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Last night and the night before I had almost a normal amount of sleep. I read somewhere that an important part of falling asleep is the body temperature dropping, and I had a moment of clarity. Post-surgical insomnia is quite possibly probably maybe at least partly a bit due to the body's temperature being a bit elevated for healing purposes! So I have added "sleep under only a single sheet" to my insomnia-fighting weapons. I can't swear that it is working, as the difference is really only about an hour more of sleep-- so like 5-6 hours at night instead of 4-5. But it's huge! I've gone from needing to lie down and doze a half hour out of every two hours to maybe sleeping ten to twenty minutes once or twice in a day. Normal range! (My normal normal is like seven hours of sleep)
I've also begun to be somewhat prouctive on the writing font. I forget whether I revealed here that I had recently figured out how to resolve one of the final confrontations in the not-Poland story. It does require a small but pervasive amount of revision in the earlier parts of the book so as to support and kind of foreshadow the events, but I needed to do some revision anyway. To that end I'm taking notes and also advancing the narrative. I need the notes. I have a cast of thousands to not make stupid errors about and I also have decided to change the fates of some soldiers, so that means I have to know where they met their current fates. I'm also updating the appendices.
Yes, well. Appendices in a work of fiction. Well.
The thing is that the kind of person who likes to read the kind of book that The Drummer Boy is, also like to know how to pronounce the names, and they like to have a handle on the grography--maps and all that. So I thought I'd give them those things in appendices, so they don't have to read that matter unless they want to but they definitely can if they want to. Also, the kind of people who read this kind of book are definitely the kind of person who will notice that there are a lot of name forms that look inconsistent, and they might be unhappy if I didn't give them a nice context in which to understand what I'm doing with that (the short answer is that Marezhkia is a polyglot country and the people use the forms they like--thus there is a Giurgu and a Yuri and a Yiri, and a Yanek and an Ivek, and so on and so on: and this fact is important to the actual plot, thank you).
I finally found the kind of real-Polish (that is to say, Polish in this world, not not-Polish which isn't Polish at all but I find it a convenient handle) folk music I could not find before. What I had found before was chorales that sounded like Midwestern a capella choirs singing church music, which I am going to just say I respect in the abstract but I would rather not listen to. I was sure that Poles had some music I would like, and given their position on the continent I had an idea what it would sound like. But then I found a very large corpus of Polish groups who sing English sea shanties, which is charming, and I listened to that with some burbling enthusiasm. Then yesterday--on a whim I threw in Polish folkmusic to the search bar at youtube and found...Lipka Zielona (that's right, it even has a linden tree in it! and birds who are not birds). This is right up my alley-- that's one of the kinds of sounds I like the most, and when I translated the lyrics (using g. translate, my limited Czech vocabulary, and a common-sense feel for how song lyrics go) they were pleasing. Also I like contemplating the resonances the different aspects of the song and performance have with other European folk music. The instrumental elements I tend to call Hungarian though the Hungarians have no monoploy on them, and the vocal style which sounds a little more Russian to me though as soon as I say that I start arguing with myself about it, like that. That's fun.
There's another video of the same song on youtube which has an unbearable costume skit of peasantry whatever nationalist whatwhat, but whatever. If this song has nationalist implications I don't know about, well, I guess if you know it, tell me, and break my heart.
I started this to write about fooooooood. I can't get enough. I thought maybe I was going to get relief from endlessss huger today but it came back. I can't appease it. I thoguht at one point it was because I wasn't eating enough but now I'm eating more: three eggs cooked with potatoies, onion, salami and chard for breakfast, a chicken salad sandwich and a beet and a tomato for lunch, a goddamned bowl of sunflower seeds for a snack, and I'm sure other things, already today. Maybe I'm missing some nutrient and my body's protesting this?
I've also begun to be somewhat prouctive on the writing font. I forget whether I revealed here that I had recently figured out how to resolve one of the final confrontations in the not-Poland story. It does require a small but pervasive amount of revision in the earlier parts of the book so as to support and kind of foreshadow the events, but I needed to do some revision anyway. To that end I'm taking notes and also advancing the narrative. I need the notes. I have a cast of thousands to not make stupid errors about and I also have decided to change the fates of some soldiers, so that means I have to know where they met their current fates. I'm also updating the appendices.
Yes, well. Appendices in a work of fiction. Well.
The thing is that the kind of person who likes to read the kind of book that The Drummer Boy is, also like to know how to pronounce the names, and they like to have a handle on the grography--maps and all that. So I thought I'd give them those things in appendices, so they don't have to read that matter unless they want to but they definitely can if they want to. Also, the kind of people who read this kind of book are definitely the kind of person who will notice that there are a lot of name forms that look inconsistent, and they might be unhappy if I didn't give them a nice context in which to understand what I'm doing with that (the short answer is that Marezhkia is a polyglot country and the people use the forms they like--thus there is a Giurgu and a Yuri and a Yiri, and a Yanek and an Ivek, and so on and so on: and this fact is important to the actual plot, thank you).
I finally found the kind of real-Polish (that is to say, Polish in this world, not not-Polish which isn't Polish at all but I find it a convenient handle) folk music I could not find before. What I had found before was chorales that sounded like Midwestern a capella choirs singing church music, which I am going to just say I respect in the abstract but I would rather not listen to. I was sure that Poles had some music I would like, and given their position on the continent I had an idea what it would sound like. But then I found a very large corpus of Polish groups who sing English sea shanties, which is charming, and I listened to that with some burbling enthusiasm. Then yesterday--on a whim I threw in Polish folkmusic to the search bar at youtube and found...Lipka Zielona (that's right, it even has a linden tree in it! and birds who are not birds). This is right up my alley-- that's one of the kinds of sounds I like the most, and when I translated the lyrics (using g. translate, my limited Czech vocabulary, and a common-sense feel for how song lyrics go) they were pleasing. Also I like contemplating the resonances the different aspects of the song and performance have with other European folk music. The instrumental elements I tend to call Hungarian though the Hungarians have no monoploy on them, and the vocal style which sounds a little more Russian to me though as soon as I say that I start arguing with myself about it, like that. That's fun.
There's another video of the same song on youtube which has an unbearable costume skit of peasantry whatever nationalist whatwhat, but whatever. If this song has nationalist implications I don't know about, well, I guess if you know it, tell me, and break my heart.
I started this to write about fooooooood. I can't get enough. I thought maybe I was going to get relief from endlessss huger today but it came back. I can't appease it. I thoguht at one point it was because I wasn't eating enough but now I'm eating more: three eggs cooked with potatoies, onion, salami and chard for breakfast, a chicken salad sandwich and a beet and a tomato for lunch, a goddamned bowl of sunflower seeds for a snack, and I'm sure other things, already today. Maybe I'm missing some nutrient and my body's protesting this?
no subject
Today I was given what looks to be a wonderful novel of three generations of a family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last decades -- 1859 - 1916. It was published in 1937, initially, written by Joseph Roth, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, titled The Radetzky March. Feeling as off color as I do I'm curling up with it tonight.
The copy I was given is part of that Knopf Everyman's Library imprint of great books.
Of course I wish the book went back to the Napoleonic era, or even earlier. as well. But this should be good.
no subject
When I was in Prague in 2013 I was fortunate enough to hit upon a grand retrospective of the end of the Austrian Empire and every museum in town had exhibits pertaining to some aspect of other-- the Military Museum had one about soldiers and their lives and a bonus exhibit on the Sokol societies, another museum had a grand exhibit about childhood, another about food, and I can't remember but there were more of them. Such revelations I had looking at these artifacts and puzzling through the captions (a few of which were translated into English, but some of the translations were more puzzling than the Czech!)
When I was first figuring out the story and I knew I wanted the fellow o be a drummer in an era when military drummers were almost but not quite obsolete I asked my son when they last used them, and he said WW 2, and he was right!