No 2 son and I were puzzled about the origin of this phrase (various bits of Isaiah). Not in Brewer, so I went to the Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations (2000). No headword for ‘wicked’, none for ‘rest’. The temper of our time, precisely.
Consider if you will (and it’s worth it, even if such things do not interest you) the following reviews of Granados’s piano work Goyescas.
A. … the Goyescas are “piano music of the purest kind”, giving one “the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly coloured jewels”, and it is this sensory magic that glistens in every bar of Joyce Hatto’s scintillating and evocative performance. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that a more torrid and stunning realisation of Granados’s ultra-Spanish masterpiece is hard to imagine. Her idiomatic rubato, whether subtle or bold, colours and inflects every facet of music that veers from radiance to desolation, from blazing sunlight to a death-haunted poetry. Opening with El pelele, Hatto revels in its wild exuberance before continuing with readings of an astonishing stylistic fervour and conviction, and never more so than in “El Amor y la Muerte”, a powerful elegy at the very heart of the Goyescas.
_ Bryce Morrison, Gramophone, January 2007.
B. …[Heisser] quickly makes you aware of a pianist pushed close to his limit. Exuberant and big-hearted he may be (terms such as con anima or appassionato molto find a ready and inflammatory response). But he can make heavy weather of more piquant or delicate requests (con gallardia or avec beaucoup de grace), struggling to separate prime melodic lines from serpentine strands and figurations always threatening to engulf and obscure their song. His trills are less than ideally fluent at the end of “Quejas o la meja y el ruisenor” and time and again I missed an essential liberation from the score, an aristocratic distancing and resolution of all difficulty.
_ Bryce Morrison, Gramophone, May 1997
You guessed it: the performance Morrison praises in A is the same one he buckets in B. There are, to be fair, differences of tempo: some bits are slowed down, others sped up. Still and all. Poor Morrison should have waited a few weeks.
On February 15th, 2007 the news broke that some of the recordings by the late British pianist Joyce Hatto (1928-2006) released on the Concert Artist label were in fact illegal copies of recordings by other pianists.
The news was in fact broken by Andrew Rose, of Pristine Records, and you can read all about it here.
Yes but still and all what? That CD reviewers talk through their necks? That “it’s all a matter of opinion”?
As I pull out CDs I haven’t played in a while, especially those I didn’t much care for, I sometimes find my experience of the music is so different that it might be another performance. If of course this happened regularly and capriciously it would substantiate the sceptic. But there are hundreds of CDs to which my responses, while not uniform, which would be inhuman, nonetheless fall within close-set margins. There are some performances which I’ve known for close on fifty years (scary) and admire as much and more today as I did when a green younker.
But there are moods and there are circumstances, and everything from a tiresomely hot day to an interfering lawnmower can throw out concentration and inhibit the surrender to music. You just do get some things wrong.
But not, surely that wrong? And which review is wrong? And why hasn’t Gramophone done the right thing by their reviewer and pulled the reviews, - or corrected the public record by adding a note to each review? Is it their idea of scrupulousness, or is it another case of the multitudinous Web overpowering our energies?
Kenny Rogers, a data security specialist, moved into Mountain House last year, buying a foreclosed property on Prosperity Street for $380,000. But the decline in values has been so fierce that he too is underwater.
He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying. “Best to wait for a better price, or do without,” Mr. Rogers, 52, said.
Arrant theft: this is Mimi Smartypants and if you go there you get the *footnote as well.
HOORAY IT’S OVER
No more election baloney clogging up my bandwidth! I know, it is very un-civic-minded of me. Yesterday when I was leaving work a woman in the elevator said, “I am so excited! It’s like Christmas Eve! And if I wake up to President Obama, it will be the best Christmas ever!”
This irritated the crap out of me. Look, I like the man,* I voted for the man, I think he has good intentions and will do a good job and will hire excellent people to give him advice. And hey! Bonus points! He doesn’t seem to hate women! But he is not Santa Claus or Glinda the Good Witch or some human good-luck charm. I hate to break it to you lady, but Obama will not be bringing the nation Barbie Dream Houses and Hot Wheels tracks anytime soon.
Only a couple of hours into the vote-count. but there’s a clear front-runner for the standout media event and statement of cultural priorities. It’s the lady in Times Square. When ABC cut away to the crowd outside this lady hoisted a sign: Cassoulet forever!
And so say all of us.
In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of “digital Maoism”–the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule.
Lanier was moved to write about Wikipedia because someone kept editing his Wikipedia entry to say that he was a film director. Lanier describes himself as a “computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.” He is good at all those things, but he is no director. According to his essay, he made one short experimental film in the 1990s, and it was “awful.”
“I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me,” Lanier wrote. “Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I’m turned into a film director again.”
Since Lanier’s attempted edits to his own Wikipedia entry were based on firsthand knowledge of his own career, he was in direct violation of Wikipedia’s three core policies. He has a point of view; he was writing on the basis of his own original research; and what he wrote couldn’t be verified by following a link to some kind of legitimate, authoritative, and verifiable publication.
_ Simson L Garfinkel in Technology Review for Nov/Dec
Oh and the verifiable publication ought to be (a) online and (b) in English and (c) written from a neutral POV. Avoid the article if you’re trying to give up biting your nails.
Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily
With so much schism and doubt around the place, how good it is to contemplate a credible optimist.
In the NYT, David Pogue interviews E.O. Wilson, the great biologist and unrivalled ant-man, about his new project , nothing less than a complete online descriptive catalogue of every single one of the 1.8 million species so far discovered and named. (There are probably another 8 million still to discover.) Its working title is the Encylopaedia of Life.
I liked this bit:
The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted
amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind
of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs
to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in
interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was
thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological
fact about a species already known, and can provide that
right into The Encyclopedia of Life.
These are the successors to those 18th century clergymen who spent their spare time with newts and daisies.
There no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, an infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or influenza of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone at any time. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would discover writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute - from the loftiest idealism to the most insidious corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and doctors, soldiers and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins.
_ Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, 2006, 149
Fun to arrange them in cross-temporal couples, using Auster’s characteristics. I’ve matched ’sexual proclivities’ so that each couple has at least one thing in common, sort of.
Christopher Marlowe and Somerset Maugham
Marcel Proust and Bruce Chatwin
Jean Genet and Henry James
Stendhal and Emily Dickinson
Byron and Beatrix Potter
George Eliot and the Marquis de Sade
D.H. Lawrence and Jane Austen
Rainer Maria Rilke and Germaine Greer
Arnold Bennett and Emily Bronte
Well, you get the idea. No lawyer, though.
Prince Charles has been invited to appear on Dr Who, and according to some reports, turned it down. “Miserable swine” said Russell T. Davies, the executive producer and lead writer on the show. The charitable interpret this phrase as a reference to “the Prince’s favourite radio program” - the Goon Show - in which it’s a running gag.
Could be. Then again there does seem to be a feeling around that when the tribunes of the people speak, royals ought to jump. Remember the “rage” when the Queen failed to react to Princess Diana’s death by wailing and keening and rending her garments in Trafalgar Square? The tribunes on that occasion were the editors of the tabloid press. Never mind ‘the Arab street’, knock ‘em in the Old Kent Road.
Then there was the concert to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee at whose conclusion she shared the stage with a bunch of sweaty rockers. According to Fintan O’Toole (Granta, 79, Autumn 2002) this marks a turning point in the history of the monarchy. Formerly an object of deference, he argues, the Queen has now been re-branded as “a living legend, a fading icon of popular culture”.
You can be the sacred bearer of a nation’s destiny, the anointed embodiment of an immemorial fusion of blood and soil, the spiritual head of the official Protestant church. Or you can appear on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, who bites the heads off live bats. You cannot do both.
Well actually you can. Actually one picks and chooses: the late Princess - notoriously - did so, working the press for her own advantage. In this she proved herself right royal, for that’s royals have done since there was a press to work. Victoria knew what she was about when she knighted Henry Irving.
A naive illusion, this, the pop people supposing they control the controllers, and encouraged by habits of interpretation that have filtered down from ‘cultural criticism’. The world is a text; we do texts - hey, we can do the world. So after the so-called race riots on Sydney’s Cronulla beach a couple of years back, one writer decided that the Australian flag had now been ‘re-coded’ as signifying yobbish racism. Wouldn’t that surprise them down at Rotary? ‘Re-coded’, ‘re-branded’ used in passive constructions, Prince Charles in a cameo, monarchs as pop icons, the flag as fascist banner; these, if anything unequivocal, are signs of absence of mind, of a childish determination to impose one’s wishes on the world.
So as the Daily Mail might say, Put your dummy back in, Russell T.
I had read some pieces by DFW - for one, his piece on John Ziegler in The Atlantic - but not Infinite Jest (1079 pp of which 196 pp of notes) and it was clear from the Ziegler piece alone that here was a seriously interesting and famously depressive writer, and since I take a close and personal interest in how writers deal with their depressions, when he went and resolved his with his pyjama cord on September 12 it felt like the only thing to do was to read the big one. Survivor guilt, guilt-about-not-keeping-up, morbid curiosity about proleptic passages, healthy desire to try to comprehend the brute, mute facticity of the pyjama cord, lastly actual hope that such a huge reputation would prove to be more than the usual puff-bubble.
It is, it is. (Oh thanks say the Wallacians out there, but cut me some aging slack here).
I am trying hard to resist just adding a few paltry adjectives to the cairn on the web. But Infinite Jest is one of those books that make you want while reading it to button-hole people and quote at them, quote something from practically every page, quote whole pages, a pre-critical gushing love affair.
As at 22nd October in the O.N.AN.-ite Year of the Dependable Adult Undergarment, the first appearance of Madame Psychosis with her midnight radio show, which tonight features reading from the come-all-ye brochure of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (”Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks”) as at, therefore, a mere p 190 I have become addicted. The 18th century is on hold.
Amongst the many obits online (Google and take your pick) the one that made me desperately want to read Wallace was this one by Scott McLemee, especially this bit:
In one of his last published writings (how terrible it feels to put it that way) David Foster Wallace referred to “the sound of our U.S. culture right now” as Total Noise: “a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen – at least that’s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different…. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it.”
He went on to mention, all too briefly, his hope that there might be “a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.”
I have been thinking off and on for a long time, not all that productively, about Matthew Arnold’s account of Zerstreutheit (’being-scattered-ness’ maybe) and how much worse things have become since he wrote and how in particular, to adopt Wallace’s term, the Noise menaces the manic and introverted. Against this background I found what Wallace had to say compellingly accurate and brave. Reading even 190 pages of Infinite Jest shows how deliberately exposed he was to the Noise. I don’t know enough about Wallace and I am old-fashioned about these matters, so I’m not going to connect the dots here but it looks to me as if Wallace’s creative work was, like Samuel Beckett’s, heroic. He resembles Beckett as well in the love and admiration he inspired in those who knew him.
… and has he read all those books?
A week ago, if you googled Palin Youtube you got the ineffable Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. When I tried it just now, I got a slew of pro-Palin clips. Gentle reader, take heed.
A while ago I mentioned the The Jewel of Medina, the novel withdrawn before publication because of fears that it would provoke Islamists. Since then, Stanley Fish has further diminished his reputation - how can such a bright man be so silly? - by insisting that the publisher’s action can’t be considered censorship. Although the novel has not yet been released, it was picked up by an independent publisher in London, Martin Rynja, a man who likes taking risks, and in the US by Beaufort Books. (The story so far can be found here.) Now three men have been arrested in London in connection with the firebombing of Rynja’s home and office. Beaufort Books have (temporarily) closed their office.
Are we there yet, Stanley?
The star lot was The Golden Calf, a bull in a large gold-plated formaldehyde fish tank-a symbol of the worship of a false god. It went for £10m, bang in the middle of the range. The Kingdom-yet another Hirst shark-went for £9.6m, well above the £4m-£6m estimate. This was an incredible, gravity-defying feat. As the sale started, one of America’s largest investment banks went bankrupt, and a giant insurance company, AIG, was saved only by nationalisation just as the auction ended. The shares of even solid, boring banks were crashing in London and New York. The art market was sending a confusing message. Could it really be that a dead bull floating in a tank was a safer home for your cash than a deposit at the Halifax?
_ Ben Lewis in Prospect.
One of those collocations around which ironies spin, a little planetary system of cool. But all, I think, to be resisted. True, it reads like a sketch for an episode in Rushdie. But also like the chapter opening of a future book about the decadence of capitalism.
Elephant stamp to the reader who can spot the source of the entry title.
Last week, the most farsighted market players were flabbergasted, even as they comprehended that they were witnessing a capitulation to some kind of greater truth—that Wall Street had got caught up in a pyramid scheme of its own devising.
That’s Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker . He puts it more succinctly than anyone I’ve read so far. But I’ve yet to read an informed commentator who doesn’t say pretty much that. Here, luckily, the market is too small and the players too few for a comparable efflorescence of bullshit. But we’re taking our share of the damage, both directly, in the collapse of slick imitators like Babcock and Brown, and in what matters much more, the collapse of confidence in market values. So we have perfectly sound companies with actual products and no significant debt trading at price-earnings ratios that translate to no future earnings, ever.
In Australia we ought to be furious, both with the initiators of all this and with their local avatars. But we’re not. For most people, it seems, the operations of the market are like weather, uncontrollable, or nuclear physics, unintelligible.The professional commentators are too cool - or too frightened - to get angry.
A good deal of this represents generalised apathy about the workings of the world, but some of it surely is down to an education system for which the operations of the market are either sacred or shameful. Our economics departments teach the theology, our commerce departments (much more popular nowadays) teach the rituals. Over in humanities the market economy is what kinky sex used to be, a shameful practice that we don’t talk about. (Kinky sex, of course, is now a burgeoning area of study.)
It was good to be reminded this week of a more generous vision.
For more than half a century [John Kenneth] Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, that the work of economics is far messier than the blackboard mathematical models that claim hegemony, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and center both the factors of power and the narratives societies use to tell their economic stories.
_ Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 2005, p. 653
OK so that’s one busy lens in the metaphor, but it’s times like these that remind us that the market is not the forbidden turf on which only specialists may walk: it’s a common.