In which I Am Living The Musical Life, Rhetoric Gets Awesome, Bread Is Hard, and Bots Suck

Greetings, omnēs!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and since then I have learned how to sing, gone to an amazing concert, learned how to do a crazy memory technique, and baked sourdough for the first time (amongst other things).

I’ve been going to office hours, and Mr. Esmond has worked magic on my voice. Turns out, in order to sing well you have to open your throat, have a relaxed laryngeal position, a high soft palate, and resonance in your head! He’s been telling us this for weeks, but last week and the week before in particular it has finally clicked and my singing voice sounds worlds better than it did even just three weeks ago. It’s amazing! I’ve been ranting about it to

everyone I talk to! It feels so different, and sounds much better.

On Friday, I went to a concert conducted by our very own Dr. Erb, called I Never Saw Another Butterfly. And, goodness gracious, it was quite possibly the saddest

and most beautiful thing I ever heard. The songs are taken from a book by the same name, and are actually poetry written by children who lived

in a ghetto (Terezin) during World War II; they were set to music in 1968. It was one of the ghettos which was used as a false front for the Red Cross and foreign media, and the children were given art supplies to help keep up the act. Sadly, most of the children there were sent to Auschwitz and died there. The story is extremely sad, but beautiful too, and something to reflect on for a while; the songs are about death, but also beauty, about the trees and animals inside the ghetto, all from the perspective of a child. I highly recommend listening to NSA’s version once the recording becomes public (I’ll try to link it here at some point) but in the meantime, here is the anthology on Spotify–it’s the same thing, just a different choir. The chorale which sang it at the concert did an excellent job, and there were many tears amongst the audience and even from the singers and the conductor himself. https://open.spotify.com/album/2NRXR2J8EuDCZTPHYE57oN

On to a happier subject! In Rhetoric lately, we have been learning about the much-dreaded (or much-anticipated, depending on whom you ask) ✨memory palace✨ and it is in fact quite fun, in my lowly opinion. What is the memory palace, you ask? Essentially, a method to memorize just about anything, using the method of loci–places. In order to memorize, say, thirty random nouns, you think of a place you are familiar with; your house, your grandma’s house, your church, whatever you like. You then create an image for each noun you need to memorize and place it into your house. That’s a very basic and lackluster explanation; trust me, it’s much easier to explain it verbally. Anywhosies–with this method, you can memorize lists of random words and numbers, or entire speeches! In fact, our assignment for this week is to present a chreia (expanded anecdote meant to prove a point) entirely from memory–no paper or anything–and we can only work on the assignment for two hours total! As you can imagine, this has caused much consternation amongst the resident freshmen. However, I think it will be very fun and I’m looking forward to it (and I will be starting to work on it once I post this).

And yes, I finally made sourdough starter and baked a loaf! The starter was a bit of an interesting process. His name is Fred Calvin, and I was concerned that he might die young. However, he seemed to revive when I fed him a lot in preparation to bake. I did indeed bake, and the results were interesting, to say the least. Pros: Looked like bread; tasted like bread; overall consistency of bread. Cons: the bottom stuck entirely to the Dutch oven and I had to chip it off with a knife (haha); it was exceedingly dense (apparently there was some failure-to-rise); it smelled a little funny. However, bread is bread, and I wouldn’t describe this as an overall failure. I might not get the chance to bake another loaf until after Thanksgiving break, but I shall do so at some point in the future and see how it turns out. Kneading bread dough is therapeutic if you ever need something relaxing to do!

Ah yes, the last item in the title of this post. Bots! Stupid little internet bots which keep commenting on all my posts here. Thankfully WordPress has some free bot-preventing plugins one of which I have installed, so we shall see if that cures the problem. They aren’t messing up my site itself, but having 42 comments in Cyrillic isn’t per-tickully pleasing to the American eye.

Our term paper’s rough draft was due on Friday for us Rignites, and it has proved to be unquestionably the worst rough draft of a paper I have ever written, as I did not properly allow myself adequate time to research! But it’ll be fine, as I have three weeks until the final draft is due and I have already been finding some more books to use (mainly Old Testament commentaries). And I am planning on thoroughly searching my mom’s bookshelves when I am home to see if I can scrounge up some more things from there.

Well, that’s about all I have for today. Off I go to rhetor! 🫡