A Momentary Taste of Being

Or, perhaps not really--perhaps just the spontaneous overflow that any parent might be subject to. The son who lights the days and nights with the joy he brings to the house has been working, and I mean working hard--four to five hours a day--composing a new piece of music.  When I first heard it, I was stunned.  He has composed other pieces of which I have been unduly proud in light of this most recent accomplishment.  He calls it Valse in C# Minor--Hommage á Chopin --(I suggested the latter half because he wanted to get the subject of his inspiration in the title). Because I have always wanted to be a composer, I find that these compositions, regardless of what the world of music might think of them, move me nearly to tears.  And more so knowing that if all goes well, I will spend many years of my life hearing music no one in the world has heard--new music--a brand new creation.  It is overwhelming to think of--a sound that no one has ever heard before, ...

My wife discovered Son up extremely early this morning, in bed, and listening to Vivaldi.  His comment: "Vivaldi is good to listen to because it's like tiramisu because it's light and fluffy and it won't fill you up." Which seems to describe some of the appeal of Vivaldi quite aptly.

Listening to "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," we hear from the back seat, "I don't want to rule the world: people would expect me to do stuff." While coyly calculating, it was still extremely amsuing.

What can one say?  Burton visits wonderland and makes it his own, and because he is such an engaging film maker with so powerful an imagination, I don't even mind.  He eviscerates the Alice stories and sews them back together with his magical thread and I find myself wanting more. Really, the film probably should have been called Jabberwocky, because that is the core and the theme.  While the characters from the Alice books are all gathered round, they are gathered round the Frabjous day and the Jabberwocky holds pride of place in this story. Even my son, who has become notoriously picky about deviations from the sacred canon of his books (when it come to film, excoriating the film makers for the liberties they took with  The Lightning Thief even while enjoying the film) I say, even my son loved this film, talking about it frequently and often seeking to parse and critique the auteur's choices.  "Did you notice the Queen of Hearts had heart-shaped lips?"...

Son announced that he had just read the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer" ( in a translation quite similar to this one ). Being 11he said, it was interesting.  I asked him if he had read it aloud.  He naturally responded no.  Now I won't go off on my diatribe on poetry as a spoken as well as a written art and how every poem should be heard as well as read and that poetry demands reading aloud (oops, I just did).  But I did ask him to read it aloud for me, and as he did so we paused every few lines and reviewed what was going on both in the "story" of the poem and in the language.  What amazed me was his very clear grasp of what the poem was about, the differences between the seafarer and the youth and why those differences occurred.  I am convinced that if parents, teachers, or anyone would just take a little time and listen to their children reading and stop and ask them questions, we would improve education in this country 10,000% in a single year. It ...

To start with, from Books Inq.  The Last Days of Kafka . Now to the relationship with my son.  I may have narrated how recently in a book-buying blitz, my son (11) chose from all of the possibilities a small volume of Kafka's short stories.  Now, I wouldn't push Kafka on anyone, 11 or otherwise, and I'm fully cognizant that being 11 my son will not derive from Kafka all there is to get.  On the other hand, exposure to great, if weird literature, is always a good thing.  Son dutifully read "The Metamorphosis" and reported back to his mother on the details of it.  His mother, not being entomoligcally tolerant succinctly expressed her views about any human sympathetic to or being one with the Dictyoptera.  Which, of course, produced much merriment and a search on Son's part for more such to share with his mother.  Well, the other day we were at Disney and riding around on the steam engine train that circles the park.  Our seats got somewhat ...