Today I learned that chocolate-covered bacon is disgusting.

Today I learned that throwing parties on Fridays is unnecessarily difficult, when the same party could just as well be thrown on Saturday. But I also learned that, perhaps not too surprisingly considering the selection bias here, a high percentage of my friends own proper flapper attire. Yay. :)

Today I learned a whole ton about World's Fairs. Like, way more than I could write up here. Because I also learned that when my homework is awesome, I will go above and beyond. Watch a half hour of vintage Coney Island footage, you say? See you in four hours...

So we learned last week that the word panorama originally referred to the Imax 360 of the 19th century, and only subsequently did the suffix -orama get applied as an indicator of great scale and awesomeness. Keep this in mind as I tell you about the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama - the awesomest thing to be called Futurama until that other Futurama.

The Futurama was, first of all, the grand-daddy of the Disney-style dark ride: a narrated trip in moving seats through a vivid diorama (there's that suffix again), in this case depicting the world in twenty years, as envisioned by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. The principal feature of this world is the existence of an interstate highway system - build us these roads, GM told taxpayers, and we'll sell you the cars to drive on them. The thing is that although GM's argument worked, we didn't follow their instructions very well. Bel Geddes designed a utopic highway system that was carefully calibrated for ideal traffic flow - the rural elevated highways depicted in the early parts of the ride have seven lanes, with two transition lanes on a lower level, bringing drivers safely from 25 to 50 to a cruising speed of 100 mph(!).

But of course, the system we actually built was not so idyllic. Dan Howland of The Journal of Ride Theory sums it up in one of my favorite quotes on the topic: "If we lived in the Futurama, we'd be home by now."

I highly recommend this film of the Futurama itself: http://www.archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940 Highlights include the dirigible hanger in the airport (floating in a pool of water, so it can easily rotate to suit the wind direction!), and the odd reference to the Gloria Patri at the end. If you watch it, please talk to me about it - we didn't talk about it at all in class, so it is not out of my system.

Today I learned a new Harvard building! You know that building to the right of Lamont? Me neither till today! In all these years, I have not only never been inside that building, or known what it is, but I've never even really registered its existence. So today I walked in and announced my presence to the dude at the desk:

Me: Hi! I've been here five years and have never been in this building. Where am I?
Dude: This is the Houghton rare books library.
Me: Whoa, that exists?
Dude: ...yes.
Me: I mean, I always thought it was just one of those Hollis designations for a particular collection, not an actual physical location.
Dude: Rare books generally need to be stored somewhere secure. And physical.
Me: This makes sense.

Next up: Liz learns to navigate new Lamont floor-numbering, avoids further embarrassing attempts to locate Shakespeare in the government docs stacks.

Today I learned - well, I've been learning this for two weeks now, but today was another reminder - that I really don't like singing Bach. Or the St. John Passion, at any rate. I love playing Bach, but singing him seems to be a whole 'nother matter. It's the reverse of Mozart, who is great to sing but lousy to play. It's interesting that although alto and cello lines often share many characteristics, I can have such strong opinions on whose work I'd rather sing vs play - the same line has totally different fun-ness properties depending how it is produced.

Sometimes, however, the finger can really be pointed at the composer. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Fantasia on Tallis AND God Bless The Master? Really? Really?

Thankfully, today I also learned to preserve the quality of my day through a Bach rehearsal by tying up my good mood in one of Jim Marvin's Santa Claus bags and throwing it into the balcony for safe keeping till 6:30.

This weekend I learned that the church choir experience is completely revolutionized through the addition of a neck pillow. Reverend Gomes, you are a lovely man, but your sermons are very long.

After years of struggling to pithily describe the majority of my high school classmates in a way that doesn't:

• involve ethnic stereotyping ("guidos")
• inspire the listener to turn the claim back on me ("JAPs")
• sound too douchey / loaded for people who actually know their Marx ("lumpenproletariat")
• seem better reserved for describing the Five Towns ("nouveau riche")
• seem inaccurate since most people do go to college ("townies")

I finally learned the perfect word for summing up my hometown - chavvy.

Today I learned that vertiginous means vertigo-y. Can you use it in a sentence? Why yes, I can!

The soundscape in Birnam Wood is vertiginous.

There ya go.

Today I learned about panoramas. Originally, panoramas were buildings that housed a 360 degree painting. These were super popular in the 19th century, and they sound a bit awesome.

Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.

I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?

Today I learned that I am the first person in the history of the internet who has blogged about something related to her job, had her boss find it, and had this lead to praise and approbation. :)

I am wondering about a presentation given to one of my classes today by a producer at WGBH. The only time she defaulted to a masculine pronoun (the only time anyone ever defaults to a masculine pronoun in children's programming) was when referring to the writers. FML.

Borne back ceaselessly into Gatz

I am wondering about Gatz, the seven hour Gatsby semi-adaptation at the A.R.T. Why did it feel so wholly immersive, despite being so extremely low-fi? Sleep No More and The Donkey Show achieve their immersion through verisimilitude, overwhelming your senses with lush detail. Their voices are full of money. Gatz, with its wafer-thin meta-narrative and commonplace imagery, is barely more than a staged reading. But you are there.

But there is not West Egg. The world of Gatz is not the story-world of The Great Gatsby - it is the world of The Great Gatsby, the novel, the paper-and-ink book with the blue-face cover that you dog-eared in AP English. The immersion is into the very act of reading The Great Gatsby. What engrosses you is the story, but what you experience is the telling of the story, the construction of it; the green twinkle of the perfect language, the careening inevitability of the narrative.

A novel this familiar has deep personal layers to it, separate from and wholly dependent on the actual narrative - and through the familiar text you can repeat the past, old sport. I felt keenly the sense memory of lifting my chin to balance an invisible object, moved to mimicry by the vividness of Jordan's gesture. My friend Cian, raised on the metric system, recalled reading the Plaza scene and first learning the word "quart." Little details... but they are the functional equivalent of the pine scent in Birnam Wood. Sleep No More creates future sense memories - Gatz exposes and explores the memories you already have.

And as such, it is an intensely personal experience. Your memories of reading Gatsby are not mine - though they are likely similar, high school curricula being what they are. The novel is one of the few media that stubbornly resist communal consumption. That's why people react so strongly to deviation in adaptations of favorite novels - they get it wrong, they don't understand, I know the story isn't real but it's still true and you can't just change what's true. (and Gatz was not immune to this effect. Chapter Five was plain wrong.) You can feel ownership over the reading of a novel, over your reading of a novel, because there is no one else there to lay a claim.

The power of live theater is the power of the communal experience, laid bare in Gatz because it was the first time all of us, any of us, had ever experienced this particular familiar story with people. With people. Laughing together, gasping together, feeling like an overgrown spider in the Loeb seats together. It's reading the novel, but amplified. Sleep No More transports you to a world you've only visited in dreams - Gatz is a world of your own creation that is suddenly lived in by others.

The wakening from Sleep No More is well-supported - between Manderley and the long bus ride from the remote location, you can stagger the staggering out of the dream. When Gatz was over, it was over, and there we were, blinking at Harvard Square. But we weren't ready to emerge from that world. Drained emotionally from the story, we wanted to sustain the magic circle of the stage - we didn't want to admit outsiders. Sure, they all had read the book too, they could tut-tut about the Buchanans as well as us - but they weren't there. They didn't understand.

At the large party, Gatsby removed our masks and whispered in our ears.

So we beat on.

This weekend I learned that having someone read to you for seven hours is an extremely engaging and rewarding experience, especially when you're in a theater full of people, and the thing being read to you is The Great Gatsby.

And while buying school supplies I was walking through Staples with an Englishman, who pointed at a tape dispenser and exclaimed "oh look, Sellotape!" I stared at him for a moment and then realized: THAT'S WHY SHE CALLED IT SPELLOTAPE!!! Good one, JK!

I am wondering how I can arrange it so that every weekend is as awesome as this one.

Today I learned that cool institutions will sometimes let you do cool stuff for them if you just ask. :)

I'm adding another category to my What I Learned In School Today posts. Inspired by Project Zero's cheesy-but-surprisingly-effective See Think Wonder thought routines, I will also, when applicable, list something I am wondering about.

I am wondering about the orchestra pit. Specifically, about the point in architectural history when theaters first started concealing the orchestra in a pit (this was with Wagner's Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which is something I learned yesterday). I'd never really thought before about what a huge innovation the concealed orchestra is. Would we have ever gotten modern musical theater without it?