Just a couple of more points
It’s through the act of travel, it’s through the act of going, not sitting, that we get a chance to grow. It’s a matter of getting out from under one’s own rock, so to speak. Or type.
I’ll run along with the typing as long as the battery holds out, but I’ll be in Austin before I can post anything. Or answer e-mail.
The “shared van” shuttle driver was a more comforting change from my previous experience, but he was like the weatherman, apparently, anything over about 70 degrees is too warm. At 70? I still need, like, a sweater – or something. “Hot” doesn’t start until it the temp starts to approach “a hunnert.” Or so.
“That’s Starbucks right there, and they lease some space to Office Max. And over there is Amazon.”
Cool.
I’ve got to start doing a Fishing Guide to the Stars Guide to the Ring Cycle series. I just figure it’s a perfect medium. Inspired, as it is, by my uncle’s ongoing research and his other efforts to understand the music, the showmanship, plus the psychic and psychological underpinnings to the myths and the story itself.
His afternoon “lectures” would evolve into a lively discussion, centered around the libretto, the music, the way certain themes echo back and forth in the individual operas and how the cycle hangs together as a whole. Plus, no doubt influenced by his two daughters, there’s a post-modern, almost post-feminist way of looking at the shows. Heavy German opera, as long as one if going for high art? Might as well go for high art.
I had Gotterdammrung on the iPod, for the flight home. Because, in the words of my uncle, “Just when you thought Wagner couldn’t pull out any better orchestration, along comes the conclusion to the cycle….”
Which prompted that joke, but no one – other than my Sister – got the joke. I’m not sure what that means, either.
(Newman, Ernest. The Wagner Operas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.)
I hope I can recall the important points from the lectures. Discussions. Seems like most of the important figures in the opera cycle all have strong-willed women (females) pushing them around.
Austin? Austin’s home.
“Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the other things that happen to you.”
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book X, #5)
Which was weird, I as I read a copy of the Tao Te Ching on the flights home. Flight, one plane, several stops, like a bus in the sky, or so it would seem.
One of my opera cousins recommended this one particular translation. I happened across it not two days later, and I was reading it on the way home, trying to fit 2,500 year-old Chinese-based philosophy with Norse myth and Germanic opera.
Like that makes any sense.
So out pops Marcus Aurelius, and somehow, that’s a good book to tie it all together.
Did I mention Austin is home?
Final thoughts:
Ma Wetzel, and I quote, again, “One of these days, I’ll learn to work that machine, and then I’ll print a retraction for everything you’ve said, or said that I’ve said when I didn’t say it all.”
But I have witnesses. Guess that doesn’t matter. “Oh, you. That’s not what I meant.”
But it is what she said.
My own dear Libra Dad was digging around in my luggage, “Where’s your camera? I need to get a picture of you two.”
