Peeking into the rock

I am reading Longbourn, Jo Baker's of what the servants are doing while Pride and Prejudice is going on. It's a wee bit purple in the prose but the people are interesting and the material culture stuff is interesting too.

I'm listening to hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes kind of randomly. There's a reason for this, if I can remember: oh yes, I was listening to all the Frankie Armstrong and after I had done that for two days I wandered off in the direction of Blowzabella, the group she recorded her Tam Lin album with. And the rest is just surfing. And there's a reason I jumped on that juncture: that album was my soundtrack for the last part of my pregnancy with Emma, that and the song "Paul and Silas," because of the verse that goes ":ain't but the one train on this track," which you know when you are pregnant is an accurate description of your condition.

Also "You can't always get what you want," the Rolling Stones song, because I was aiming for a "normal" birth after a cesarian and but the line that tells you that if you try sometimes, you just might find, you might get what you need, was exactly what I needed for consolation in case I ended up under the knife again. I had latched on to a doctor I trusted to make the surgery call exactly if the situation required it and not otherwise, and I knew I had to simultaneously hold on to the vision of this birth I thought was best for us and also let go of it (and all preconceptions), which is hard to do. So the dialectics of that song matched my condition quite well as well.

Of course the reason for Tam Lin was that song, no matter how much it is about romance and faery, is also, deeply, about the magic and terror of pregnancy and birth. I think it was when I was pregnant with Emma and thinking about all these songs and stories where the protagonist must go through intense suffering, degradation, and labors to achieve a lover, that I decided that the lover was a metaphorical device for a child.  It makes a lot of stories more interesting to think about them that way -- The Goose Girl and its variations, for example, or The White Bear. At least it makes it more understandable that a person  would go through all that. (Of course this is not always true in all tellings)

Monday Emma and I did our Bean Hollow Beach trip early because she will be tending to animals tomorrow on the First when we used to do that. Eventually I will get back in the habit of posting pictures. I certainly took enough of them. Afterwards we had lunch at the brew pub that's where the Pescadero gas station used to be.

Other than that, writing, deciding whether I want to drag my carcass to the nice folk dance party tonight. Really quite ready to go under the knife and get a new knee, though I am worried about the cost since nobody seems to think it's important to tell me how much that is.

Tonight is the New Year Parade but we didn't go to it. We did go to the City, ostensibly to check out the art school for Emma, but she didn't last to the interview before she was sure it wasn't right for her. It's very much a Voc. school -- and vocational ed. is right for a kid who knows what they want to do, is in a hurry to get started, and wants to do something that can be taught in the voc.ed. milieu. Emma doesn't know what she wants to do, isn't in a hurry, and wants to take a broad range of subjects. And it was a little school, and she wants a big school. So we went to Chinatown for New Year tschotchkes of which we only got lucky envelopes and ran into the New Year street fair but no lion dancers, and then headed over to the Palace of the Legion of Honor because her art class require three gallery visits. I renewed my acquaintance with Rodin and also the French 18th century guys while the nice fellow managed to see everything in the building and Emma wrote up three pictures at tremendous great length.

At the New Year fair it hardly smelled like gunpowder at all, I guess because the lion dancers weren't there and also it was raining. Instead of the New Year toy stick things we used to buy when I was a girl, they had these different ones with pinwheels and flags and peacocks. They were okay. But the old ones used to gave gold plastic charms dangling from red and gold cord, and the charms were, of course, junks, fish, gourds, turtles, that sort of thing. They were like fishing rods who had gone to Heaven and Hell and come back to tell us the way of red and gold.

I have always loved the Chinese stringed instrument which I have today learned is called the erhu, but that was in a sort of distant way. Today there were guys bowing away on every other street corner -- which I have never noticed at New Year before -- and I kept hearing this one tune over and over again. I will track that tune down. I need to listen to erhu music all the time now. Every day, until it worms its way into my brain the way that Muszikas did when I was writing Esperanza Highway. Hmm. I wasn't listening to anything specially when I was writing The Conduit. Lately I've been mostly listening to this group of samples from the Piranha record catalog (hello, personhead pleonastic, I don't know the code for making that the way it's supposed to look and I don't want to go chasing it down in the middle of things), and I have to say that a couple of the songs have gotten so wrapped up in my brain that the earworm situation has gone to earmonsters and I can make myself sick hearing the echoes of "Chiri Chiri Bam Bam" or these Dalmatian waltzes all the time, day and night.

I found an erhu file at http://www.geocities.com/risheng99/instruments/erhu_sound.html but it's only 18 seconds long. But it loops really nicely. But I have to find something better.

No words today. Probably no words tomorrow. I will do something useful and something fun with the nice fellow.