Espresso Brevity

Over my third espresso this morning, I noticed that the penultimate paragraph of last eve's blog entry could be characterized as nostalgia about nostalgia, in other words, "God I miss the good old days when I used to miss the good old days." I'm trying to think of other examples of such meta-nostalgia... musical or otherwise. Blog-readers? Observe: I am now blogging about my own blogging.

You'll notice that I chose Strauss in those early Oberlin days; that was before I graduated to the turbocharged, "Extra Strength" nostalgia of Mahler--now with 30% more personal vulnerability and despair! Currently, Brahms Op. 116 #4 will do nicely, thanks.

Caffeinated, I looked back at my first blog entry and envied its brevity. Do other readers feel the same? (Ominous silence.) I just got off the phone with a friend who apparently went so far as to PLAY THROUGH some of the musical examples in my Mozart blog at the piano, but this effort, or my prose, exhausted her, and--as she put it--she got "caught up" in Dirty Dancing and stopped reading halfway. Then, inexplicably, she moved from Dirty Dancing to poems of Neruda. Which suggests the following, ascending order of artistic interest:

My blog
Dirty Dancing
Pablo Neruda

Am I as far below Dirty Dancing as Neruda lies above? Sad, but perhaps not as sad as this picture of an RV camp moved into the environs of Mahler's famous hut where he composed the Third Symphony. Thank you, Alex Ross, for that final reminder of the destruction of all that is sacred. At least the hut makes me feel less bad about the size of my own apartment.