Seeking Ferret

First, forkedtongues is an awesome community dedicated to multilingualism and translation culture. For poetry month they've been trying to post poems in as many languages and scripts as possible and create a dialogue about translating poetry, and the conversation has been amazing and the poems even better. I've personally posted poems in Chinese, Polish, and Yiddish and translations into English, French, and Spanish.

Second, last week Lee and I went to see Futurity, which was advertised as a Civil War Steampunk Rock Musical. And that was enough to sell us on it before we'd heard a note, but as it turns out it was terrific. It's created and performed by the Brooklyn indie band The Lisps, who we'd also never heard of before but who are apparently amazing.

Futurity tells the story of a Union soldier, Julian Munro, performing jobs like destroying Confederate railroad lines to cut off the Rebel supplies. It's a mindnumbing, back-breaking duty made maddeningly worse by the constant fear that the actual fighting war will reach them at any time. So our hero dreams, steampunk dreams. He dreams of the steam brain, a mechanical device of colossal proportions that will replace the fatally human decisionmakers that have doomed the US to this war. The Steam Brain will bring peace, he insists, in poetic and absolutely stirring letters to his muse, the British scientist Lady Ada Lovelace.

The music is a frenetic blend of indie rock and Appalachian folk, propelled from behind by the most gorgeous steampunked drumkit. The lyrics are verbal diarrhea, a self-conscious stream of consciousness blur of ideas and emotions made physical through the language of science. It holds together, just pure drama, the tensions building and building to an achingly intense climax.

As to the title, well, the play operates under a carefully constructed tension between history and anachronism. Sometimes there's extreme care to make the science sound 19th century, even when it would contradict contemporary ideas about science. Other times, they puncture their own sails with 21st century irony that feels just as intentional. Futurity, in a nutshell.

Fourth, the week before that I celebrated my birthday at the Met's staging of the Magic Flute. It's the second time I've seen this production, and I love every bit of it. Last time, I saw Diana Damrau sing Pamina, and this show's Pamina was no Diana Damrau, but there was really nothing to complain about. I had a great evening out with my little sister.

Third, somebody needs to recommend two books to me.

First, there's been a lot of books and stories out about the various people who "saw it coming" with regards to the economic crisis. And mostly from what I've seen they've just focused on how these random people looked at the numbers and said, "This doesn't add up." I'm sure they're all very clever, but the people who didn't see it coming were very clever too. I want a recommendation for a book that discusses the people who saw it coming and tries to theorize about what characteristics they had that made them different. Is the Michael Lewis book that book?

Second, I want a book about Renaissance-era spycraft. If I'm going to be writing more about the Pirate Rabbi, I need more information about that. Anybody have any experience on that topic?

Fifth, I love numbering things out of order.