Regarding the song I spoke about in my last blog (all those weeks ago), I’m going to a nearby town with the chamber choir on Sunday, to make a recording of all of the Shakespeare songs we’re doing at the moment, as well as a couple of other pieces accompanied by a string quartet. It should be fun! We’re going back to a church where we had a weekend away last term; the acoustics are wonderful there so it should sound great on the CD.

I’m thinking of entering this poetry translation competition. I’ve done quite a few literal translations now in one of my English and French comparative modules, and I’d quite like to have a go at writing something more poetic for my own pleasure. I thought I might as well enter the competition while I was at it - could be fun.

Other than that, not much literary news from me - I’m on holiday in a week so hopefully I’ll be doing much more writing and reading then, and more blogging!

The music centre here has a different ‘theme’ each term - last term it was ‘MC at the Movies’, so lots of the things we sang/played were from films. This term the theme is ‘Shakespeare’, so in Orchestra we’re doing Suite 2 from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (which is AWESOME) and the whole of Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’. In choir today we started learning four songs from different Shakespeare plays that have been arranged for eight-part choral ensembles. They’re great fun; I especially love the one which is taken from ‘Macbeth’ and sung by the witches:

A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron. Thunder. Enter the three WITCHES.

FIRST WITCH
Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.

SECOND WITCH
Thrice, and once the hedge-pig whined.

THIRD WITCH
Harpier cries, “’Tis time, ’tis time.”

FIRST WITCH
Round about the cauldron go,
In the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweltered venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ th’ charmèd pot.

ALL
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

ALL
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

THIRD WITCH
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravined salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digged i’ th’ dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat and slips of yew
Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

ALL
Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

SECOND WITCH
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Enter HECATE and the other three WITCHES

HECATE
Oh well done! I commend your pains,
And every one shall share i’ th’ gains.
And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.

Music and a song: “Black spirits,” &c. HECATE retires

SECOND WITCH
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks.

Here the song ends suddenly as we give one stamp of the foot in unison. Only Shakespeare could have thought up such fantastic lyrics! I also take my hat off to Jaakko Mantyjarvi, the composer, who has used a brilliant mixture of jazz and dissonance to create a really spooky arrangement of the song. Great fun!

I don’t really have any news on the literary front, and I try to keep most of my ‘life-news’ on the Whasblog. I suppose I can share some tidbits here, though… On Friday I went back to school for my prize-giving ceremony, in which I won prizes for French and Psychology. I was really pleased with the French one, but I don’t really think I performed any better than anyone else in Psychology (I really would have liked a prize for English but I better not complain…). I got a £10 book token for each prize, which was very nice. I might go and spend one of them on a birthday present for my mum this afternoon.

Apart from that the same sort of music and work stuff is going on at Warwick. We’re currently house-hunting for next year - on Wednesday I’ll be going for my first look around some of the houses the others have spotted.

I better get to that seminar. Hope everyone is well, sorry again for my unforeseen inactivity over Christmas.

Toodle pip!

- My domain name is registered with ‘MyValueHost.com’ and I have never heard of the ‘Domain Registry of America’, nor received any letters or emails from them in the past.

- The cost of renewal for my domain name has always been around £2, and yet DROA have asked me to pay £18 for the year’s renewal.

- I have only ever received emails asking me to renew my domain name - never letters. What’s more, I’ve had plenty of scam emails about it in the past which also made me a little suspicious.

The letter implies that what you are paying for is a simple renewal of your domain name - however, what actually happens when you pay the money is that your domain name registration is moved to the Domain Registry of America.

What’s clever about the DROA scam is that it’s actually quite a legitimate letter - it does inform the reader that the letter simply offers ‘an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain name registration to the Domain Registry of America‘. However, the bulk of the information given in the letter and the huge amount of (very, very) small print on the back is extremely misleading and it is easy to see how someone could be duped into thinking that what they are paying for is just an ordinary renewal of their domain name. DROA obtain your account details through WHOIS, which makes your domain name information available to everyone. So don’t be fooled by the fact that they know lots of information about you - unless you want to pay an extortionate amount of money to have your domain name renewed and moved to another registrar (and then have to pay the expenses for moving it back, thanks to their lovely terms and conditions on the back of the letter), ignore this letter as soon as you receive it!

This makes me die a little inside.

If you read my post a while back about what a haiku is, then you’ll know that many English-speaking haijin believe that haiku should not be written in the 5-7-5 format that is so often taught in schools (and apparently even at university level, which I find really distressing). Haiku should also always be about nature, and yet my friend read us one that he’d written during the day which had nothing to do with nature at all. I know it’s obviously not his fault and I’m not angry at him - just extremely irritated that he was taught how to write this delicate form in a way that is just wrong. Whoever was leading the course probably didn’t even teach the students who Basho was - the father of haiku - and perhaps hadn’t even heard of him themselves. I wonder if the people on the course even know that haiku is a Japanese form?

I didn’t tell my friend any of this because I don’t really want to start a debate about how to write haiku, especially as it’s not supposed to be a form with rigorous rules and regulations (eg. 5-7-5!) - I just had to let some of this out here. All done.

I’ve put up all of my HaikuWriMo entries in the poetry section - they can now be found under ‘Autumn Haiku’. Last year the organiser of the HaikuWriMo used lulu.com to create a booklet of HaikuWriMo highlights, featuring five of the best haiku written by each person involved. Only about fifteen of us did it last year, whereas there were about forty haijin involved this year. I’m not sure whether that makes this more or less likely to happen, but it would be nice to get another little booklet of HaikuWriMo works.

Everyone seems to be doing very well on their NaNoWriMo exploits…keep it up chaps!

Day Twenty-Five:

on the lake
fountains shoot up
amid soaring seagulls

Day Twenty-Six:

magpie thief
taking the squirrel’s
freshly buried nuts

Day Twenty-Seven:

where did I put that conker?
squirrel among the leaves

Day Twenty-Eight:

midnight:
the howling of dogs
and fireworks

Day Twenty-Nine:

two leaves
nestle together
on the bench

Day Thirty:

the tree grows thin and bare
as squirrels feast below

Day Thirty-One:

at the window
a glowing grin
snuffed out

That last one alludes to a Halloween pumpkin - I wanted to do something suitably themed for the 31st October. How many of you are doing something for Halloween? We haven’t made much of an effort since our Halloween Ball in the student’s union happened on Saturday, so I feel like the day has already been and gone.

As for my course, the work is slacking off a bit now - next week is Reading Week, where we don’t have any seminars or lectures and we have a chance to catch up on any work or reading we’ve been given. Since I haven’t been given that much it’s just going to be a fun week off for me and I’m quite looking forward to it! I have to read the General Prologue and the Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales and a French play by Racine called ‘Phèdre’. I’m very excited to start Chaucer; I did The Miller’s Prologue and Tale for my AS-level (two years ago) and really enjoyed it. I think we’ll be reading that as one of our selection, so it’ll be nice to do something I already know quite well. I’ve also read a few of the others in translation in the past, so I feel reasonably well prepared.

I should be a bit more active around the blogosphere this coming week since I have less work to do, although this weekend I’m away with the Chamber Choir so you may not see many comments from me until Monday - but I promise that I will do lots more blog-commenting next week!

Finally, good luck to all those starting their NaNoWriMo writing tomorrow. I found it difficult enough writing a haiku a day for a month, so I take my hat off to anyone who succeeds in writing a whole novel!

two friends
cycle and laugh
in the rain

Day Seventeen:

sucking up leaves, these workers
take away my autumn

Day Eighteen:

rustling bush –
squirrel’s tail
disappears

Day Nineteen:

waiting for buses
and watching leaves
fall

Day Twenty:

what a racket!
ducks squabbling
on the lake

Day Twenty-One:

breathing clouds
into a clear blue sky –
autumn afternoon

Day Twenty-Two:

parading round the river bend
a whole troop of ducks!

Day Twenty-Three:

the sun peeps through water droplets
on my window

Day Twenty-Four:

three students
scuffle in the leaves
collecting conkers

I’m sorry for the enormous lack of updates recently - it turns out university actually involves quite a lot of work. I have two essays to write for next week - one to be handed in on Monday and the other on Tuesday; I have to read the last Fitt of Sir Gawain and translate two passages from it for tuesday; I have another French book to finish reading for Friday; I have a translation to write and grammar exercises to do for tomorrow, and reading and writing work to do for my French grammar seminar on Monday. All of this makes my brain hurt.

On the bright side, the HaikuWriMo seems to be going well - there have been a few days recently where I haven’t had time to sit down and think about nature let alone try to write things about it, but I’m managing to keep up. John came to visit me here at the weekend and we went on a lovely autumnal walk around a lake and through the woods, which provided some inspiration for me.

Sadly this is going to be another short post because I need to get back to work. Exciting grammar exercises, here I come!

Day Eight:

old oak and I -
knotted bark
and wrinkled brow

Day Nine:

morning rain:
four ducks laughing
on the lawn

Day Ten:

October morning:
dewdrops slip
on spider strings

Day Eleven:

fire alarm at dawn:
dressing gowns float
in mist

Day Twelve:

autumn morning –
treetops disappear
in the mist

Day Thirteen:

a youngster plays
in the road –
grey squirrel

Day Fourteen:

falling shapes at my window:
bomber magpies

Day Fifteen:

foxes at midnight
scream
like children

a sudden burst of cackles -
magpies at my window

Day Five:

a hungry magpie
pecks the ground;
why do you answer, worm?

Day Six:

a pair of ducks
keep company
under the bridge

Day Seven:

crunchy autumn leaves:
pedestrian’s delight

The HaikuWriMo is still going well; many of my ideas have been based on magpies as there seems to be an abundance of them here. I’m constantly seeing them turn up outside my window and they’ve inspired a couple of the above haiku in the last few days. About the day five haiku: I found this out today, apparently the reason birds peck the ground to find worms is that the worms think the sound is rain, so they come to the surface to avoid drowning. Sadly they then usually get eaten, as was the fate of the worm that inspired my fifth haiku this month. It’s quite clever, though.

Most of my university seminars and workshops begin this week, so I’ll be much busier from now on. So far I feel like I’m keeping on top of my work quite well; I’ve read the first section of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and I’ve completed my translation of the seventy or so lines the lecturer told us to translate. This was actually easier than I thought it was going to be - tricky words can be looked up in a glossary and the rest is common sense really. I think Middle English is quite similar to French in some ways, particularly with the separate use of ‘thee’ and ‘ye’, which is just like ‘tu’ and ‘vous’. I’ve also completed the reading I had to do for my French literature module, and I’m working on a Yeats Selected Poems book for another English module.

I’ll try to keep up to date with my HaikuWriMo-ing, blogging and commenting this week, although I might be a bit lax in those departments because of the increasing workload. I’m sure I’ll manage; I have about half the lecture hours compared to most of those first years doing sciencey courses, anyway!