I'm running out of ways to open these entries inventively, without resorting to flooding your journals with animated .gifs and videos. Perhaps that's a sign telling me I ought to start cross-posting from Dreamwidth, if only for a change of pace.

I have a Russian competition coming up, so I've been working on four short compositions to memorize as well as a poem by Boris Pasternak. (Note: the English translation on that website is awful. Here is the one we were given.) Unfortunately, I've been having problems with the poem: my professor told me in so many words that my reading was thoroughly bad, and asked me to translate it myself to get a better feeling for its meaning. She did compliment me greatly on the first composition, though, so I'm feeling positive about the competition as a whole.





Last summer, if some of you remember, I went with my family on a trip to two Bastions of History--with Lancaster, Pennsylvania thrown in as a bonus. This was taken on one of the uppermost floors of our shockingly posh hotel; the original is much larger, but this was resized so as to spare your eyes from the grain.





And these were taken prior to my spring break this year, when I was photographing some flowers that were going to wilt over the following week. There isn't, to my knowledge, any intrinsic value to photographing little paper stars like this, but we can consider it an exercise in color.

As part of my university's Community Chorus's Spring Program, we will be performing a selection of works by American composers (including Bernstein, Lindsay Lafford, and Randall Thompson). The last piece on the program is John Corigliano's Fern Hill, set to the words of Dylan Thompson's poem of the same name. The poem itself is more an example of what I would call "word-smithing," or an attempt to appeal to the heart of the reader at the deepest level. If only Thompson had attempted grammatical coherence, too!

This, of course, is what we are not performing:

The giant space lotus apparently wasn't in the budget.