An afternoon Lull Report …

… Keyboard mastery: The Hall of Horowitz by Tim Page | NYRgallery | The New York Review of Books.

… households tuned in across the country to see and hear one of the most celebrated of all pianists (remember that there were only three networks in 1968—and no video stores or Netflix) and Horowitz never again played to an unsold seat. Watching it again after so so many years, one notes Horowitz’s seeming ease and charm, his 300-watt smile, his remarkably flat fingers (the bane of so many music teachers) and, above all, his command of dynamics. Chopin’s dark and crushingly difficult Polonaise in F-sharp Minor combines a long, brutal quasi-minimalist study in motoric reiteration with a tender chromatic intermezzo that somehow seems to prefigure Edward Grieg in its simple sweetness. And finally, when you don’t think the piano can possibly get any louder, the playing any more savage and furious, Horowitz (as they might have said in “This Is Spinal Tap”) “turns it up to 11.”

If memory serves, Horowitz played some Scarlatti that night also. Splendid.



… I think Dante can snag atheists: Can An Atheist Really Get Dante?



… Whethering By A.E. Stallings.

Rain is a kind of recollection.

…  No explaining: Penelope Fitzgerald: The core of her mystery.

… she kept her lips buttoned. Her drunken barrister husband was disbarred for fraudulently cashing cheques that belonged to the Clerk of his Chambers; the family drifted into Micawberish poverty; and the family home, a shabby Thames barge, sank at Chelsea wharf – all these disasters were weathered somehow or other. “In the family”, a daughter told Hermione Lee, “the court case was never mentioned.” Lee quotes Fitzgerald’s observation on the Waugh family, who “formed a conspiracy against the outside world, not feeling the necessity to explain itself”.

… No words for this: Twitter / dg_myers: Saw my oncologist today.



… Daniel Suarez Sees Into the Future.

In the publishing world, there is a growing sense that "Influx," Mr. Suarez's fourth novel, may be his breakout book and propel him into the void left by the deaths of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. "Influx' has Mr. Suarez's largest initial print run, 50,000 copies, and Twentieth Century Fox bought the movie rights last month.

… Herbie Hancock on The Genius of Miles.