Pachelbel Bedtime

My friend Sara wrote:
“I am not a particular fan of youtube or cute parental tirades generally, but I rather enjoyed this and thought you people might too.”

I have a bit of a weakness for You Tube myself, in the same vein as some kind of food you think you don’t care for so much, easy enough to resist, but if someone happens to hand you an open package of it and you happen to taste one, you pretty much finish the whole lot of whatever it is—gummi bears or Cheez-its or Girl Scout Thin Mints—in spite of saying with each bite, This is the LAST one.

Anyhow, this song is really quite clever and likeable, the musician talented, and I think it’s about time for more on the rhapsodic end for this blog.

Social Networking Experiment

Without saying a word about the resounding empty echoes of this blog from the last three months… My friend Lynda, who works for Visible Path and keeps a professional blog called Centrality Journal, has e-mailed an invitation to link to the blog of her friend “Gatsby” to see what happens to his Technorati rating. When she linked from hers, his rating went up 500,000. I have a scientific streak, so I am willing to do an experiment….

And so must be the aforementioned Gatsby, whose blog is entitled Archimedes’ Hot Tub. Or he merely has a penchant for classical references. I don’t know him, this writer Michael Fitzgerald, though perhaps I should. I notice that my boss is on his list of friends! The world closes in around us. Or just the social network.

Years ago, I observed that my boyfriend’s Hungarian immigrant parents seemed to know every other Hungarian immigrant in the state, if not the nation. They said, oh yes, of course they did and it wasn’t all that different from back in the old country. At least within their educational strata. And now, I guess, the same is probably true beyond the bounds of Magyar.

If sheer numbers of links will help Gatsby, then perhaps this modest link will push him along, but “authority”? Toothless Invective is an unlikely source, I think.

And with that I’ll say, I miss this stuff!

Not Even the Silly Season

Oh my, this (below) made me laugh. It’s from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, a website worth visiting and a newsletter worth subscribing to. It’s weekly, so sometimes hard to keep up with, but almost always full of gems. He looks at new words coming into use in English (both British and American (and other variations too)), the odd history of words, and funny misuses of words.

The following is from his most recent newsletter from the section called “Recently Noted,” about words coming to prominence.

E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with the “e-” (for “electronic”) prefix that I’ve long since given up mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to the terms “e-petition” and “e-petitioner” becoming widely known. It all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister’s office—some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised, one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public transport and another one—which has gained a surprising level of informal support—arguing that Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” should become the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative proposals to introduce road-pricing—charging road users by the distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even though trials are several years away and full run-out could not happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic petitions. “Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat,” he said. (Prat: an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term for a person’s buttocks that also appears in “pratfall”.)

Don’t miss Gold on YouTube—priceless.

Random Flickr Blogging IMG_1610

Dizzying plains.

by sjareb

(Random Flickr Blogging explained.)

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

How Sports Can Be Sublime

There’s a lot to be grumpy about out there, the general theme of this blog, but the subtheme, the stuff to rhapsodize over… man, it beats all. It’s when I have things to share like this little You Tube clip from a bicycle race in France that I wish I had a proper lively blog with a big viral audience. This is so inadvertently uplifting! Ah well. Pass this along if you find it as delightful as I did. You don’t need to love or even know cycling, and it’s probably even better if you don’t understand French. Even with the crappy video quality, it’s an etude on the wonderful surpringness of the world. Or if not an etude, some other musical term. Capriccio or something.

C’est beau!

Grateful for the Well-Spoken and Annoyed

Toothless I remain (not literally, thanks to Dr. Polansky), but where has all the invective gone?

My god, things have come to such a pass that I am reduced to spluttering. Which is why I don’t post much here, in the place I thought I would do my political ranting. Take Bush in his press conference today, going on about the dire, most serious, portentious, and did I say dire, situation in regards to Korea (a.k.a. part of the Careen Peninshla). Trying to look like a responsible leader. Here’s a snippet:

[THE PRESIDENT:] Kevin.

Q Thank you, Mr. President –

THE PRESIDENT: If I might say, that is a beautiful suit. Q Thank you, sir. My tailor appreciates that.

THE PRESIDENT: And I can’t see anybody else that even comes close. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you very much. I’ll be happy to pass along my tailor’s number if you’d like that, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll take that back. I will recognize that — please.

Q On May 23, 2003, sir, you said — you effectively drew a line in the sand. You said, “We will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.” And yet now it appears that they have crossed that line. And I’m wondering what now, sir, do you say to both the American people and the international community vis-à-vis what has happened over the last 48 hours?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that, and I think it’s very important for the American people and North Korea to understand that that statement still stands, and that one way to make sure that we’re able to achieve our objective is to have other people join us in making it clear to North Korea that they share that objective. And that’s what’s changed. That’s what’s changed over a relatively quick period of time. It used to be that the United States would say that, and that would be kind of a stand-alone statement. Now, when that statement is said, there are other nations in the neighborhood saying it.

And so we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work. It is very important for us to solve these problems diplomatically. And I thank the leaders of — listen, when I call them on the phone, we’re strategizing. This isn’t, oh, please stand up and say something; this is, how can we continue to work together to solve this problem. And that is a substantial change, Kevin, from the previous times.

Suzanne. First best dressed person here. Sorry.

Q Kevin and I coordinated.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. He actually looks –

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

Et cetera.

See, where do you begin? Well, in truth, I begin by appreciating those with the stamina to give voice to their outrage. Even if it feels it has no effect, it does no good to stop, right? I think I’ve mentioned The Disgruntled Chemist in here before. Did I mention Arse Poetica? Just a likeable soul who appreciates good things (say, food and praying mantises, though not together), suffers with others, and excoriates public idiocy (say, questionably elected leaders).

You can always find something good, if more intellectual than visceral, on 3 Quarks Daily. For example, you can’t beat a headline like this:
The Return of Henry Kissinger: Will We Never Be Free of the Malign Effect of This Little Gargoyle?, which links to a column in that vein by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.

One Good Move is a good compendium of outrageous observations, remarked upon with a blandness that accentuates the beyond-rage quality of outrageousness.

I’ll try to keep sharing the voices that in some way or other say what I would have said if I were half so clever. Or profane. Or not beaten down by the disbelieving dread of it all.

Fearful Invective

I know this is a really trite and prissy thing to get irate about, but certain brands of so-called reality TV do seem to succinctly represent a rotten society.

I’m late jumping on this bandwagon, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t deride these “competitive” reality shows, even the people who say they like watching them. The reason I’m late to this is that I’ve avoided the whole gamy field by simply not paying any attention at all. So, my vitriol is uninformed. I won’t argue that. That doesn’t make it wrong.

I had remained safely in my “reality”-free world until they upgraded the workout room in my workplace. I was very grateful for the new erg and the replacement for the antebellum weight machine and so forth, but sad that dual TVs had been deemed critical to the improvements. These days, as it happens, I tend to frequent the room at the same time as some very nice seeming person who treads away on a conveyor belt and watches Fear Factor.

Here, people, is the end of western civilization. (See my previous mention of The Four Gated City.) This is the irrevocable crumbling decay that is happening under our own stuffed-up noses.

The first few bits of the show that I caught while whipping through my weight workout didn’t seem so bad. People climbing a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter to grab a flag, swimming underwater to unlock something—whatever, these seemed like physical challenges no more bizarre than football or platform diving. But soon the whole gross-out aspect became evident. Transferring leeches between two containers using only your mouth, lying in a bed of millipedes, that kind of thing. Retarded. But the thing that put me over the edge, made me have to leave the room and think the world was going down the toilet, was when they introduced some buxom contestant and did the sun-dappled profile of her. Ahh, here she is with her sister riding horses in the countryside and the sister’s voiceover saying how sweet Ashlee is, though tough, and how much she really, really loves horses. So naturally her challenge is to play horseshoes with someone and whoever loses has to take the number of points they lost by and eat that many inches of horse rectum. Yes, that’s right friends, horse rectum (apparently dried). The screen shows the pretty girls, the host holding up a yard long thing that looks like your dog’s rawhide chew toy, and of course, of course, a couple of horses (ass view) in the background.

Really. I don’t expect people to want to always watch something edifying or be Dr. Bloody Bronowski or anything, but is this stuff really worth the firing of a single neuron? The crass manipulation of emotion and the encouragement of nastily selfish behavior is what seems most offensive, though on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to not harm animals in the production of entertainment? Did the producers just pop down to Safeway to buy a whole horse rectum, byproduct of some otherwise legitimate horse slaughter? Admittedly, I’d probably find the eating of horse rectum objectionable under most circumstances, even say, the more benign Iron Chef, but there was something especially repellent about the setup on Fear Factor. I know, duh, that’s the whole idea, get it—fear and repugnance. Primal, maybe irresistible things. But is there no better way to scratch that particular itch? And not to get unbearably righteous (like I haven’t already), isn’t there something despicable about eating as punishment when there are people starving in the world?

You may be wondering what happened to that horseshoe contestant, but literally, I left. And ever since when I’ve had to be in that room while the treader watches her show I blast music into my ears at dangerous levels and studiously don’t look at the screen.

A security professional I sometimes work with posits that the replacement of quasi-civilized TV (e.g., Spencer for Hire or The Beverly Hillbillies) with the truly abominable crap known as reality TV is what has caused the world to hate the United States (as the source of most of it), and want to strike out at us and all we stand for. I think he has a point.

Va col canto… Thank You, Lorraine

The world is a poorer place this week than last, with the untimely death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

There are some fine obituaries of the 52-year-old mezzo-soprano in The New York Times (registration required), Playbill, and The San Francisco Chronicle, whose music critic Joshua Kosman puts it so well:

“I always loved hearing Hunt Lieberson sing, but I hated writing about her performances. More than with any other artist, her splendor seemed to defy description or accurate measure.

Words failed; superlatives bounced off her performances with an empty clang. You’d have to have been John Keats to convey any sense of the beauty she brought into the world.”

I saw her numerous times in Boston and always her first note would stun you, take your breath away, leave you all goose-bumpy. A friend who had excellent seats (center, row 4 or something) at a recital in 1998 or 99 said that sitting directly in front of her, he could feel the air vibrating before his face.

Whenever mailings came from the BSO or the Bank of America Celebrity Series, I always looked eagerly to see when she was coming to town and arrange my budgeted music consumption around that. I suspect those mailings will now pile up unread for awhile.

The New Yorker of Jan. 5, 2004, ran a profile of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Through that, and the facts of her career, she has been called the anti-diva, an arch maverick and other appealing epithets. Maybe because of going about it differently or in spite of that, she gave the world something amazing and lasting in her too short life. I am forever grateful.

If you have not heard her, try her recording of Handel Arias for a general sampling of gorgeous stuff. I am particularly partial to an early recording (she was still plain Hunt and billed as a soprano) of Handel’s cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno with Jill Feldman and Drew Minter. Both recordings include the aria Va col canto. (Va col canto lusingando/ la sua bella il rusignuolo…. With his singing the nightingale/ charms his beloved.) It will make you remember being in love on a crystal September day with wind in your hair. Something soaring like that.

NPR offers a free listen to a tune it called the best classical song of 2004, Handel’s Ombra mai fu. Also the aria from J.S. Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug, along with an interview with the singer.

War and Peace

A book review. No, really.

I read it, complete and unabridged, a 1938 (or earlier) Modern Library edition, translated by one Constance Garnett. I feel kind of bad that in the time it took to read it—from Thanksgiving to Mother’s Day; I’m not proud—this antique book took some abuse and now the front cover and binding on the spine are off… (It was at least third-hand, with my having borrowed it from my mother, and its having two other names written inside, one of which says, “Rose Fink ’38.”)

As you may know, it’s bulky, and even when reading in bed it gets beset by its own weight. But still all 1,146 pages of quite small type are still there. Should any of you want to borrow it. (Joke.)

I realize it’s anachronistic and weird to have undertaken such leisure reading in this day and age but I’m so glad I stuck to it, and finished. It’s something I’ve wanted to read for about 20 years. The writing is exquisite of course, a fact almost forgotten in its universal acceptance. Tolstoy writes well. Duh. But really, really well, with an authorial reserve combined with psychological x-ray vision that is lucid and incisive for all its 19th century formality. With occasionally the slightest imaginable shade of irony. Refreshing. He understands how people work at a deeply interior level, and can relay it clearly without Freudian twaddle, whether it’s a peasant soldier, a minor countess of 19 years, or Napoleon Bonaparte, the axis on which the story turns, though he’s written about directly but little.

That scant attention to Napoleon actually embodies one of the main points Tolstoy seems to have been wanting to make (seeing as in the last 50 pages he abandons the characters and their stories as done and pursues this line philosophically from umpteen angles): History is not made by leaders and heroic men alone. It is the sum of all the participants’ decisions, acquiescences, and actions. He avers that Napoleon could not have gotten 600,000 men to march from France to Russia if it was all on his own say-so. It was the concatenation of other events and decisions, and most notably the combined will of those 600,000 that caused it to occur.And yet, is will the right word? Tolstoy questions free will, coming just shy of giving all motive power to the Almighty, but speaks of history in terms of Newtonian physics, irresistible forces and objects in motion….

The commentary on war in the second half is also arresting for Tolstoy wrote about the war when it was fairly recent history (50 years past or so), and in his laments at the barbarousness, the stupidity, and the venality of it all, he sounds downright contemporary. Every generation thinks not only that it is the most advanced, but also that it is the most vicious and degenerate. Guess human development only goes to more, not less, of anything, good or bad.

Of course, LT has a point about the absurd waste of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign. It’s very clearly shown in graphic artist Edward Tufte’s famous poster diagramming the movement of diminishing troops as they invade and retreat from Russia. I attended a Tufte seminar years ago, and still have the very telling poster in my study.

So, about the story part. First you meet a couple dozen characters, each with many names and apparently unconnected to one another, bopping about Moscow, St. Petersburg and the countryside. Then off to the War of 1807, which is not very warlike. Then it’s back to society and all its turmoil for a sizeable chunk of the book, which made me think Leo’s point was that that was where the real war was…. at least that battles and negotiation are as much a thing of home as army. Then the last quarter is mostly focused on the grisly events of 1812 and what our characters are doing through that time. Struggling with financial or spiritual bankruptcy, testing romantic and filial love, surviving…. Our original cast starts getting entwined by this point. A handful of characters we’ve grown slightly or very attached to die. But, without softening any pain or fear, Tolstoy paints a transformation at death to such mystical repose that it is downright comforting.

So the pace, the length, the depth… all written for another time, when reading wasn’t limited to the 15 minutes before you crash asleep or the occasional airplane ride. And yet, completely worth the swimming against the tide to get through. Wonderful.

And oh! Mon dieu, the whole novel is online, searchable by chapter!