I've put on my Bacchic crown (plastic ivy never sere!) and poured myself a nice cold vermouth, and am sitting down with Purcell's Fairy Queen to try to work the wildebeest out of my back-muscles and re-generate some milk of human kindness. My charitable-glands have been running dry the last few days, probably since I've only slept in fitful three-hour bursts, invariably interrupted by some new and miserable obligation. But working with the gentle people of P**t's (FiDi) has got the juices flowing again. P**t's has a lovely custom of donating tips to charity on the day before Christmas; H-Sq. raised about $850. On the other hand, the generous corporate ratfuckers of the Financial District contributed $1500. If this hasn't exactly reinstated my faith in humanity, it has at least encouraged the formation of a coalition government between it and bitter misanthropy.
In a curious reversal of fortune, I spent last night on MG's sofa. He's been lonesome in his house, with his parents away, and the dog was recently put to sleep. Probably the best evening I've had all year, listening to PR's American folk disc and Joni Mitchell's Blue. Old cheese and triscuits, MG's mom's chardonnay, chatty-chat-chat. Once tanked, I sat down at the old pianner-forte and bulldozed my way through the George Gershwin and Cole Porter Song Books, backing MG's inchoate vocalises. Our I got rhythm didn't, but But not for me brought tears to my eyes, as it always does; consider Ira G's felicitous "When ev'ry happy plot / Ends in a marriage knot / But there's no knot for me." It was three in the morning when I shut the book on Ev'ry time I say goodbye -- I settled down for a three-hour nap, and then wafted through my day at work like fog in the tree-tops. My grim week softened considerably today -- the people I work with were so splendidly considerate, and on my sweater, hair from the recently-deceased golden retriever Shannon, and the echoes of SLB's perfume. I probably looked all doe-eyed all day. That has less to do with my emotional state, in point of fact -- I've already mentioned that even at my jolliest I scowl like an Evangelical preacher in a George Eliot novel -- but because I'm mildly allergic to dog-hair.
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Damn it. I never thought I'd get old enough to have to start noticing, with regret, cute guys with wedding bands. Real adultery seems like such a grim prospect to me, a too-well-travelled road through vile, polluted fens, with only the wide skies for comfort and the distant squawk of sea-birds.
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Reading Update: In the Shape of a Boar turned out to have some cute, dangly postmodern tricks down its pants. I'm enjoying it a little more heartily now, but I still feel that the prose style is some kind of dry inside joke that I'm not getting. I suppose I'm not used to reading prose that is self-consciously prosey; the delight LN seems to take in books has to do with "content" rather than "form", and hence relies on keeping the ideas distinct. I'm afraid I can't quite wrap my mind around that, but I'm trying.
Music on Tap: Purcell's semi-opera the Fairy Queen, based on Midsummer Night's Dream, and including a Drunken Poet, an Epithalamium, and, "Dancing Chineses". Oh, and a duet for Corydon and Mopsa, where Corydon is a tenor and his lady-love Mopsa is a bass. I believe it's (in part) a cruel jibe at the femininity of peasant women: in Philidor's village wedding skit, le Mariage de Grosse Cathos, "Fat Cathy" is also written to be played by a man. But there's an aspect of traditional English dragginess to it, too. This curious alliance of mean, beautiful, and ultimately forgiving appeals deeply to my aesthetic sense -- as well as my sense of human nature -- as when sardonic texts are set to perfectly transcendent music, balancing mankind's beauties with its failings. Gilbert and Sullivan do it when, momentarily, the music of the Living I shines a soft light into the otherwise monstrous Katisha. Aspiring songwriters would do well to listen to much Purcell, since he can set an English text like none other, and his gift for subtle melody invariably serves both the drama and the sense.