Category Archives: Baltimore

Baltimore, the chorus

chorus weekend

Yesterday, I led a small Parallel Octave / chorus workshop with the text of an Allen Ginsberg poem being read to a new instrument one of our members has created, a laser harp.

Today, this afternoon, I’m going to collaborate on some audition / callbacks and use choral techniques as an audition requirement. This will be the first time I’ve done this for auditions that are not for my own production. We have a large group and an improvising guitarist. I’m very excited about it.

It’s wonderful to have a theatrical activity on both days of the weekend.

I’ve been spending some time this weekend helping an incoming writer in the program look at potential locations for rent, which has meant exploring parts of Baltimore I hadn’t seen before. I thought I was pretty familiar with all the areas around the campus, but you turn a corner and it’s a different planet, around here. Even from one block to the next, the width of a street may double. There may be absolutely no trees, and then a tree in front of every house.

Today is also the seventh day of getting up and walking before working, and although the temptation is great to skip it (it’s later, it’s hot out) I’m going to do it.

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Baltimore, film

on roach velocity

Saw THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO tonight. Excellent, although people who don’t like seeing lots of mutilated bodies onscreen should avoid. Also, unnecessary Swedish National Socialists. Really good movie, though. Fantastic acting.

After, with friends, observing slow-moving Baltimore roach saunter across sidewalk, I found myself defending Los Angeles’s superiority yet again, saying, “If we were in LA, that roach would be moving much faster.” Now, that isn’t true. I can think of slow-moving LA roaches: I can even think of one I’ve written into a poem. However, I think that I now have my new poetic theme around which to organize thesis: Ways In Which LA Will Usurp Your City’s Greatness By Winning Battles No One Wants To Win. Best traffic, best roaches, best heat, etc.

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art, Baltimore, writing

I don’t think I’m allowed to title any more posts on this blog “don’t call it a comeback”

Drove out to Mt. St. Mary’s today, and attended a career interest lunch for Maryland sophomores, which meant I got to spend an hour and a half at a table with seven sixteen-year-olds who were interested in writing, theater, or both. They were running around from one leadership event to the next, and were a bit worn down: the way we ran it was I talked while they ate, and then I ate quickly while they asked questions. I had a great time with them. I hope some of them will email me.

I found it surprisingly inspiring. Telling other people not to give us has a good effect on making you (one) not give up.

After it was over, my friend dropped me off at the art supplies store on North, and I bought colored pencils (Lyra) and markers (Sakura) and the best pencil sharpener ever (Staedtler tub sharpener with a lid, for those of you who sharpen pencils / draw in bed) and spent a couple of hours scribbling. I now think I have the new concept for the ever-shelved Sander Lamori project.

So, hear me out: instead of a first-person narrative (Sander’s blog, Sander’s journal, etc.) I’m thinking of a first-person narrative told by multiple writers, a la Moonstone, in the form of a collective blog put together by a group of art students. This means that I don’t have to make Sander’s personality incorporate all of the visual things I want to do with the project: I just have to invent enough other co-bloggers for him. This is a very attractive idea to me. There can be co-bloggers who tend to supply more of the writing, or others who do more of the visuals.

I’m exhilarated about this, but if I had a nickel for every time I’ve reinvented Sander’s concept platform over the years, I’d have ten years of Sander comics / graphic novels / blog posts.

Also cleaned bathroom.

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Baltimore, gradschool

Commencement

The quad behind the library has so many people in it it looks like a political rally. Graduates, sweating, shielding their faces with massive envelopes. People in mortarboards wandering around Charles. A younger brother, too excited to listen, bounding around the cafe, asking everyone where the vending machines are. He asked me, and then five minutes later, he asked the guards. Older relatives, with swollen feet and nowhere to sit down. I saw a man walk up a set of narrow stairs and back down the same set of narrow stairs. A petulant girl to her family: “I want to stay with the group!” Not going to happen. The point of this is that you have to leave the group. Making my way in to campus, I saw a couple of the usual-suspect graduate students, caught in the flood of families, looking like squirrels at the tops of trees with the water rising, resigned to getting no work done today.

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Baltimore, the chorus

back from NYC

enjoying the Baltimore weather, playing soccer (for the first time ever!) Commencement is tomorrow. I’m working in the library by day, reading–plowing through the enormous Raymond Carver biography–by night, making more recordings on the weekends. Yes, still thinking about choruses. I played some sound files from the recent chorus projects for friends in NYC, and although I liked doing it, I think I need to be more stringent with sound quality in the recordings we make. It’s one thing to document and another to distribute. I want to start making recordings that are so good they need no explanation. This is going to mean learning more or finding someone who knows more.

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Baltimore, poetry

You know it’s going to be a good weekend

when you wake up with the Norton staring at you, opened to “Oh, she was perfect past all parallel…” There could be worse things. I read “Church-Going” last night before going to sleep, and for some reason, it sent me wandering over to Byron. Something about the clippedness of it. Maybe I’m finally going to make it through Don Juan. Maybe Larkin has some Byron in him. I don’t know.

Today, going on a morning bagel run–then the composer/lyricist group is meeting at noon, for the last time this semester–then a liquor/party supplies run–then the Interdepartmental Flasker is happening this evening, a co-party between the graduate students of the English and Writing Seminars departments. It is definitely the end of the semester. It is definitely also summer: yesterday was the first uncomfortably muggy and humid day. The sky, right now, out my window, is unbrokenly blue and hot-looking.

I am furniture-sitting a friend’s comfortable, overstuffed striped armchair for the year, and its presence in my room makes me feel like I am an adult. Sure, I don’t own it, but it’s going to be around for awhile. Can’t say fairer, etc.

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Baltimore

PSA:

Cafe Spice, in Towson, has the best Indian food I have ever eaten at a restaurant in my life, anywhere on the planet. It’s only surpassed by the couple of times I have gotten to eat Indian food that was home-cooked. It. Was. Amazing. Went there last night, and then came home to find that one of my roommates was making his variation on his family’s carne asada tacos recipe…Spring makes food good.

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Baltimore, poetry

There never was a spring like this

I’m in the library, grading writing, with a feeling of great freedom, as one only can write when the obligation of a deadline has been removed. It is very nice that the half-thesis was due a couple weeks before the end of the semester. It means the end of the semester won’t be so arduous.

Through the window on D Level, I can see the Ferris wheels of Hopkins’s Spring Fair turning, and the sky becoming a medium gray. The heat is elusive. It’s a real and inconstant April.

The flowers are out. Our yard, which used to be a demure dark green, looks like it’s wearing an exploding piñata. You can’t walk down the street without being pelted with seed pods. Therefore, spring poem:

To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year’s song and next year’s bliss.
I know, in spite of all men say
Of Beauty, you have felt her most.
Yea, even in your grave her way
Is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost,
Spring never was so fair and dear
As Beauty makes her seem this year.

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats,
I am as helpless in the toil
Of Spring as any lamb that bleats
To feel the solid earth recoil
Beneath his puny legs. Spring beats
her tocsin call to those who love her,
And lo! the dogwood petals cover
Her breast with drifts of snow, and sleek
White gulls fly screaming to her, and hover
About her shoulders, and kiss her cheek,
While white and purple lilacs muster
A strength that bears them to a cluster
Of color and odor; for her sake
All things that slept are now awake.

And you and I, shall we lie still,
John Keats, while Beauty summons us?
Somehow I feel your sensitive will
Is pulsing up some tremulous
Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves
Grow music as they grow, since your
Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves
For life that opens death’s dark door.
Though dust, your fingers still can push
The Vision Splendid to a birth,
Though now they work as grass in the hush
Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.

“John Keats is dead,” they say, but I
Who hear your full insistent cry
In bud and blossom, leaf and tree,
Know John Keats still writes poetry.
And while my head is earthward bowed
To read new life sprung from your shroud,
Folks seeing me must think it strange
That merely spring should so derange
My mind. They do not know that you,
John Keats, keep revel with me, too.

– Countee Cullen

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