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Sunshine Blogger Award!!!

Posted on July 3, 2016 by ksedinger

Oh wow, it’s actually been an entire month since I posted here last, hasn’t it? That’s terrible. Anyway, I’ll have a proper report up on how June went in terms of writing (short version: mixed bag) early next week, but for now, check this out: A fellow writer, Rebecca Chase, nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Huzzah!!

The rules are as follows:

The Sunshine Blogger Award is a “get to know the writer better” type of blogging exercise, with a couple of rules attached:

1. Answer all 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you.

2. Nominate eleven bloggers in return and write eleven (possibly fiendish) questions for them to answer.

You know, it’s funny — over on Byzantium’s Shores (my personal blog, for those who only know me through here), I’ve been blogging for so long that I remember when these types of blog-quiz awards were quite common. They’ve really fallen by the wayside with the rise of Facebook and Twitter and the like, but they’re still fun, so I’ll go ahead and answer these, pose my own, and nominate. Here we go!

1. What is your favourite song? Do you have a significant memory attached to a time you listened to it?

Oh heavens, it’s this question. Don’t you just hate when you ask someone this question and they get all dewy-eyed and say something like “Gosh, I just love music so much that I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite song!”

Well, guess what? Gosh, I just love music so much that I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite song! Although…I can pick a favorite song, just so long as we acknowledge that there are hundreds of others. For now, I’ll note the song “Last Dance” by Donna Summer. Here’s what I wrote on my personal blog about that song on the occasion of Donna Summer’s passing.

2. Where do you love to blog/write the most?

Upstairs, in my library, surrounded by my books.

But I do love writing elsewhere. I can write in cafes and in public libraries perfectly well, and I like to do so once a week, if possible, for the change of pace. I also want to try writing in a public park or something like that, but as of this writing my laptop’s battery is too old to live up to a sustained writing session without a cord. Luckily, though, also as of this writing, I’ve ordered a new battery! I don’t want to buy a new computer for at least another year if I can help it.

3. If you could make up a fear of something what would it be of and what would it be called?

Huh. Interesting. How about Pronunciphobia, which is the fear that you badly mangle a word in spoken conversation because you’ve only ever read it and therefore you don’t know how it’s said? Or Scrabble Expectations Syndrome. This is when people assume that you’re a great word-game player because you’re a writer.

And as a pie-in-the-face fan, I admit to barbasolaphobia. This is an unreasoning hatred of shaving cream. That stuff is terrible, folks!

4. Italian or French? (in whatever context you decide)

French! (We’re going with opera here. I love me some French composers. Hector Berlioz is my favorite composer of all time, and he wrote three wonderful operas. Then you have Bizet, composer of Carmen. Not that the Italians are any slouches, though. Verdi and Puccini are enough to ensure the Italian star in the operatic heavens.)

Oh, and salad dressing? Italian all the way. I’ve never been a big fan of French dressing.

5. What do you think killed the dinosaurs? (can be as creative an answer as you like)

Nothing. There never were any dinosaurs. Their bones were artificially created and seeded around the world by the aliens who put us here. Why? Because they’re jerks.

6. What is the strangest thing you’ve ever had to research for your writing/blogging?

Huh. I’m not really sure! I recently looked up how boiler explosions happen, because my current WIP features someone who died in one.

7. What can you hear right now? What would you prefer to be listening to?

Right now? Crickets and birds; the wind in the trees; traffic on the big highway that’s a quarter-mile thataway; the clackety-clack of the dog’s feet as he wanders about trying to signal us that he wants to go out for his walk!

8. What do you do when you feel you should be writing but are lacking in inspiration?

I usually grit my teeth and force myself to write. I’m a “Get the job done” kind of person. I don’t have a great deal of use for waiting for The Muse to show up.

9. What is your greatest achievement?

Raising the Daughter; staying married (no, we never came close to breaking, but we did have some pretty serious tests about ten years ago); finishing a book; learning how to use Scrivener (yes, this counts); learning how to format e-books in various formats!

10. If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life what would it be?

As long as I can change the toppings in any way I want? Pizza. Or waffles. Or sandwiches, with as broad a definition as possible! I also can’t rule out nachos or burritos. Damn, this question is hard!

11. Who is your favourite author and why?

My favorite living author is Guy Gavriel Kay, whose historical fantasies are deeply emotional and filled with characters who are incredibly real. My favorite nonliving author is JRR Tolkien, because The Lord of the Rings is quite frankly a miracle of a book.

OK, time to tag a few people! And my eleven questions follow. Wheeeee!

Roger
Calvin
SamuraiFrog
Lynn
Briana
Brianna
Sara
AB Keuser
Rae
Faith

Questions:

1. What do you value more in a story: dialog or plot?
2. Describe the home planet of Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Come on, that dude ain’t human.)
3. If you enjoy watching any sports at all, which ones would you at least like to try just once?
4. Describe the most recent book to which you gave (or would have given) five stars.
5. Do you finish bad books? Why or why not?
6. How vexed are you when movies don’t match the books?
7. Describe your perfect hot beverage. In detail. I’m talking roast of bean or variety of leaves, additives like spices or squirts of citrus, vessel from which the drink is sipped, where you are sitting as you sip it, who is next to you, what music is playing.
8. Do you watch cooking shows? If so, describe your favorite.
9. Name a place you’ve visited that you thought you’d hate but you didn’t.
10. You know that hobby you had as a younger person that you miss dearly but you know you’ll never do it again? Describe it!
11. On January 20, 2017, the newly inaugurated President of the United States signs a law requiring all Americans to display a coffee-table book prominently in their home. Which one do you put out?

And thanks again, Rebecca, for the award!

Posted in Life, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment

Wow.

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

That is all.

The Auroras of Jupiter, captured by Hubble.

Hubble Captures Vivid Auroras in Jupiter’s Atmosphere

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Photo Posts, Science | Comments Off

Symphony Saturday

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor is very, very new to me: I first heard it a week ago, after I posted about the Symphony No. 1! I don’t really have a great deal to say about this symphony, actually. It’s a very nice work, and it would undoubtedly be a lot better known if it hadn’t been so overshadowed — along with the First and Third — by the back half of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic output. The Symphony No. 2 abounds with the feel of Eastern European folk music (he actually used Ukrainian folk songs in the work), and Tchaikovsky’s typical fine and transparent orchestration, with some wonderful writing for the horn, strings, and woodwinds.

This is a fairly short symphony, clocking in around 35 minutes. Apparently Tchaikovsky revisited the work some years after its initial composition, and thus we now have two versions — the original (which ran 40 minutes) and the revised version, which the composer preferred. Critics and musicologists have argued compellingly for each version, but I tend to defer to the wishes of creators in such matters.

Here is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor.

Next week: The Third Symphony!

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Bad Joke Friday

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

What do you call a fish with two sodium atoms?

A 2Na fish!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bad Joke Friday | Comments Off

Something for Thursday

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

Sometimes you need perfection, and for that, you need Mozart.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Something For Thursday | 2 Comments

“Always”: On the conclusion of CASTLE

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

So Castle has ended.

Finally…mercifully…ended.

I would rather it left leaving me wanting more, but as the last weeks of this season ticked by, I found myself actually hoping for the show’s cancellation. When it came, I felt a keen sense of relief, because not only was Season 8 mostly disappointing (and occasionally downright bad), Season 9 was setting up to be awful. Stana Katic was actually released from the show for Season 9, if it happened, so we were actually going to have Castle without Kate Beckett, and that would have been ridiculous. Best to get the thing off the air now, when it’s still in “stuck around too long” territory and not in the “completely bottomed out” region.

So what the hell happened?

A number of things. The worst was that the show was handed off to its third set of showrunners for Season Eight, and these folks simply weren’t nearly as good a group of writers as the previous showrunners, and certainly not as good as they show’s creators. That’s a big thing. Writing is everything, and in the last season, Castle just didn’t have the goods.

For one thing, they felt the necessity of having another Major Story Arc, so they somehow managed to resuscitate the Beckett’s Mother’s Murder thing, which had been long put to bed. The story they cooked up didn’t so much reestablish that as a mystery, but they posited another bad guy out there who had it in for Beckett for some reason, someone so scary that he terrified Senator Bracken, the guy who had actually engineered Beckett’s mother’s death. This person, a shadowy figure known as ‘Loksat’, was up to…well, we have no idea. Maybe this was explained, but I couldn’t tell you what Loksat’s plot was if you held a gun to my head. Loksat was known in intelligence circles, and…well, it was a dull and convoluted story that was never involving at all.

And then there were the complications this story involved. For reasons beyond comprehension, the writers decided that it would be a good idea to have Beckett leave Castle because she had to keep him safe while pursuing Loksat (while still being a Police Captain), so we had half a year’s worth of bullshit stories that had Castle aggressively courting his own wife, who had left him for reasons she wouldn’t tell him, and so on and so forth. This led to an awful lot of terrible shenanigans, some of which made me wonder if Castle had become a detective-story version of Three’s Company. This was all terrible, terrible writing that treated the characters like plot-device caricatures.

Castle has not always been perfect – case in point – but it was never this bad, either. Lots of folks attribute this to the fabled “Moonlighting Curse”, in which the sexual tension is the main driver of story and once you get rid of it, your story goes up in smoke. That might have been true with respect to Moonlighting, which was (let’s be honest) a shitty show in which the sexual tension was the only interesting thing about the characters, but that’s not some holy law carved in stone as many seem to think. There’s no fundamental law of storytelling that says that as soon as Castle and Beckett got married their status as an interesting couple had to be doomed, and the frustrating thing about the way it all unfolded is that the writers actually had a couple of interesting ideas but still screwed them up.

When Beckett “separated” from Castle, it further meant that he couldn’t hang out at the precinct and help the police solve cases. The writers solved this by having Castle become a licensed private investigator, and he took on his daughter Alexis as an assistant. This was actually a great idea, and would have been easily set up without the stupid bit about the separation: since Castle’s original permission to follow the precinct detectives came via his friendship with the mayor of NYC, simply posit that now there’s a new mayor who doesn’t like Castle, and boom! Problem solved! But no, instead the writers had Castle using his PI business as a way to “court” his own wife. This was a good idea whose execution was painful to watch.

Also painful was the use, then non-use, then use-again, of Castle’s father’s status as some kind of superspy. We never saw his father, but his new stepmother showed up just to help with the exposition of Loksat. That’s all that was ever done with any of that, except for referring to it in the context of Castle’s three-month disappearance a season or two ago (a very lame development in itself, which was the first canary-in-the-coal-mine incident that the show’s writers at that time were running low on ideas).

There were interesting episodes here and there in Season Eight, but on the whole, Castle went out on a deeply disappointing and silly note. Alas…there really could have been an interesting show spun out of two married detectives solving crimes. Castle could have morphed into an updated Hart to Hart, for example, or it could have done more with its occasional delving from murder mystery into spy fiction. Alas indeed. ‘Twas not to be.

Oh well. Castle still gave us four terrific seasons, a couple more decent seasons, then one “meh” season and finally a bad one. That’s more than we get from a lot of shows, and eventually I look forward to rewatching those earlier years. So many wonderful moments on this show, and I’ll always appreciate the way Castle managed to set a murder mystery show in New York City without also making NYC look like a horrible place of awful violence where only the crazy go. At its best, Castle was a witty and smart show that used its main character’s status as a writer to wink at the audience about the very tropes of storytelling that it was using. It was also a show with a very fine supporting cast, and a lot of great chemistry all the way around. It was fun and beautiful to look at and it had nifty premises and it gave me one of my favorite teevee literary jokes ever, when a guy survived being shot by virtue of the bullet encountering the copy of Brothers Karamazov in his jacket’s inside pocket, leading Detective Ryan to quip, “Good thing this guy likes Russian lit; if he’s a Nicholas Sparks fan, he’s dead right now.”

I plan to give the show a year or so to get the taste of Season 8 out of my mouth, and then? I might start rewatching it. The first five or six seasons, anyway. Because, you know.

Always.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Teevee | Comments Off

Symphony Saturday

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Kelly Sedinger

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with Tchaikovsky, but over the last few years, I find myself more and more attuned to him. His famous Piano Concerto No. 1 remains a work that vexes the hell out of me, but I like parts of it enough to outweigh the things I find difficult in it; the 1812 Overture and the Capriccio Italien remain fun potboilers, even if the former is really twice as long as it needs to be. Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, though? Well, even there I’ve always had trouble. For one thing, even though he wrote six total, it’s the last three that show up on frequent programs; in fact, until I did listening for this post, I’d never even heard the first three. I disliked the Fourth for years (only now changing my opinion), and the Sixth was nice but didn’t really do a whole lot for me. (I’ve yet to relisten to it for this series, but I’m looking forward to it.) What started my transition on Tchaikovsky (whose ballet music I have always loved) was the Fifth Symphony, which I’ve always liked and which a few years ago grabbed my heart in a way that few works ever have…but we’ll get to that.

Tchaikovsky was the consummate tortured Russian Romantic who poured the struggles of his soul into his art. His life was one of constant turmoil, and his relationships were stormy and too often ended in death or, in the case of his patron Nadezhda von Meck, the enigmatic and sudden ending of the relationship with no real explanation. Tchaikovsky was also homosexual at a time when that was not a thing to be, and some think that his death — from cholera which resulted from his drinking unboiled water during an epidemic — was at least partly suicidal.

From all this arose some of the most enduring and popular works of classical music ever written, including the last three symphonies. The first three, however, are interesting and fine works in their own right, so I decided to go ahead and just include them all in the course of this series. That’s partly why I took a break from these posts for two weeks: I had catchup listening to do!

So, what of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1? It was his first (obviously) real foray into the world of large-scale symphonic works, which he began composing shortly after entering conservatory. As a youthful work, it does show some signs of inexperience at times, but Tchaikovsky’s gift for soaring, singing melody is evident early on, and there are some very interesting uses of orchestral color as well. (Russian composers always seem to know how to use the orchestra in the most amazing ways.)

Tchaikovsky’s work on the symphony was not easy, though. Here’s a brief account, from Wikipedia:

Tchaikovsky started writing this symphony in March 1866. Work proved sluggish. A scathing review by César Cui of the cantata he had written as a graduation piece from the St. Petersburg Conservatory shattered his morale. He also composed day and night. All these factors strained Tchaikovsky’s mental and physical health tremendously. He started suffering from insomnia, from pains in his head which he thought to be strokes, and became convinced he would not live to finish the symphony.[5] A successful performance of his revised Overture in F in St. Petersburg lifted his spirits. So did a change of scene for the summer with his family. Nevertheless, he soon worked himself again into nervous and physical exhaustion by continuing to compose day and night. A doctor declared him “one step away from insanity,” ordering complete rest. Tchaikovsky complied.

Ouch. Tchaikovsky was also handicapped by teachers who criticized the work heavily for its awkward use of the traditional rules of sonata-allegro form, rules which Tchaikovsky felt too constrictive for his own natural abilities as a composer. Still, he finished the symphony, and now, hearing it recently for the first time — yes, it’s youthful. No, it’s not the equal of what was to come. But it’s still a fine work that I’m glad to have finally heard!

Here is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor, titled “Winter Dreams”.