reading and eating

Today was our book discussion group's annual 'reading and eating' meeting, where we gather for food and to read short selections of our choice aloud to each other. And it was our second year in the back room of an Irish pub. Seven people again, almost all the same folks as last year. And we had lunch, most taking food typical of an Irish or British pub, only I had a caesar salad, and then did our reading.

As B. and I came by car, it wasn't difficult for me to lug along all three newly-published volumes of Tolkien's Collected Poetry to show them off and to read from. My first selection I introduced by saying "You all know the song which ends 'That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! / So carefully! carefully with the plates!' But what did J.R.R. Tolkien hate? Motorcycles!" And I read the previously unpublished poem expostulating almost incoherently against motorcycles in alliterative verse.

Other readings included more Tolkien, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Connie Willis, The Bloggess, and Yangsze Choo if I've spelled that correctly.

On the drive up I had the radio on, and Saturday morning is the weekly opera broadcast, into which we were dumped in the middle. We tried to figure out whose music it was. The sung language was German, so that limited the possibilities. The orchestra was wildly emotive enough to be Wagner, but the tone colors didn't have a distinctively Wagnerian air. B. thought maybe Weber, who certainly could be weird enough, but I thought the harmonic language beyond him. Then came a passage to which my comment was, "Now it sounds like Richard Strauss." It was. The act ended just before we arrived. It was Die Frau ohne Schatten.