Updation

My song cycle was indeed performed during Canada Music Week (way back in November) and they did a great job. I finally finished a choral setting of an Anglo-Saxon poem, but am told that although there's much to admire in it, it just doesn't work. Recently I've been thinking more about Tintinnabulation (because Arvo Part is my compositional hero, hands down), but figure that anything I try will probably be a repeat of the Anglo-Saxon thing. It's pretty disheartening, but maybe I'll wise up someday and learn how to write 'properly' or something. In December, we went to see Nine Inch Nails again (non-festival this time), which was superlative. It was neat to see how the show had changed over the months since we saw that very first one. You know it will be awesome when there's a marimba on stage. I still marvel at Year Zero every few months when I remember to give it a listen. Year Zero also makes me feverishly want to continue working on my conference paper. Speaking of which: I can't say I had an overwhelmingly great grad experience last year (despite a couple awesome classes) so I withdrew for the fall term to think things over. Ideally, I'd like to develop the paper I did for the UCLA conference into a Masters-Essay-worthy piece, but that doesn't look too promising. This past spring, though, I took a fantastic zoo-texts (generally multidisciplinary) class and could envision my final paper as my Masters project... if only I wasn't forbidden to elaborate on it when anybody asks ):< At Christmas I flew back home, and I had fully intended to recount the horrors of the trip. I ended up stuck in Calgary airport for some 13 hours with nothing but Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son and a blank notebook. Charles Dickens. For thirteen hours. I halfheartedly started doing some Drawings from the Airport, but have let drawings slip as well. I have the best intentions of doing the Aphex Twin transcriptions that people keep asking about, maybe over the summer. Who can say.