Sun comes in the front window at an angle. It is close to noon. The plants in the window cast shadows on the floor. On the table by the wall is a New Yorker magazine, open on top of the placemats from my grandmother, on one side, and some tax documents on the other. Also scattered around the table are chocolates and a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant; salt in a small stone bowl; and several letters and postcards waiting for responses in the other corner. In one of those letters was a request for some blog activity. I can see that it has been an unseemly amount of time. I'm sure I had interesting and clever things to say in the intervening months but they are now lost to time. Oh well, there are always more words to say.

Outside the window, rooftops, and clouds steadily moving across the sky, now covering the sun. There are other piles around our living room. It is a busy time over here. I've been playing an opera in Malmö,  Sweden, across the Øresund from Copenhagen. Tonight is the Scandinavian premier of Lear, based on the Shakespeare play, written in 1978 by a German named Aribert Reimann. The piece is composed mathematically, and there are very few moments in the 3-hour opera in which any two people are playing the same note at the same time. It's maybe as distant a piece from what I was doing in Basel as can be imagined. Fun, challenging, like a Sudoku puzzle. Also cacophonous and jarring. Also, occasionally, beautiful. But mostly not. I just found an illuminating interview with our American conductor, Erik Nielsen:

I'm also playing the Rite of Spring with an orchestra in Copenhagen, accompanying a professional dance troupe and 200 children dancers. Next to each other, the Rite seems a bit like Lear's grandpappy. Cluster chords, strong rhythmical figures. A quote from the conductor about Lear: 'It's not intended to be ugly. It's intended to be pure emotion.'

As a beautiful antidote to all of that Pure Emotion, I was just revisiting the site of the Statens Museum for Kunst, where you can look at all the pages of the 17th century Gottorfer Codex. It is a painted record of all the plants in the collection of the Schloss (Castle) Gottorf, in northern Germany, maybe belonging to Denmark at that time. They're pretty stunning.

Here's a link to the viewer.

Lunch time in Denmark. I am eating lunch while you are sawing logs. Sleep well, friends.