Waka != Haiku

I did not quite fling this book across the room in disgust, but it came very close:  

A cloud of blossoms
A hazy moon
Tast of mist, sweet wind

That is my waka for the spring tea that I plan for Auntie and my mother.  It is modeled after the greatest of the ancient Japanese poets, Basho.  His was better.

                            The Royal Diaries: Kazunomiya, Prisoner of Heaven, by Kathryn Lasky, p. 15

A waka is a classical Japanese poetic form of 31 syllables arranged in five lines. The Kokinshu (905 C.E.) is the first collection of waka only.  Kazunomiya would certainly have been familiar with it, as well as with later collections such as the Hyakunin Isshu, and would more believably have referenced such poets as Ki no Tsurayuki, Izumi Shikibu, or just possibly Saigyo.

An haiku is a later Japanese poetic form of 17 syllables arranged in three lines.   Crudely speaking, the haiku grew out of the first part of waka and came to be a standalone form.

Basho (1644-1694) was a master of haiku, not waka.  In a country with extant diaries reaching back to 600 years before Basho (Tosa Nikki, 934-35, oldest surviving diary written in the Japanese language), and extant literature from the early 700s C.E., Basho would hardly have qualified as ancient to Kazunomiya. 

I grant that historical fiction takes certain liberties with facts in order to create a more engaging story.  But unnecessary ignorance of even the basics of Japanese poetry styles, in a tale where such poetry is an absolutely key cultural underpinning?   When a wealth of material exists, beyond Basho? The author has been unforgivably lazy with this story.

Caturday Post: Scaramouche Sits On His New Cat Tower

The Atlanta Opera Goes Piratical

The Atlanta Opera is a decent, but not fabulous, opera company.  They are the sort who get nominated for opera awards, but for accessibility rather than anything artistic. The only time I've actually seen them achieve fabulosity was during their 2015 production of Rigoletto, which I think was mostly due to Nadine Sierra.  Now that she is triumphing at La Scala, Atlanta will probably be henceforth unable to afford her. In opera, as in life, money is important.

With that in mind, the Atlanta Opera's Pirates of Penzance was decent, but not fabulous. It was fun; this operetta being difficult to make less so, but there were a few musical problems. Some of the cast were having projection difficulties, notably, and unfortunately, the chief of police.  That should be a standout role, and it just wasn't. Some of the general's daughters as well were difficult to hear, and since the orchestra was playing much more piano and less bombastically than I could wish (and it's a small orchestra) there's just no excuse for that. Also, the music was played more slowly than is an artistic choice of tempo I could agree with.  This operetta is ridiculous, and it should be played uptempo and with gusto.

There were definitely good points.  Maureen McKay, as Mabel, sang the guts out of her coloratura role while playing up the comedy as much as she could.  The general's daughters as an ensemble were fantastic, moving as they did in clumps and casting shade on Mabel's amorous choices.  Individually, they were only average, but they were well choreographed at least.  The Pirate King, Kevin Burdette, easily stole the show in his tight pants.  He would have been better with a police chief with a personality to be a foil, but what can you do?

The set was fabulous, consisting entirely of movable pieces which cast members moved around as they needed things to pose on or hide behind.  Except for maybe the set of their 2014 Rigoletto, which was a brooding pit of darkness with paintings of depravity beneath a gleaming white city, this is probably the best staging I've ever seen here.  I'm hoping they stay more with things like this and move away from their fancy technological projected backgrounds.

Pirates of Penzance is genuinely, sidesplittingly, funny material.  It's one of Gilbert and Sullivan's better (and better aging) works, and making it not wonderfully funny would require great effort.  We may have lost whatever they were mocking with the timid policeman and probably other subtleties, but enough meaning translates into modernity without effort that it's not a problem.  What is the problem is that I felt that the production was banking on funny to carry them through some musical weaknesses.  I had a great time, and I like going to the opera, make no mistake.  I'm happy the Atlanta Opera is returning to 4 productions for next year.  I think this is an important step to becoming a higher quality company. If it takes producing crowd pleasing operas with shoddy singing in places, to get there, well, I'll be willing to be pleased and hope they make enough money from me to invest in more singers than just the principals.

In the meantime, on to Gounod's Romeo and Juliet.  I have never seen this before, and I am so excited.

Computer Game Graphics: Then and Now

The first computer game I ever played:

Digger.  Screenshot from the web.  Still playable with DOSBox or online.

Except I played on a laptop with display tones all in blue/purple/gold, so it didn't look quite like the above.

The computer game I'm currently playing:

Dragon Age Origins. Gorgeous.

Living in the future is amazing!

Caturday Post: Scaramouche Helps Dance

His spot is smack in the middle of the floor.

Lovecraftian Horror

In silence and in darkness and in cold the horrid unspeakable thing lay, growing, growing, growing, over the slow and patient crawling of time not measured by puny humans, until, at last, it burst the chains laid on it by its long-lost makers and crawled into the world of men...

***

I speak, of course, of my potato rosemary bread dough, which I left in the fridge to rise overnight.  While mixing this batch I got lazy and just dumped in all the potato water instead of measuring 3 cups, and the increased volume overflowed the bowl: 

But of the ancient mysteries of oxygen-and-sugar-burning, carbon-dioxide-and-ethanol-producing organisms that are yeast, I must not speak.

Pointless Stitchery

I made a small thing.  The pattern was for some uninspired snippet of melody, and with actual notes, rather than pawprints.  I added the cat and stitched the first few notes of the The Queen of the Night's Aria, because of course I did.