Renée Elise Goldsberry

Renée Elise Goldsberry gave a concert this evening at Swarthmore. It was free but "sold out" so quickly that the concert got doubled to meet demand in the Swarthmore audience.

It was delightful.

She sang a varied selection of songs --- yes, including getting the audience to sing along with songs from Hamilton --- and interspersed them with snippets of talking about the songs, their genesis, and why she picked them.

One of her stories was about going to see Maya Angelou and remembering no particular specifics of what she said, but only the feelings generated by seeing Maya Angelou speak. In that spirit, I say: this performance was a lovely, carefree step away from the usual cares and niggling worries of life to simply enjoy live music, words and notes flowing together and performed with beautiful skill.

I have a lot of live music coming up in the next week, I am looking forward to all of it.

This post's theme word epanalepsis, "a figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word(s) of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence." The best music is played by musicians who are best.

License to Quill

The premise of Jacopo Della Quercia's License to Quill is that Shakespeare is actually James Bond. The book attempts to fuse these two genres; it reads a lot like a writing exercise where the assignment was "a story clearly identifiably by tone and plot but with all the verbiage and styling of a different genre."

On the face of it, this is a premise I find appealing; however, it palls after awhile and did not really develop its own voice. There was nothing drawing me in, particularly, so I declare reading bankruptcy on this book at page 137 of 367. Oh well.


This post's theme word is anadiplosis, "the repetition of a word or words in successive clauses in such a way that the second clause starts with the same word which marks the end of the previous clause." The premise was interesting; interesting is not how the book turned out, for it leaned heavily on tired tropes and failed to use anadiplosis.