When a literary festival takes over your month

I was a reader at the first reading of a month-long literary festival, and it has been taking over my life.  It was organized by a friend of mine, and he's invited a truly staggering number of mutual acquaintances to take part.  This means I have been spending a lot of time in coffee shops around the area hearing writers I already liked and finding new writers I've never heard before.  It also means I haven't been home most evenings to write for my blogs.  I feel like a real slacker.  But I've been writing a lot.

Hearing numerous voices in all sorts of genres does that to me: it makes me pay attention to the words of others, and it makes my brain fizz with words and ideas and forms and topics I want to write about.  Hearing new work from writers I know makes me feel more a part of a community.  I talk to people I haven't seen since that class 6 years ago.  (Okay, mostly I think about talking to them.)  I am inspired again by the things that are important in their lives, the things they write and think about, and the ways they share these things with the world.

And the new voices.  That hilarious zombie piece by the guy in his 70s, the music of spoken word poets from Guinea, that essay about why fiction writers suck at life, or the piece about the travails of being a thug-ish husband forced to wear a shirt with sleeves when being dragged along by his wife to meet the potential Doula (he got ice cream as a reward).  The voices all swirl together.

There is not a single reader who has left me without some phrase or image to write down and mull over.  This is a feast, and I am thankful for its bounty.  So I may lie a bit and back date some of the posts for this month that are based on what I wrote in my notebook but never put in here.  Indulge me.  This dream world will only last for a couple more weeks, and then I will be left with the memories and the notes and the urge to read and think and edit and write, which can only be a benefit here, right?

Requiem for a requiem

I'd never been through all of Mozart's Requiem before that night.  (I can still definitely say I've never sung Mozart's Requiem because I personally believe my batting average in terms of hitting notes has to be above .160 to say I've actually sung something.)  Then again, nobody's really sung through Mozart's Requiem because he died before he finished it.  Now I want to listen to Amadeus again . . . 

It didn't matter that I was barely keeping up with the music, let alone the unfamiliar words, or that there's always one violin that's flat.  At certain moments, these things don't matter when you're making music.  The thing is that there were more than enough people who knew what they were doing all around me, so I still had that feeling of being a part of something huge and lovely in those moments when I was carried up and away by the beauty of voices singing music to God. 

A Confession

I have a confession to make.  I have not seen an entire season or series or, really, anything by Joss Whedon.  This makes me want to. 

Are you already a fan?  On the fence about whether to take the plunge into his world?  Anti-Whedon?  Why?