Well, I'm working on turning the paper into a grand success. I'm amazed that I've gotten this far, and some of my sources have turned up with timely saves. I just might manage to pull this off!

After all of this, I deserve to sing in Terre Haute and dance in Wilmette!

How do you get yourself into these situations? ;-)

Oh, trust me, I ask myself that no more than about twice a week, or twice a day during paper-writing time. I'll let you know if I ever figure out the answer.

They are still in Israel, but they are rapidly losing one of their great musical traditions, the women's song repertoire. This is because the songs are in their old native language of Malayalam, which the girls don't learn from birth any more. Some mothers still try to teach their daughters Malayalam in order to pass on the old songs, but with the inevitable result that the daughters will never be quite as comfortable with the language as the mothers. Fortunately, there is a recording of the women's songs, so they won't be totally forgotten.

To the surprise of all, I actually managed to finish the paper today. It came to thirteen pages of text, and two pages of pictures, which makes it multimedia, in the very technical sense of the word. Frankly, I didn't know that Christian forms of wayang existed before I started on this paper, either. The things you learn in grad school. Three weeks ago, I didn't know wayang wahyu existed. Now I can tell you all about it.

Sure, I'll tell you a little.

First of all, wayang refers to Indonesian theater in general, though it's usually applied to theatrical forms in Western Indonesia -- Java, Bali, Lombok, Sumatra, Sulawesi, those sorts of places. There's two major divisions of wayang. Wayang kulit is shadow-puppet theater, and there are lots and lots of different kinds of that. Wayang wong is dance drama -- the name means pretty much "theater of humans."

Ninety-five percent of wayangs in Java and Bali tell Hindu stories, usually elaborations of small moments from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, while accompanied by a gamelan. This is one of the big uses for gamelans in Indonesia. There are standardized casts of puppets for the puppet plays, and sets of rules and conventions like any theatrical form.

Recently, by which I mean that this art form got started unofficially sometime between 1930 and 1957, and officially in 1960, the Catholic Church in Java has developed its own form of wayang. It's called wayang wahyu -- wahyu means "divine revelation." Like the other forms, wayang wahyu has an expanding cast of puppets, who are Bible characters, and the dhalang, the puppeteer, uses them to tell Bible stories. The wahyu puppets look a little different than the traditional kind, more Europeanized.

Lately, since the 1970s, the Protestant missions have also started doing wayang. They call it wayang prajanjian, where prajanjian means "testament." The major difference between wayang prajanjian and wayang wahyu is that the puppets in wayang prajanjian look more traditionally Javanese than the ones in wayang wahyu.

Well, one good thing about it being a dissertation in progress is that the author is still a grad student, like me. So, when I wrote to her asking to discuss her work, she understood, and we had a nice e-mail chat. That's one thing I've noticed about academics -- they're very friendly even to completely random students who e-mail them to ask about their work. I hope someone asks me about my work someday so that I can be friendly and discuss it with them.

Do you ever wonder if the teachers sit down and say, "how can we make this schedule as impossible as possible for the students?"

Possibly. Although, here, I think they sit down and say, "which course can we list incorrectly so as to screw up the most music students' schedules?" I haven't even been here a year, and this has already happened twice.

I am told that there is a very good reason that so much ethnomusicology and anthropology has been committed in Bali. The professor for this course said that Bali was one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Perhaps after my Hebrew gets good enough, I'll learn Bahasa Indonesia and take off.

Oh, ambitious Pony!

Yes, well, it's easy to be ambitious when you walk into projects without a clear picture of just how big they really are. Usually I don't figure that out until I'm in too far to back out, so I have to keep on going. But if it looks like ambition to the outside world, I'm cool with that.

And now I can safely say that you have a steady tendency toward getting into impossible papers

To wriiiiiiite. . . the impossible paper. . .

so wathc out what you take for next course!

The quarter starts on Monday. Head for the hills.

LOved that icon!

I have only recently come to peace with the fact that I'm one of those people who would really enjoy Romeo and Juliet if one could somehow cut the parts of Romeo and Juliet, since they are a plonker and a hormonal thirteen-year-old girl and generally screw up what could have been a rather nice comedy. I've always been a big Mercutio fan, which I'm sure surprises you not at all.