Artsy Weekend

Friday night our family went with my sis's family to celebrate the end of school by seeing the 3-D version of "Up." If you go, take Kleenex. Loved it.

My daughter and I heard Tchaichovski and saw Joyce Yang, Van Cliburn silver medalist, playing Rachmaninoff at the Dallas Symphony last night. Amazing performance. I got free tickets thanks to an incentive the DSO was doing to get folks on their mailing list.

Did I mention that the Tchaichovski performance was of favorite selections from Swan Lake? The concert notes said when Tchaichovski originally composed Swan Lake, an average choreographer left dancers concluding the music was "undanceable." Only when a great choreographer came along and saw the brilliance in the composition did the work become the classic it is. Sort of a variation on the old saying: The play was brilliant, the audience a failure.

I also finished reading The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was a genius in his use of time and flashback. The "rules for writers" say to avoid jumping all over the place in terms of chronology because it totally confuses the reader. Yet F. Scott pulled it off.

On to Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment...

(For those just joining us, I'm gearing up for examinations in my PhD program, and I have to read a ton of lit, so some of of my readers asked me to chronicle that process.)