It’s been a lovely weekend so far, so even though the house needs a bit of a cleaning and I’m feeling a bit buried underneath a mountain of files that I need to go through and understand in order to start a new project, things are good.

Yesterday evening Ross’s friend Morgan, who is as erudite and gregarious a computer scientist as I have ever met, invited us to go to a concert with him—so we walked to Mandel Hall, which is a marvelous little theater inside the university’s main student center, and listened to a couple of hours of this. It was sweet for me in two ways: it reminded me of how much I love listening to voices used as instruments, and it provided me with some interesting noodlings about literary metaphors for sound. I kept coming up with horrible clichés (the soprano is as bright as diamonds, the countertenor’s notes as smooth and liquid as molten gold), but in a way it was comforting to have those dusty old comparisons in my mind as we sat listening to text and music that was hundreds of years old, knowing that in all of human history the voice of a singer raised in exaltation has always wrought these same true, palpable images.

In the bathroom during intermission a snooty looking lady with short red hair and a green sweater of a shade I am rather fond of responded to someone’s enthusiastic appreciation of the performance so far with a superior sniff, and the cutting remark “Actually, I thought the countertenor was thin. Countertenors are very rare, but I thought he was slightly thin.” Earlier I had been thinking how little I know about classical music, and how much more I’d like to listen to, but idly wondering if in the end I should grow almost too used to it—whether the beauty of its sounds would lose that sharp, shocking clarity they have for me now. For some reason I didn’t want to become a judge of this extraordinary thing, didn’t want to examine it for seams and flaws the way I reflexively examine books and music. As I was washing my hands, two other women emerged from bathroom stalls and caught each other’s eyes. They began to laugh over the snooty, sniffing lady’s words, and I remembered that the power of the critic, important though she may be, is always tempered by those who refuse to listen.

This morning Ross and I took the number six bus to the Loop (only 14 minutes to get there once we got on! Astonishing!). He surrounded himself with coffee and statistics homework at Intelligentsia, and I wandered off to the Chicago Public Library to attend this.

I’d forgotten how much I love listening to writers talk about writing. Philip Pullman has a wonderfully serene and matter-of-fact presence. He’s a bit portly and a bit balding, whip-smart and very wry, but when he talks about his job as a storyteller he almost sounds like a preacher, terribly fervent and assured (which is, I admit, somewhat ironic given his views on organized religion). He’s a charming example of a particular sort of traditionalist. All his comments about his work today were about how he writes in the service of the story, how he doesn’t write with a theme or definite character development in mind but “discovers” these things as he goes along, and how he doesn’t mind being a “despot” when he’s writing, but how once a book is published he refuses to talk about what it means because reading is “democratic.” I sometimes wish I encountered more writers who were a bit more arrogant, actually, because it’s very hard to convey the strange intersection between magic and excruciating hard work that takes place during the creative process, and I think people deserve credit for both the sweat and the inspiration.

He spoke beautifully about how storytellers, like magpies attracted to shiny things (this was in response to a girl who asked what he thought his daemon might be) seize upon odd objects and ideas in the world, some of great value and some entirely worthless, and shape them into new forms. He also talked at length about the journey from innocence to experience we all go through, and reminded us that if we spent all our time mucking around on the internet, we won’t have very rich stories to tell at the end of all our experience.

And so, readers-mine, I leave you tonight in that spirit.

This is what we look like after we have had a jolly evening of music, drinks, and conversation, and are about to go to bed:

See also here.

I have more to tell you about my weekend, but first there is tea to be had. Later, lovelies.

1) Ross is still up grading assignments for the class he’s TA-ing this quarter. He’s working so hard I feel bad getting into bed with the shockingly good book I’m reading, and leaving him all alone in the living room scratching his head over amateur code.

2) I am staying up replying to all the friendly emails, letters, and phone messages people have left me. (At least three of you know exactly how convincing this one is.)

3) This entry right here? I’m typing it on this.