Dust and Spores

I've decided to set myself a goal this year. I'm an avid opera-fan, but I've never done a good job at investigating the source material for the librettos of some of my favorite pieces. I want to change that. I decided to read 5 novels that were turned into operas I like.

So I started looking around for books upon which operas have been based. Turns out, most of the pieces I know come from source material are actually from mythology or plays. So I expanded, and now it's a big goal: 5 novels, 5 plays, and 5 mythological sources (plays or poems). I think it's a good project.

Here's what I'm looking at:

Novels

• Bride of the Lammermoors / Walter Scott (Lucia di Lammermoor / Donizetti)
• Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District / Nikolai Leskov (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District / Shostakovich)
• Manon Lescaut / Abbé Prévost (Manon / Massenet)
• Eugene Onegin / Alexander Pushkin (Eugene Onegin / Tchaikovsky)
• Le Mariage de Loti / Pierre Loti (Lakmé / Delibes)

Plays

• Othello / William Shakespeare (Otello / Verdi)
• Les mamelles de Tirésias / Apollinaire (Les mamelles de Tirésias / Poulenc)
• Le Viol de Lucrèce / André Obey (The Rape of Lucretia / Britten)
• The Figaro Trilogy / Pierre Beaumarchais (The Barber of Seville / Rossini ; The Marriage of Figaro / Mozart ; La Mère Coupable / Milhaud ; The Ghosts of Versailles / Corigliano)
• The Merry Wives of Windsor / William Shakespeare (Falstaff / Verdi)

Mythology

• Daphnis and Chloe / Longus (Daphnis et Chloé / Offenbach)
• Iphigenia in Tauris / Euripedes (Iphigénie en Tauride / Gluck)
• Oedipus Rex / Sophocles (Oedipus Rex / Stravinsky)
• Metamorphoses / Ovid (a ton of stuff)
• Electra / Sophocles (Elektra / Strauss)

Since this exploded, I'm not looking at an end date or anything.... but hopefully I'll make a big dent in it this year. And then I can make a new list! Whee.

Ok, one more because I'd been planning on finally participating in this one this year.

Here I throw in my coin for the fourth annual R.I.P. Challenge: creepy, scary, gothic, supernatural is the theme from now until HalloweEeEeeEEeeen! I'm gonna go for 4 books because that's how many I found on my TBR pile.

• The Graveyard Book / Neil Gaiman
• Kwaidan : Stories and Studies of Strange Things / Lafcadio Hearn
• The Turn of the Screw / Henry James
• Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Stories / Edgar Allen Poe

And if for some reason I actually get through all that with time to spare, I've got this neat illustrated copy of Dracula I might work through. I tried reading an unillustrated edition about 5 years ago and got like 40 pages from the end and stopped for some reason.

So that's it! Have a spooktacular time making horror-ble Halloween puns, fellow undertakers (of the challenge)!

I've never read a screenplay before, but after seeing them sold on the street so often, I figure there must be a reason there's such a market for them. And so, I will join Michael's Words Behind the Pictures Challenge in which every month for a year, he makes available a screenplay (free, thanks!) and the goal is to read it, watch the film, and document the experience.

Sounds pretty cool. And it's something different. And I haven't been using my Netflix account very much, so that is all.

You should probably join up too.

Ok I'm in. I wasn't going to do anything like this for a while -- at least until Infinite Jest was over -- but I noticed the timeframe was so big and the requirements to liberal that I thought "Ok!" And so: Bellezza's 3rd annual Japanese Literature Challenge.

My own self-imposed rule is that I'm only reading stuff off my TBR pile because it's not even a pile, it's a mountain so big I'd freeze to death before I got to the top. Brrr.

The goal is 1 book of Japanese origin by January 2010. I'm gonna go with three and see where it goes. To begin:

• The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter / retold my Yasunari Kawabata -- This is a really neat edition of an old folktale with gorgeous illustrations. It's got the Japanese and the English translation in parallel, and even though I can't read a word of Japanese, it's still cool that it's there.
• Norwegian Wood / Haruki Murakami -- This has been sitting there for like 2 years so ok.
• Thousand Cranes / Yasunari Kawabata again -- I read Snow Country and The Master of Go in like 2 days each, so I'm sure all this needs is a good Saturday.

Ok bye.