A lot of you who follow me on the social networks and/or who also follow 
solarbird
Continue reading “Anna vs. H. pylori, or, the Very Bad No Fun Not Good Weekend”
Vertical Movement alert! GBS at the Moore, 3/8/2013!
Attention all Seattle GBS fans! If you don’t know already, the B’ys just announced the first leg of their massive 2013 tour plans, including a show in Seattle at the Moore on March 8th, 2013!
Tickets for this show go on presale TOMORROW! You no longer need an account on greatbigsea.com to buy tickets–they removed site accounts with the launch of the new site. So you can hit the site at 10am tomorrow morning to get tickets.
HOWEVER, if you want in on a block of tickets with me specifically, please let me know ASAP! Otherwise I’ll hope to see you there!
ETA: DAMMIT! The presale as per usual falls right during my morning standup at work, and since it would be impolite of me to bail on the standup just to buy tickets, I ain’t going to do that. Also, will NOT be available to get tickets on my behalf, so I can’t get a block of tickets after all. :(
Seattle crowd, could I get a volunteer to get me a ticket? I will happily provide money via Paypal or whatever means you request. Talk to me!
Et maintenant, une journée avec Anna
Dans ce post, je vais pratiquer mon français! Si vos etes un francophone, j’invite vous à m’enseigne si je faire une erreur!
Au matin, j’étudie le français avec SuperMemo sur mon iPhone. Je peux étudier sur le bus pendant que je vais au travail.
Je suis un testeur pour notre site web à Big Fish Games. (Je ne sais pas–une testrice? Je teste le site web!)
Lorsque je rentre chez moi, j’écris des romans fantastiques. Mon prochain roman sera publié en avril 2013!
Je joue la musique aussi! J’aime tellement le groupe Great Big Sea, qui a m’inspiré apprendre la guitare! Mais, j’aime maintenant la musique traditionelle du Quebéc! :D La musique du Québec m’inspire d’apprendre français, pour comprendre les chansons merveilleuses! J’apprends aussi la podorythmie à faire avec ma flûte!
J’ai tellement trop choses à faire–ma tête est très plein! Mon cerveau explose! Mais, je suis très heureuse. :D
Reading Grey Larsen's Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle…
… and even though I’m only into Chapter 1 thus far, already I’m finding this thing highly informative.
Some of what he’s going over in the first chapter is familiar to me–basic stuff about how time signatures work, for example. And the difference between a tongued note and a slurred one. I remember these things from my years in band in middle and high school.
What I never had to deal with before, though, was modes. When I started playing again in my adulthood and started hearing about modes of tunes–especially at session, before our Renton session imploded–I had a bit of time trying to bend my brain around what the hell a mode actually is, and what the difference between it and a key is, for a tune. Larsen’s book explains this beautifully and simply. I’d kind of already bent my brain around this a bit, but to have it clearly spelled out is very, very helpful.
(For the curious who may not know–if you know how a basic scale works, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, and assuming you’re doing it in a major key, that’s actually what’s called Ionian mode. You can change modes if you take that exact same scale and just start it on a different note! So the key is still the same, but the resulting base note for whatever tune you may be dealing with is NOT.)
Here’s another thing that was incredibly helpful to have spelled out, since I DO come from a background that’s more or less “classical”, even if I only bounced briefly off of that in Symphonic Band and in Wind Ensemble my freshman year (mmmmm Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony Finale mmmmmmm). To quote Mr. Larsen:
The classical wind player is taught that all notes are to be tongued unless there is an indication in the notated music, such as a slur, to do otherwise. Most Irish players use tonguing and throating intuitively as an expressive device against a general backdrop of slurring.
Speaking as somebody coming out of a more or less classical background, I read that bit and went WHOA. Because he’s right–I was totally taught that I was to clearly articulate every note unless the music said to do otherwise. But here’s the fun thing–when I’ve been playing Irish or Quebec tunes, I’ve totally found myself, by habit, mostly slurring stuff! It was always easier to me, and I never really thought about it.
So yeah, that suddenly made something just click HARD in my brain.
And if this book’s doing that to me in the very first chapter, I can’t wait to get to the more complex stuff–and especially to see if I can learn from this text some of the more complicated tonguing tricks I was never able to learn well in school. One could argue that if I’m in my 40’s, it’s probably too late for me to REALLY pick this stuff up properly… but screw it, I don’t care, it’s the journey that’s fun. Learning how to improve my flute playing AND learning a whole shiny new language exercises my brain! And my fingers!
This is going to be fun, you guys!
Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 6 (still ongoing)
And now, it’s time again for the Tri-lingual Hobbit Re-read! When last we left our intrepid band of short adventurers, they’d managed to escape the goblins only to run smack into a lengthy scene of exposition. This is what Bilbo gets for sneaking up on them all with a magic ring, doncha know. And then OHNOEZ ROCK SLIDE!
Continue reading “Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 6 (still ongoing)”
Fun with reels and podorythmie!
It was inevitable, O Internets, that when I fell in love with the podorythmie in Quebec music, I would of course eventually have to try it myself. Those of you who have seen me post about the monthly Quebec music sessions I’ve been going to know that I’ve already tried it a time or two at those. The REAL fun, though, is if you can do it while simultaneously either singing or playing an instrument!
As I am not only a neophyte at Quebec trad but still fairly heavily out of practice on my flute in general, I ain’t expecting to get this down right out of the gate. Tonight, though, while playing with Gigue du Père Mathias, I HAD to try it. Just to see if I could.
So far what I’ve observed about podorythmie is that it’s generally done with reels (or gigues, or stuff that’s generally in 4-based time signatures). I have maybe one or two recordings where the tunes being played are clearly jigs, yet simple podo is happening underneath them–most of it, though, it’s 4-based stuff. And the very simplest rhythm I’ve been able to note thus far is a ta-ga-DAP pattern. The DAP falls on each downbeat, with the ta-ga leading into it as pickup notes (sixteenths, if you break ’em down).
Getting the pattern down with my feet is pretty easy, with the caveat of my having neither proper board nor proper shoes, so I cannot actually hear myself making the satisfying rhythm that I get in so many of the tracks I’ve got in my collection now! (Note: getting proper shoes IS an eventual goal, but I want to see if I can learn this first! ;D ) I can, however, at least get down the rhythm and the motions, and I can feel each strike of my foot against the floor even if it’s muffled.
Then comes the tricky part–trying to work in the tune to play on top of it. Since Gigue du Père Mathias is a tune I’ve now managed to memorize (and is actually the first 4-based fast tune I’ve picked up, the rest I know are all jigs so far, or waltzes, or Da Slockit Light which is I believe an air), I thought I’d try to layer that in on top of the root rhythm. I had to try it very, VERY slowly. But I thought maybe I could apply the same principle I do to trying to sing while playing guitar–i.e., don’t think about ‘your hands have to do this’ vs. ‘your feet have to do this’, but instead, get into a sort of zen space where all parts of you are uniting to make the song happen.
I think this might actually work! I tried just vocalizing the tune over my feet, and that worked okay. Then I tried actually playing it–and it took me a few tries before I got the hang of it–but I was eventually able to do the whole A part! Also, paradoxically, I did it a little better once I speeded things up a bit.
I can already tell though that this is going to be super-extra-bonus fun for a wind player. By which I mean, “oh god oh god where the hell am I going to breathe?!” It’s amusing enough to be a flute player trying to tear your way through a reel at top speed without making your legs go at the same time!
But WOW this is going to be fun. And hard. But FUN. The challenge is ON!
(STILL need a proper podorythmie icon. Must find a proper picture. And the caption will have to read ‘my fandom wears the Smiling Boots’!)
An evening of flute practice
As y’all know I’m a writer first and a musician second, but Musician!Anna is really only a few steps behind Writer!Anna, and if the instruments yell loud enough I have to pick them up. No questions asked and no quarter given. Tonight, the instruments yelled loud enough. So I grabbed Norouet and Shine for some tunes practice! (For those of you who may just be tuning in, Norouet is my current main wooden flute, and Shine is my piccolo, my oldest working instrument, from way back in my days of middle school.)
It’s been too long, so my fingers found Norouet a bit big and awkward to deal with (which of course means I damn well need to play Norouet more). So I mostly punted over to Shine instead just to review all the various tunes I know.
Started off with Road to Lisdoonvarna, including the variation I’m trying to play with. And by variation, I mostly just mean, several little additional twiddles I’m throwing in there, just to vary up the rhythm a bit and make it more interesting to listen to when I swing back around for a third repetition. Along with this, since I still typically play ’em in a set even though our Renton session imploded, I did Swallowtail Jig and Morrison’s. Morrison’s STILL gives me fits. I can’t play it at speed without losing my breath control. Augh.
Also stumbled my way through Banish Misfortune, Blarney Pilgrim, and Si Bheag Si Mhor, the other tunes from the Renton session I am still more or less able to play without having to consult sheet music.
After that, though, I jumped from Ireland over to Quebec, to practice the two tunes I was taught by Genticorum’s flute player! These tunes, y’all may or may not recall, are 6/8 de André Alain and Gigue du Père Mathias. Playing with these tonight, I determined that 6/8 de Andre Alain is more or less in my fingers. The Gigue, not so much. This is probably pretty much a direct result of how I was working with Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand on the first tune for most of our lesson, and we barely bounced off the second one.
That said, I DO have a phone recording of him playing through both of the tunes. And I have just determined that I was more or less able to follow what he was playing, at least in the slow bit of the recording. The fast bit where he kicks into full, proper tempo? Um, yeah. I gotta work on that part. *^_^*;;
The real, important takeaway here though is that yes, I apparently can learn tunes by ear if I have an opportunity to work through them a few times–either with a suitably slow recording, or with somebody with an instrument sitting with me who’s willing to fling me a few measures at a time until I can reliably echo what’s being played. And let me clarify–I can do this on the flute. And specifically on Shine, since that’s the instrument that goes back clear to my formative years, so it’s the one whose fingerings I don’t have to think about. I don’t have that level of comfort yet with flutes that don’t have keys.
(And the other takeaway here is that holy hopping gods Alexandre can play him some flute. Y’all go buy Nagez Rameurs for a proper demonstration of this! Did I mention the part where that album’s up for an award, and going head to head with Le Vent’s latest AND La Bottine’s latest as well? BEST AWARD NOMINATION LINEUP EVER. <3 )
Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 6 (ongoing)
Picking up again in Chapter 6 of The Hobbit, Gandalf is finishing up cluing in Bilbo on what happened while he was playing at riddles!
General notes:
Goodness, a book released today couldn’t get away with so much telling of action that the protagonist happened to miss, I must say! Much argument could be had on either side as to whether this is actually a good thing–but to be sure, it’s in keeping with the more relaxed pace of this story, as well as Tolkien’s overall style.
French notes:
First translation shift I note in this round is that in the English edition, Gandalf describes his situation of getting into the caves as “touch and go”. The French translation renders this as “une affaire très incertaine !”
Oh hey, here’s a bit that pings one of my SuperMemo vocabulary verbs: “vous vous le rappeler sans doute”. The actual English text says “as you remember”, and it’s in the bit where the narrator is reminding the reader of Gandalf’s skill with fireworks at the solstice celebrations of the Old Took. Google Translate translates the French phrase as “you probably recall”. And it pinged off of me because I was just this morning reviewing “se rappeler” as a verb, i.e., to remember/recall. The “se” bit changes appropriately to reflect the subject of the sentence, so in this case it’s pinging off of “vous”, the reader.
Here’s another good verb: “falloir”. The English text says “it took a wizard to keep his head in the tunnels and guide them in the right direction”. In French, it’s “il fallait un magicien pour garder la tête claire dans les tunnels et les guider dans la bonne direction”. “Fallait” is the conjugation I’m interested in here, because 1) it’s imperfect tense, and 2) falloir is what is apparently called an impersonal verb. So it only gets conjugated in third person, singular, indefinite! I’m going to have to keep an eye out for this one in SuperMemo. I’m sure I’ll see it sooner or later.
Ooh, here’s another verb I know from songs–gémit, appearing in this sentence: « Mais j’ai horriblement faim », gémit Bilbo. Gémir means “moan/groan”, and it’s all over the lyrics to the awesome La Volée d’Castors song “Belle embarquez”! I am deeply unsurprised to see this word showing up in the context of Bilbo bitching about how hungry he is!
“Une horrible confusion”–this is an instance of how sometimes French words do look pretty much like the English ones, except for being pronounced differently!
This post’s most awesome gigantic French word award must go to “s’épaississaient”! Spotted in the phrase “Déjà les ombres s’épaississaient sur elles”, or “Already the shadows were deepening around them” as in the original English. That big ol’ word comes from the verb “épaissir”, and it’s imperfect tense, third person, specifically. I’m slowly getting the hanging of thinking “ongoing action” when it comes to the imperfect tense.
German notes:
This post’s award for Most Awesome Gigantic German word goes to “Mittsommergesellschaften”!
“Jetzt müssen wir weiter” is the translation provided in German for Gandalf telling everyone “Let’s get on!” Google Translate claims this comes out to “now we must continue”. I keep thinking from the rhythm of the words that I might have heard something that sounds like this before, maybe a fragment of the (admittedly badly pronounced, but hey) German in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I will have to doublecheck this!
Here’s another awesome German word: “Überbleibsel”! It means “remnant” and appears in the context of the party scrambling down the rocks that are a remnant of a landslide. But I swear, it sounds like it ought to be some sort of futuristic flying car or something!
This word, on the other hand, looks like it ought to be Japanese: “Tohuwabohu”! It means “chaos”. SWEET.
That’s it for this post, but before I go, let me share with you my amusement at the comparative thicknesses of the French and German editions of the book. The French version, as you can see, is a much slimmer volume. The German is of course written in German, so naturally one could joke about all the words being longer–but more relevant is that the German text is in a significantly larger point size!
Here’s a photo to show you the difference in book thickness!
Next time: dwarves and a hobbit! In trees! That are on FIRE!
ETA 10/2/2012: A few German speakers have advised me that ‘Tohuwabohu’ is in common enough use in the German language that they don’t think of it as anything but a German word. So it looks like it must have become a loan word, jumping from Hebrew over to German. Learning about this kind of thing, folks, is exactly why I’m enjoying going through the translated versions of The Hobbit so much! Vielen Dank to the German speakers who have enlightened me!
Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 6 (beginning)
Moving into Chapter 6 of The Hobbit, we find our hero Mr. Baggins/M. Baggins/Herr Beutlin emerging out of the Misty Mountains–with a magic ring on!
Also, as an epilogue to the previous chapter, I must note that German!Gollum using “mein Schatz” for “my precious” is deeply giggle-inducing for me given that I associate that phrase with an Elvis Presley song. Now I have an entirely different spin on the bridge of “Wooden Heart”, imagining it sung by Andy Serkis. Hi folks, welcome to my brain!
General notes:
I gotta admit, if I were Bilbo, travelling with a bunch of dwarves who’d up to this chapter found me fairly useless, I’d TOTALLY be planning to surprise them with my new shiny magic ring, too.
Red hood! Hi there, Balin! Not your fault that the tricksy hobbit could sneak past you when you’re on watch.
“You nearly chopped off my head with Glamdring, and Thorin was stabbing here there and everywhere with Orcrist.” This, of course, requires a macro saying DORI IS UNIMPRESSED BY YOUR SWORDS OF GONDOLIN.
Ranting!Dori is, however, COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY PWNED by Bilbo going OH HAI in the first recorded incident in Middle-Earth of a hobbit pwning thirteen dwarves and a wizard all at the same time.
French notes:
The English title of this chapter is “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire”, but in the French edition, it’s “De Charybde en Scylla”–which is of course referring to Scylla and Charybdis. It intrigues me that the French translator jumped over to this phrase; one presumes that “out of the frying-pan into the fire” otherwise doesn’t translate.
Since beginning this re-read I’ve started working on my French vocabulary using an app called SuperMemo on my iPhone, and because of that app, I picked up a couple of words that I was tickled to recognize in the very first paragraph of the French edition: “ensuite” and “avant”. I still need to work on my comprehension of these words, though, because I thought they meant “after” and “before”–but the sentence they appear in starts “Il regarde ensuite en avant…”, and this is the analogue of the sentence in the English edition where it says “Then he looked forward…” Note to self: keep this in mind in SuperMemo vocabulary review tomorrow!
Another word I picked out from Le Vent du Nord: “manteau”! *beam* Right out of the title of “Manteau d’hiver” (winter coat), a lovely instrumental on Le Vent’s last album. About which I have gushed repeatedly in other posts. :D
I understood pretty much this entire line of Bilbo’s: “J’espère seulement, pour l’amour de Dieu, qu’ils ne sont plus là-bas au pouvoir les gobelins !” (Bilbo saying he hopes for the love of God that they, i.e., Gandalf and the dwarves, are not still back there in the power of the goblins.) Of particular note here: I picked up “seulement” and “pouvoir” as SuperMemo vocab words, and I recognized “là-bas” out of the lyrics of the Le Vent du Nord song “Rossignolet”!
Recognizing a few more SuperMemo vocabulary words as I go, too–“niveau” (level, as in “the level of the path”), “se développait” (conjugation of the verb “se développer”, develop), “retourner” (return), and more. So clearly, working with this app is improving my vocabulary quite a bit! I’m finding the text rather easier to follow than the last time I did this!
Wait, what, did the French translator sneak an Italian phrase in here? Here’s the sentence: “En vérité, Bilbo était si content de leurs compliments qu’il se contenta de rire in petto, sans rire dire de l’anneau”. The italics are the translator’s, and Google Translate thinks “in petto” is indeed Italian, meaning roughly “in his chest”. Interesting! A friend on Twitter points me at this reference for that phrase, which makes a lot more sense when you think about it being used in a Catholic country.
And oh, this is weird! After Bilbo tells his story to the dwarves, completely leaving out the part about finding the Ring, he asks Gandalf what he’d been doing all this time. The original English says, “The wizard, to tell the truth, never minded explaining his cleverness more than once”. But in the French, it says “A vrai dire, le magicien n’aimait pas expliquer plus d’une fois ses artifices”. Which, if I’m reading this correctly, says pretty much the exact opposite of what the English edition says. Francophones, I am reading this correctly, aren’t I?
German notes:
In contrast to the chapter title in the French edition, the German edition’s title is pretty much a direct translation of the English: “Raus aus der Bratpfanne, rein ins Feuer”. Except, however, for that little word “rein” in there, which Google Translate is telling me has a few different possible meanings. “Pure”, “clean”, and “straight” are all proposed, so I’m guessing this is intended to be “Out of the frying-pan straight into the fire”.
I note with satisfaction that the German word for coat here, “Mantel”, is very close to the French “manteau”.
Huh, in the first paragraph of the chapter, the narrative describes how the sun goes down in the west, and both the English and French editions italicize “behind the mountains”. The German edition does not!
Bit of a difference as well where the English edition says of Bilbo that “He wandered on and on”, and the German says “Er marschierte und marschierte” (he marched and marched). Herr Beutlin thus strikes me as a tad more self-possessed than Mister Baggins, hmm?
Oh cool, how awesome an interjection is “Donnerwetter”? In English, Bilbo says “Good heavens”! Google Translate claims “Donnerwetter” means gosh, damn, or heavens! Literally, I think it’s “thunder weather”, but way to be inspecific on the translation there, Google! Any German speakers want to chime in on the best translation for this?
Here also, for reference, is the German version of the French sentence I understood above: “Ich kann nur hoffen, dass sie sich nicht mehr dahinten in den Klauen der Orks befinden!” Slight difference of translation here as “Klauen” appears to be “clutches”.
Oh bah, German translator, was it really necessary for you to rearrange paragraph breaks? Especially given that you’re not signifying Bilbo’s thoughts either by italics OR by quotes? I totally lost track of where Bilbo tells himself “I will give them all a surprise”, and had to dig through a long paragraph to find it. It rendered in German as “Die werden ganz schön überrascht sein, dachte er”.
Dori snarking on Gandalf and Thorin stabbing everything in sight reads pretty awesomely in German: “Beinahe hättet Ihr meinen Kopf mit Glamdring abgehauen und Thorin stach hier und dort und überall mit Orkrist herum.” German!Dori is ALSO unimpressed by your swords of Gondolin!
Here’s a fun German word: “Massenweise”! This is what Bilbo says when the dwarves are all “BUT BUT BUT weren’t there guards?!” Google Translate says this is essentially “lots” or “tons” or “masses of ’em”!
For interesting contrast to the weirdly translated French sentence above, here’s the German equivalent: “Dem Zauberer, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, kam es durchaus nicht ungelegen, seine Gescheitheit noch einmal zu beweisen.” Looks like German!Gandalf, like his English counterpart, is quite happy to go on about how why YES, he IS awesome, why do you ask?
And this’ll do me for tonight, I think! Next time: more of our merry company catching up with each other before things start getting difficult again!
Because Susan continues to have all the Awesome
So y’all know how I was gushing about my friend Susan arranging a Le Vent du Nord concert in Uxbridge?
Well, she commissioned some art by Kevin Bolk of the boys, and made some posters of that art to promote the concert, and she was handing them out as incentives to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. She also set aside a few to be used as she saw fit–and she saw fit to send ME one, because she’s just ENTIRELY AWESOME LIKE THAT.
So now I have this darling thing hanging just behind the monitor of my Mac at work. I love it so. I particularly love that Chibi!Simon’s guitar is pointed in the wrong direction, but I choose to believe that this means that Chibi!Simon is CLEARLY ambidextrous, and can play a guitar no matter what direction it’s pointing in! In fact, I would even hazard a guess that Chibi!Simon, in the grand tradition of Anime Characters Everywhere, would be able to whirl his guitar around his head in a stunning transformation sequence, playing it the entire time. And then he’d do it again with his bouzouki. Or possibly even play both instruments at once.
And it goes without saying that I totally fangirl Chibi!Olivier and his tiny violin! This, O Internets, is a situation in which the playing of a tiny violin is, in fact, GOOD. ;D
