Wie sagt man das auf Deutsch?

I almost fell out of my chair when our instructor showed this video in class the other day. I've definitely got myself into a totally unfamiliar, parallel universe this time when I enrolled in a German 100 class at IU this fall.  I've been going to class at 8 in the morning, four days a week, since school started.  Learning a new language, from the ABC's like a pre-schooler in a kindergarten, with a bunch of young men and women barely out of their teens, is quite a novel experience for me.  When I went back to Graduate School over a decade ago to study Architecture, I was similar in age to my classmates' parents, now I could be their great aunt.  Thankfully, I am not as prone to feel embarrassed in such circumstances as when I was younger. 

What prompted me to take up German was the frustration I felt when I attempted to pronounce a few German words in a book I was reading for LibriVox in the summer.  Also, I remember feeling very embarrassed and rude when I couldn't understand or say anything in even the barest minimum of German on our trip in the German speaking part of Basel some years ago.

One often reads about how learning to speak a new language or to play a musical instrument can improve the mental agility of older adults.  It so happens that I seem to have been doing all the things that may contribute to keeping my wits about me.  At any rate, I hope my learning German now may have many more benefits than just enabling me to say "Vielen Dank!" when occasion arises.

The Fixed Period

The Fixed Period is the title of the second audiobook to which I contributed in the LibriVox project.  It is a strange story, to say the least, written by the prolific Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, and first published in 1882.  Kirk and I, since we joined The Folio Society back in the 90's, have collected all of Trollope's 48 novels and have read most of them through the years.  The Fixed Period, however, was one that I tried in vain several times to read but could not get past the first few chapters.  It was very different from the usual themes of Trollope's stories about love, marriage, inheritance, lawsuits, impetuous and stubborn men and women, greed and ambition in some of his more unsavory characters, etc.  It has been called a dystopian fiction, set in 1980, long since passed without any such event, fortunately, ever having happened.  The story itself, though grim enough, was narrated in a matter of fact tone, mundane and argumentative, though what sends a chill down one's spine is not so much the dystopian society it depicts, but the realization how one can be led astray on a grand scale by mistaken beliefs and an inflexible will.

When I saw the book in the Readers Wanted list of LibriVox's catalog, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to find out, finally, what the story was about and how it ended.  I actually started reading, my first attempt at voice recording, from the last two chapters of the book.  After satisfying myself that nothing more disastrous happened than the frustration of a misguided idealist, I gradually read my way back up, and eventually recorded six chapters of the book in total.  I'm afraid my reading is rather mechanical, not like story-telling; I've a lot to work on still.   

Opera 101, Re-broadcast

[The following post is for people who may be interested in finding out more about western operas.  If you're well versed in this subject, please read no farther.]

For opera newbies out there, me included, I'd like to bring your attention to a new series of video podcasts this summer by Nicolas Revels of the San Diego Opera Company in which he introduces some of the basic elements of operas.  (Hat-tip to Marija for first telling me about this podcast a couple of years ago.)    

Opera for most people is an acquired taste, like bitter greens that take a little getting used to.  In addition to its unfamiliarity, there are several obvious reasons why it is not a more popular form of music theatre than, say, Broadway Musicals in the U. S.-- e.g., the fact that live operas are not readily available unless you live in big cities, that they are sung in languages other than English about 90 percent of the time, that opera singers do not normally enjoy the same cachet as pop idols, except in their own rarefied world, and that operas can be interminably long, and so on.  It was not until the Metropolitan Opera started showing opera productions live in HD at movie theaters that I got exposed to this musical/performing art form, just a couple of years before we moved from Gainesville to Bloomington. 

Luckily for me, Bloomington's IU School of Music happens to be one of the hot beds, and the best schools, for opera studies in the U.S.  Each year they stage seven full-fledged opera productions at the IU Musical Arts Center.  As a result, since moving to Bloomington, though a small town, I've been to see several live opera performances, by semi-professional opera students with all the accompanying fanfare and pageantry  of live orchestra, gigantic movable sets, dramatic lighting, and period costumes, etc.  I can't say that I've now become a bona fide opera buff; my knowledge about operas is in truth minuscule--barely scratching the surface. But I have caught the opera bug. 

I hope that the following introductory podcasts about operas by Nicolas Revels may perchance become the entry point to the world of [western] operas for some, who perhaps think it not to their taste, while providing, for others, an opportunity to dig a little deeper into the subject.  I don't know if there will be more podcasts in this series coming, but the followings are what have already been broadcasted -

1. Summer School for Opera Fans

2. Words and Music

3. What is an Aria?

4. I've Heard this Before!

5. The Duet

6. How do you say "I Love You" in music

7. Homework?!!

By the way, the schedule for the 2014 Met Opera Live in HD season is out; you may catch a few of the performances "live" in the movie theaters near you this Fall!

Happy Trails

We hit the trails, on horseback, one auspicious afternoon when it was not too hot, for an hour's ride in the Brown County State Park.  I vaguely remembered, or perhaps falsely remembered, having mounted once before, but it was probably before moving to the U.S.  I got myself fitted up for the occasion, donning my cowgirl hat and my "fire-engine-red" cowgirl boots, so described by our guide somewhat jealously.  We were told two basic maneuvers - right or left turn by pulling slightly on the rein accordingly, and then, off we trotted in an orderly procession, one horse's nose behind another's butt, so to speak.  I was assigned a horse named Sam; later on I learned that he tended to misbehave by snacking on the greenery along the way.  Sure enough, he would snap some branches off the scrubs once in a while and munch at his leisure.  The trails through the park were not all on smooth turf or gravel, there were some rough patches of mud, steep inclines, and down slopes.  A couple of times, Sam sidetracked us from the trails to get at some juicy bits of leaves in rather precarious conditions.  The guide hollered at me from the front to pull him back, saying with some encouragement, "You can do it, Cowgirl!"  Kirk said that Sam had "got my number" -- and could do anything he wanted with me.  When we got back, no sooner did I dismount, Sam let off a heavy jet of pee -- I barely got away in time.  

Happy Trails

Felix Holt, The Radical

The book, Felix Holt, The Radical, by George Eliot just came out as an audiobook available for free download in the Internet Archive website here or LibriVox's catalog here.  (Both sites have their eponymous free apps for convenient listening.)  George Eliot has such an extraordinary range of observation, power of description, and understanding of human aspirations and foibles that in reading her books one gets a vivid impression of the life, mostly in small towns, in 19th Century England.  I had not read Felix Holt before so it was a real pleasure to get to listen to the book for the first time.  I recorded four chapters for the book, not all in consecutive order.  If you listen to the whole book from the beginning, you can easily pick out my parts; they stick out like sore thumbs.  I hope they don't ruin your listening experience.  These are my first forays into reading for audiobooks; I hope I get better at it with practice.

p.s.: If you can, please consider giving to LibriVox.  Thank you.  

Summertime

And the livin' is easy

Unlike the previous two summers, this one has been especially mild, some hot days in the high 80s/low 90s, interposed with days, in the low 70s, of sustained rain and thunder storms.  All kinds of vegetation in our yard, never before seen, are growing rambunctiously, after having stayed dormant in the ground for the previous two years due to the severe drought we had.

The pleasant weather prompted Kirk to hang up his old hammock in the sunroom, the one he used to sleep in for an entire year when he lived at the dorm at UCSB many, many moons ago.  He bought it in Merida in the Yucatan on a trip, hitch-hiking part of the way, through Mexico, one summer when he was an undergraduate.  (This kind of road trip somehow does not seem very feasible in the present time, at least in the eyes of the older and wiser folks like us.)  

He thought to get another one like it for me so that we could sleep in plein air, as it were. After some searching on the net, he managed to find an outfit in Yucatan that sells almost exactly the same Mayan style of hammocks at an incredibly good price!  He ordered it and got it in no time.  We hung it up side by side with the old one, whose colors are slightly paler than its freshly-minted neighbor.  We've so far spent two and a half nights out there, the half being the one that I called off, rather unnecessarily according to Kirk, due to the severity of the thunder storm we had that night.  

Sleeping outdoors is a little like camping, except that the bathroom facility is close at hand.  One's sense of hearing is especially acute in the dark--kids giggling from somewhere in the neighborhood, probably also camping out, the screeching of cats fighting, the sound of driving rain and outrageous thunder, and the notes of the first bird awakening and the answering trill from another in the early dawn, barely broken. 


07.08.13 Update:

Hostas in bloom

The hostas in the bed by our front walk, which we thought to have been completely decimated by the deer in the neighborhood when we moved here three summers ago, have miraculously revived and re-populated the entire bed, despite my having planted hyacinths there in the fall after we moved in.  And in recent weeks, saturated with rain, they have even pushed out their slender, delicate, lavender-colored flowers to our great surprise and delight.  We have been jealously guarding them from any deer approaching our yard -- that is, as best as we can, for the truth is that there is no stopping the deer munching, en famille, from yard to yard in Bloomington. 

Reading Out Loud

Recording in Session

Earlier this month, I made myself a cardboard sign, which says "Recording in Session", to hang up as needed on the door of my office.  (It somehow seems to remain on the door any time of the day, for days on end, as Kirk soon finds out.)  You may be wondering what it is all about; well, there is a story behind it...

I recently jointed a multi-national volunteer organization, called LibriVox, whose ambition is to record all the books in the public domain and make them available for download for free -- a lofty goal indeed!  As you may be wondering why there are people doing this, here is what they say about it on their FAQ -

Why are you doing this?  What's in it for you?
"We love reading, love books, love literature, think the public domain should be defended and enriched, we like free stuff, we like to hear people read to us, and we like reading to other people.  It's fun, it's a great community, it's a rewarding public service to the world. And "nothing" is in it for us, except the satisfaction of participating in a wonderful project."

Well, it can't be said any better.  I've been listening to their free audio-books for some time and as they always begin and end their recordings with calls to volunteering, I finally decided to give it a try and signed up.  (They are not very particular about signing people up; no qualification is required.)  For the past several weeks I've recorded six chapters, three each in two books, and spent many late-night hours reading and re-reading paragraphs in the books and heavily editing my recording.  Compared to those of the experienced readers, my reading sounds laborious and has a unmistakeable foreign accent but they don't seem to mind it once the recording meets certain guidelines.  (I'll let you know what I read once they publish the two audio-books in question.)  Several of my readers will be a great fit for doing this kind of thing; I won't name names but you all know who they are.    

Reading out loud, though everybody does it, is not as easy as it sounds; to many of my friends who are professional pedagogues, for whom the ability to get their points across effectively with voice is essential, speaking/reading out loud is perhaps as easy as second nature.  Though I've been speaking English almost exclusively for over 30 years, it still frustrates me when I can't speak well, explain myself clearly, or when I feel that I speak with a foreign accent, and I don't mean in occasional episodes of public speaking but just ordinary day-to-day conversation.  As a way to improve my English, I read out loud to myself from time to time just to keep my tongue nimble.  Therefore, to volunteer to read for LibriVox seems like a great opportunity for me to practice my English.  I hope it gets easier as I continue to work on it.                     

Hmm, you may be thinking, "This is another of her early retirement projects, like blogging and learning to play the piano; how fun!"  Well, yes, and many thanks to Kirk that I have been able to do this.  As a New York Times' article asks "What do you want to be, now that you're grown?", I feel like I've been given a second life, to do whatever I like to do, now that I've left off, albeit not entirely voluntarily, being an income-producing adult, whose life is tied to the job that pays.  I have, however, never been at a loss to have something to "do" with my time; quite the reverse, I'm concerned about not having enough time to do all the things I like and want to do.