Speaking in music.

It's been a presence-heavy day for me today: an early-morning (read: 11 a.m.) rendezvous with a film crew (for my college's new capital campaign video, whose theme, I was told, will not be "We need your money") and a two-hour radio interview and guest DJ spot with an excellent student who runs a show called "Interdiscipline and Punish" on the college radio station. This interview/DJ experience was supposed to happen in January, but the station's transmitter was broken for months and has just gone live again. Once upon a time, I was a co-host for an opera show on this same radio station, but I was so microphone-shy that I almost never spoke. To my delight, I am no longer microphone-shy at all. Perhaps I will train as a DJ and have my own show after my fellowship year is over.

As I began trying to convince my excellent friend that she and I would be kick-ass co-hosts of the coolest radio show around, she put the Hidden Cameras's album Awoo (2006) into her stereo and started me rocking out. You must try them: go here. Anyway, I predict that she'll decide she's up for it.

Have I mentioned that my newest colleague has me hooked on Battlestar Galactica?

Can I express my great dumbfoundedness in the face of this abomination? I mean, watch it: the Lake District is a contender for most beautiful landscape I've ever seen. But also beware. It might hurt your eyes, this video.

In the morning sun, a (real-life) squirrel cleared a six-foot jump from gutter to branch. I watched him run to the edge of the roof, hesitate, and then fling himself toward the tree outside my office window. Such a headlong flinging. There was no way not to love its absurdity, the success it should perhaps not have become.


Can I tell you that though I didn't love every moment of reading The Diary of Alice James, I wasn't disappointed? I will confess that I cull moments from works and then carry them with me willfully out of context. Such as:

But what of the success made up of all delicate shades and subtle tones, that makes no sign, but is known alone to the bosom that attains it?--that floods the mind with infinite delight when least expected--that has never mistaken pleasure for that shy bird happiness whose song is only to be heard of the ears of the soul.--Surely it has not sunk deeply into the mind of Man that--The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or Lo, there! for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you. (15 February 1890)

But now it's on to the Brownings' love letters, and it doesn't get much better than that, really. This is the thing for which I'm looking, this boldness, this stripping away of the unnecessary, the fretsome. This exclamatory meeting. I know better than to try to live another's narrative. But to live in one for the duration of reading: that seems permissible.

I do have images for tonight's writing, but Le Bloggeur is refusing them, giving me nonsense explanations that resemble "an error was made." Perhaps later. [Hooray! Fixed!]

Oh, and a postscript, because we haven't had one of those for awhile: somehow it didn't occur to me until two days ago that the outcome of my year's faculty review should be revealed to me sometime this weekend or shortly thereafter, as our Trustees are currently wending their ways to campus. Here's hoping for a celebratory weekend (or shortly thereafter). For now, I have one more thing in the air.