silva rerum

Because they decide they’d rather be tennis pros

Lately, my days have been awfully list­less and aim­less; I’m just busy look­ing for things to do, things to improve. I’m not very good at this relax­a­tion thing, I think I lost that part of my nature when I decided to live a life of “Productivity Zen.” It’s also idyllic though, to have noth­ing to do – to not have object­ives, action items, to-​dos – the to-​do is to appre­ci­ate time and space around me.

During one of my tutori­als yes­ter­day, I was describ­ing the beauty of poetry and my philo­sophy of it – my defin­i­tion came to be some­thing along the lines of, “Poetry is noth­ing more or less than the right words in the right places (what Amy Tan might call the “art­ful arrange­ment of words”).” Apparently this was some­thing deep and philo­soph­ical to my stu­dent which made me inwardly smile – we spent more than half the tutorial study­ing “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare and while the lan­guage was assuredly con­fus­ing for him, the mean­ing wasn’t. I was so pleased I could unwrap the lay­ers and lay­ers of mean­ing (though I still think there are lay­ers I haven’t yet begun to com­pre­hend!). I ended up com­par­ing an appre­ci­ation for lit­er­at­ure to be some­thing that com­ple­ments and aug­ments an appre­ci­ation for visual beauty or aural har­mony, some­thing that requires cog­ni­tion com­bined with intu­ition. There is some moment of serendip­ity, of magic, when you read some­thing (regard­less the lan­guage) that strikes you as par­tic­u­larly mov­ing, as beau­ti­ful – beau­ti­ful words arranged beau­ti­fully. I could go on about this aes­thetic the­ory of lit­er­at­ure but I am assuredly not the first to see lit­er­at­ure as beau­ti­ful, as har­mo­ni­ous, and I doubt I will be the last.

I’ve been fid­dling with UltraStar Deluxe because, as any­one who knows me well, I am a huge fan of karaōke video games. I love Rock Band, Guitar Hero but I really love SingStar. Unfortunately, the song selec­tions for SingStar are, well, lack­ing. 30 songs per disc. And not all of them are good. So UltraStar rem­ed­ies that – I can even use my SingStar micro­phones to play! I’m totally going to bring this to the next house party I go to; fin­gers crossed that tech­no­logy doesn’t fail me (so many things could go wrong – the micro­phone USB con­nec­tion, the S-​video out­put, the res­ol­u­tion, the soft­ware, the user inter­face, etc.). I’ve heard that the Swing Space lec­ture halls are open but vacant when they’re not being used for classes; per­haps I’ll hold a sur­repti­tious karaōke battle there one of these days…who’s in?

I won­der if any­one has noticed my con­stant tinker­ing with this blog? Do I dare eat a peach?