messiah season has started!

every year for about 3 hours at a time i suspend my doubts and become a devout christian. the vehicle of my faith is handel's oratorio, messiah. probably handel's most famous work, i will contend it is also one of the most briliant and powerful pieces of music ever written. legend has it handel wept while the music flowed through him onto his score. When he wrote it he was indebted, depressed, desperate, but he believed, as i do, that divine inspiration guided his hand through the notes.

it's become something of a tradition for me to listen to messiah every christmas, starting the day after thanksgiving. to me, it epitomizes the beauty of all the positive aspects of that religion through the retelling ot jesus's life, in verses taken from the king james bible. but i am sad to say that after 27 years, my most treasured tribute to handel, the annual sing-it-yourself messiah put on by the san francisco conservatory of music ended last year. smaller versions of the event abound, but pale compared to the majesty of over 1,000 spectators rising to their feet in the davies symphony hall to join their voices in the chorus glory to god in the highest. it doesn't take a pious heart to be moved to tears.

this year, i shall have to content myself with sitting patiently in the audience, watching and listening to the piece unfold on stage. please forgive me, though, if i hum along to a snatch or two here and there.

i hate harry potter

i know. it's almost a sin. especially for someone who likes fantasy. i went through a period of curiosity - cool, i thought, the series so many people have been raving about. i picked up the first book. meh, thought i. well, maybe the second book was better. they are easy to read, after all, and i borrowed them from people to avoid shelling out the $8 or whatever for the paperback edition. again, meh. i continued on to read the 3rd, by this point mystified by the amount of acclaim the books were getting. now, i've slogged through 5. i experienced a brief flicker of interest with book 3, though that quickly faded.

the thing is, i just don't get it. i suppose i'm happy that kids are reading these books, that fantasy fiction has experienced a flowering, etc etc. but i can't get past the fact that the books are just so poorly written. the prose is completely flat, the pacing atrocious, but worse of all, the characters are cardboard. i don't think i could create a more insipid character than draco malfoy. and by the fifth book, harry was swinging out of control, doing things and acting in ways that i couldn't understand because there was no flow or sense to his development. he was putty in rowling's hands, doing exactly what she wanted, when it was convenient and required for her to move the plot along. okay, now harry has to be mad at hermione. now he has to be apologetic. the effect: he just doesn't make any sense.

it makes me cringe to think there is a whole group of kids growing up thinking this is the greatest stuff around. it makes me want to vomit when people compare rowling to tolkien. but worse than that, it makes me very very depressed, since it seems success as a writer has very little to do with talent or skill. but maybe i should take comfort in that. after all, who am i to presume i have either of those things?

nanowrimo 2006

yay me! i finished today, at 50900-ish words. i told ryan in a way it felt anti-climatic. not having a job is part of it. but i also remember feeling so euphoric the first time (2002?) that i finished. i swear, i was on 7th heaven, couldn't stop smiling. now, yeah, i'm happy, yeah, i feel accomplished. but that's about it.

my story has some potential. there are bits i really like. a lot of it is crap. but nanowrimo for me is like novel seeding. you get it all out, follow a story line even if it doens't feel quite right. but i've also noticed that starting stories is easy for me. i have so many scenes and characters running through my head. it's taking up the story, crafting it, and keeping it going that's the most difficult. i have such vague ideas about what my story is about. "i want to write a story about the fight against good and evil, and how the characters come to terms with the fact god is within, not something external." okay, great, but how do i make that into a story that's fun to read?

for the nerds

this periodic table, from popular sci magazine, is pretty freakin' cool.

books books books

i need help. i'm addicted to purchasing books. odd, isn't it? it's not to reading them. more than half of the books on my shelves are unread. i purchase books when i want them, thinking i'll read them "someday". well, sure enough, someday never comes around. sadly, amazon.com goes far to facilitate my addiction. a trait i share with karl rove, according to newsweek, anyway.

i tried to put a moratorium on new books, telling myself, i shall read the ones i have before i order more. but sure enough, i catch myself surfing around on amazon digging up new books to order. what can i do? i know it's hereditary - my dad had the same problem. i remember my mom getting so angry with him when he would go out ad spend $100 on new books when we couldn't even pay the electricity bill. my dad was a powerful reader, though - i suspect he read all his books. i just have the purchasing addiction. my sister, on the other hand, is the reader. how does it happen that i just have one half of that? it doesn't seem fair somehow.

anyway, my dad was fery strict about books. he would get mad at us if we put them on the floor, saying we should show respect to them. i think he'd be appalled now at my library. i have books chaotically arranged pretty much anywhere, under the bed, stuffed into my nightstand, lodged behind the bookshelves. someday i'll have to purge all of them, decide which ones to read and which ones not to read. i guess while i still have them all i can at least pretend i'm a well read intellectual.