Baaaaaaaaaaaaaadly organized.
taking place as the ever more beautiful
Angel Orensanz Foundation... but it's an old distressed building, and even after they turned on the heat it was colder than I could tolerate, even with my down coat zipped all the way up.
Obviously, with all participants being allowed to volunteer to read, some were better than others. Mostly, people were bad. And even those fully able to render the English in the appropriate rising and falling manner of the Greek, did so at such a slow pace, and with such a dragging of syllables it was like a poetry slam of quaaludes.
No one knew how to use the mic.
An iron statue almost fell on someone's head.
They had coffee, but no tea or plain hot water, which for me, being cold and unable to consume coffee was a nightmare.
There was this horrible slide show that the organizer's daughter put together to "suggest" the Odyssey. Mostly, we got to see Windows 95 in action, as it crashed or as people lost their place.
The crowd itself was diverse and lovely in every way, and proves, if nothing else, that there is an ache for real content and art and literature in this world, and that people want to be a part of it -- from shy lonely bankers who had never even read the book before, to leather daddies and social workers and college students with no professional/academic interest in the classical fields.
But I just couldn't deal with the cold, and the vanity-project nature of the matter from the organizer, and with Things to Do over the next several days, I did the right thing.
People make me angry, and everyone should learn to read outloud. The reproduction of the classical cadence is very hard, and honestly, often displeasing to the modern ear, but using some cadence, any candence, is not. And in listening to so many people read in a halting, confused monotone, I wondered, is this not an innate ability of people?
When you read or speak, or listen to others doing so -- do you hear cadence? Do you understand it's purpose? When you speak, do you consider and focus on how to emphasize words, know how to if you wish? understand the way it works? It's something I've been able to do since quite little, and I thought it was just human nature to do so, but after last night, and in considering how many people often decide I am angry, or sarcastic simply because my words are crsip and some take emphasis, even when I'm cheerful and showing it -- maybe this is not something peopele understand?
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