please, name my characters for me! I mean, no. I am not already pleading for assistance. Actually, I may put up polls about things like names if anyone actually ends up reading this thing. So far, I'm planning on a fantasy, but I have not worked out the system of magic yet. Oops.