My chair loves me deeply; its cushion is blue and mucky-white striped, it has a cheap twenties-mass-produced Empire knockoff lyre under the back rail, sweet little klismos-y legs, and vicious, needlessly extroverted upholstery tacks. But it can take my ass for hours at a time. Oh baby.
Today was another rehearsal with KK, SS, and DV, whipping through another couple Boismortier quartets, a CPE Bach trio sonata, and the Handel op. 5 no. 6, which breaks my heart every time. After DV left, SS and KK and I played the JS Bach G-major two-flute trio sonata that sounds just like the gamba sonata. I had to go laundry-diving to find enough change to get onto the bus, I smelled like a goat dusted with parmesan, and I'd had four hours of sleep the night before since I stayed up very late making popcorn and screwing around (discreet cough) online. In a very real, history-of-the-body way, I felt I was getting in touch with my artistic forbears: hungry, dirty, longhaired perverts who were perpetually short of cash.
There are two problems with DV, the dear violinist: the Lesser Problem is that she plays like a modern violinist. Her phrasing borders on the trudgy. Her ornaments are, for the most part, withered curlicues brushed onto a cadence like flowery adhesive paper to a stained bathroom cabinet. She uses a great deal of vibrato. She sometimes seems to wallow in certain anachronistic notions of sentiment (which is odd, considering her background in Enlightenment Europe). I could go on for paragraphs like this, but keep in mind that these criticisms are meant in much the spirit as a cranky cardinal observing that Raphael has missed a spot in the Stanze. I keep them very much to myself, and, like KK and SS, assume that she'll assimilate into our stylistic hegemony quite well, with only the rarest application of electric shock treatment against she should play choppy ports-de-voix.
The Greater Problem is that she's apologetic about the things in which she excels most sublimely; she keeps up, she leads when it's appropriate, she listens as well as (probably better than) the rest of us,... -- blah, blah, blah. But she always puts herself down. In short, she is like a noble and qualified ambassador, who feels ashamed of his manners because they seem rough compared to the peculiar refinements of the court to which he has been sent. Why should he chastise himself for coarseness? This kind of self-deception sets my teeth on edge. Damn it, she should know what to apologize for and then keep it to herself unless it is absolutely necessary. It breaks up rehearsal and sounds like she's fishing for flattery.
My first day at P**t's C*ff** in H*rv*rd Sq*r* went swimmingly, except for a certain lack of sleep the night before and thinner socks than my feet would prefer to stand about all day in. I like the people who work there a great deal more now than when I worked there at the end of the last century. They're more colorful, friendlier, less apt to skulk and cower. The work -- well, it's funny, but my first day was also, coincidentally, the first day that the real holiday-season weekend crowds started. This is less pleasant. There are a lot of very demanding, ugly people in C*mbr*dg*, who feel that both their money and their collection of vintage radical bumper-stickers excuse them from having to be polite to people who work behind counters. There is also something mildly revolting about a crowd of pasty-faced, upper-middle-class elephant seals bellowing for their triple-tall lattes, but this only happens at particular tides, like late afternoon. I shall resist the urge to inscribe their foamed milk with political slogans; I shall leave my molotov cocktails at home.
The caff� latte, in case you were wondering, is a revolting drink except at very rare moments when you feel very bummed out and only an evocation of hot bedtime milk and toesywozy jammies can calm you down, but you also want not to fall asleep at the helm of your IM session. That it has become the standard drink within a certain (almost without exceptions) vile population probably stems from the misprision that more of a thing, in this case, tepid milk, cannot fail to be better. I like drip coffee, nowadays, or maybe a perfectly-balanced cappuccino or a caff� macchiato when I'm feeling particularly flamboyant. With it you must have a chocolate, or a bikbik, or both, keeping in mind that a chocolate biscuit is the middle path.
Oh, and if one more yacht-smelling middle-aged guy with a signet ring asks me if I'm having a Proustian moment while I'm dishing out his madeleine, I will jam an annotated bibliography of Pastry in Literature (tentatively entitled Milles Feuilles) down his godsforsaken khakis and ask him, once I've removed my hand from his trousers, to find another saw to wiggle at the overeducated kids who work at coffee shops.
I have lost a great treasure this week in the form of my complete corrsepondence, April-November, 2001. I was trying to move folders in Netscape and failed. With the result that all incoming and outgoing mail folders for my primary email address during that period are completely and utterly gone. I was distraught, then hopeful that I could reconstruct them, then utterly crushed, then, finally, delighted: I realized that, with one ill-timed click of the delete key, I was providing the scholars of sixscore years hence with a killer project: the reconstruction of AT's Lost Year. I hope by then ASCII worms will have chewed great bloody exciting lacunae in all my letters, so that professors can ascribe to me things far more brilliant than anything I'd ever bothered to write.
I now plan to don my silken robes, procede to my musty Virtual Abbey Library, pull down several dirty big Latin tomes, and fall fast asleep on 'em.