Recent case histories are alternately breakthroughs and models of artistic self-defeat. Which was which? Opera Philadelphia’s Soldier Songs, which is available on-demand through May 31 or Boston Lyric Opera’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which premiered Jan. 29 on operabox.tv? The reverse of what I expected.
Monday, February 15, 2021
Opera in the digital age …
… Seeking Humanity Amid Operas That Wax Humanitarian | Classical Voice North America.
Love and time …
… ‘Love And Other Poems’ Promises That Love Will Find Us. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The book is guided by the structure of time. We go full circle from June through to May; summer through to spring. There is a poem for each month, just as there is a poem for each feeling. Pleasure, annoyance, boredom, spiritual awakening — we feel it all. And as the poems travel through time, the poet’s vulnerability and loneliness are palpable enough to, perhaps deliberately, make the reader feel less alone.
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Anniversary …
… JM Synge’s powerful vision of Ireland still provokes and inspires. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As his career had progressed among the fraught cultural conditions of the Irish Revival, Synge increasingly gravitated towards the second option. His literary output began with a bucolic Romanticism, taking a turn of experiments through Decadence and symbolism. But it was the pressures of a modernising Ireland that urged him into what the scholar Mary Burke has recently called a form of “modernist provocation”.
How interesting …
… A Brief Look at Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It will be rightly pointed out that her style of poetry is influenced by rap and hip-hop rather than John Lyly, but it’s also fair to say that she’s re-invented/rediscovered a style of writing that is nevertheless indistinguishable from the euphuistic Elizabethan style (just as Elizabethan writers re-invented Iambic Pentameter after Chaucer). Lyly’s style was popular for its time, but after a point it became an easy target for satire.
Something to think on …
One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth.
— P. G. Wodehouse, who died on this date in 1975
But not too heavily …
…Going Backwards to Bethlehem : Roosevelt weighs in on race relations in America.
.
He cautioned against imposing radical changes in government policy and instead suggested a gradual adjustment in attitudes
Hmm …
… New translation shares the voice of a poet who wrote as intensely as she lived | MPR News. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Ditlevsen's brilliance is evident when you read her confessional memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, which is newly available in a crisp translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman. Told in a sneakily plain, highly addictive voice, it's the portrait of the artist as a young woman who wrote as hard as she lived.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Something to think on…
If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.
— Georges Simenon, born on this date in 1903
Classical diagnoses …
… Like Sheep: On Translating a Literary Plague in a Time of Pandemic | The Hudson Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull,)
Mythological plagues are often indications that something is very wrong, an invitation to look more closely at assumptions and injustice, a judgment. It is worth remembering that Sophocles’ famous play debuted in 429 BC. The plague of Athens had broken out the previous year, and 429 saw a second wave. The references to a plague, in combination with a criticism of state leadership, would have been eerily topical and resonant for the audience in a time of war and pandemic, for all that the play is set in a legendary past and another city.
Friday, February 12, 2021
An excellent choice …
… Sarah Weinman Becomes New Columnist for Crime Fiction as Marilyn Stasio Retires | The New York Times Company. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I know Sarah. She reviewed for me. She really is outstanding.
Something to think on …
Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.
— Lev Shestov, born on this date in 1866
Indeed …
… The French are absolutely right to say 'no thanks' to US woke-ism.
… if you’re Macron or any sensible European observer, seeing a United States in which playing the national anthem or displaying the flag is deemed “offensive” and “problematic,” in which professors are suspended or threatened for quoting Supreme Court opinions verbatim when they contain unapproved language and which has seen months of urban riots tearing apart some of America’s biggest cities, how could you not say “no thanks”?
Thursday, February 11, 2021
Mark thy calendar …
THE GREEN LINE CAFÉ POETRY SERIES on ZOOM
Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 6-7:30 PM
The Branch Will Not Break –
Readings and Discussion
of the Long Poem with:
Jack Israel, Author of Sorry For Fire
David Kertis, Author of Word of the Day
Helen Mirkil, Author of Sower on the Cliffs
Presented by POETRY IN COMMON, Peace/Works
and The Green Line Café
Hosted by Leonard Gontarek
Leonard Gontarek is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Green Line Cafe Zoom Poetry Reading
Time: Feb 16, 2021 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8568
Meeting ID: 856 8900 5977
Passcode: 799299
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Meeting ID: 856 8900 5977
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Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdjV
The Branch Will Not Break –
Readings and Discussion
of the Long Poem with:
Jack Israel, Author of Sorry For Fire
David Kertis, Author of Word of the Day
Helen Mirkil, Author of Sower on the Cliffs
Presented by POETRY IN COMMON, Peace/Works
and The Green Line Café
Hosted by Leonard Gontarek
Leonard Gontarek is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Green Line Cafe Zoom Poetry Reading
Time: Feb 16, 2021 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8568
Meeting ID: 856 8900 5977
Passcode: 799299
One tap mobile
+19292056099,,85689005977#,,,,
+13017158592,,85689005977#,,,,
Dial by your location
+1 929 205 6099 US (New York)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
Meeting ID: 856 8900 5977
Passcode: 799299
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdjV
Well, maybe …
… Going Backwards to Bethlehem : The flight of the poet who gave wings to the human spirit.
I have never forgotten Joseph de Maistre’s admittedly bitchy line, “Voltaire, who touched upon every subject without ever penetrating the surface of any.”
Blogging note …
I have to spend the morning handling some legal matters for a friend who has been given only weeks to live. Blogging will have to take a back seat for a while.
Book vs. movie …
… Graychin's Reviews > The Children of Men. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I would never suggest that film adaptations of novels must slavishly follow their originals in every respect, but I began to see the changes Cuarón made as insulting.
In case you wondered …
… How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons | Open Culture. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
… if Rockwell’s admirers give him a pass on this sentimentality, his detractors often turn a blind eye to his obvious technical mastery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a camera. Indeed, his process began with an actual camera. According to that NPR piece, he “used photos, taken by a rotating cast of photographers, to make his illustrations — and all of his models were neighbors and friends,” residents of his small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Something to think on …
Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that has guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments.
— Antony Flew, born on this date in 1923
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Something to think on …
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
— Boris Pasternak, born on this date in 1890
That’s for sure …
… A Good Editor Is Hard to Find by Cassandra Nelson | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Which brings us to Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends, edited by Benjamin B. Alexander. Insofar as books are windows to the soul, this one is quite a conundrum. O’Connor possesses one of the sharpest minds readers will ever encounter, and her dry humor and understated brilliance are at their best in her correspondence. The Habit of Being, an earlier and more substantial collection of O’Connor’s letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1979, is a treasure. But here her words have been arranged and edited so bizarrely and so sloppily that the overall effect of the book is to drive a careful reader mad.
Tuesday, February 09, 2021
Hmm …
… John McWhorter: The Neoracists - Persuasion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Third Wave Antiracist tenets, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever …
Something to think on …
Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.
— Amy Lowell, born on this date in 1874
Monday, February 08, 2021
Something to think on …
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.
— John Ruskin, born on this date in 1819
A must-read …
… The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows - Glenn Greenwald.
… this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.
Sunday, February 07, 2021
Enjoying being different …
… Dundalk and sock? Patrick Kavanagh’s outrageous rhymes. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Going their own way …
… My failed attempt to unite the Upstate New York literary scene - The Spectator - news, politics, life & arts. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Of Primrose and Candida, Smith wrote, ‘They felt the United States of America was, in a spiritual sense, almost their own property, just as they felt that Geneva almost belonged to them.’ This same proprietary patriotism imbued Walter D. Edmonds and Henry W. Clune, who — like Edmund Wilson — felt their country slipping away from them. The USA just didn’t seem like it was theirs anymore. (A sensation common to millions of Americans today.)
I saw the movie of version of Drums Along the Mohawk on TV when I was a kid. Loved it.
Something to think on …
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, born on this date in 1867
Saturday, February 06, 2021
Something to think on …
Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.
— Barbara Tuchman, who died on this date in 1989
Hmm …
… David Duchovny: My Urge to Fail and Fail Again - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This is why I must write—to make these searching guesses and to justify all the time and care my parents put into seeding my brain with the words and ideas that were meaningful to them. It’s my way of communicating with my ancestors; of talking to the dead, Ami and Moshe; of reaping what was so lovingly sown. When I write, I reach forward to a time when I won’t exist and backwards to a time before I existed. It’s a magical, light-year state to inhabit, and though the act of writing is brutal on the head, the soul, the confidence, the back, the shoulders, and the ass, the act of having written carries with it a blissful timelessness and quiet pride.
Friday, February 05, 2021
Something to think on …
Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, born on this date in 1848
In case you wondered …
… Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse …
Thursday, February 04, 2021
Something to think on …
Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.
-— Dietrich Bonhoefer, born on this date in 1906
Wednesday, February 03, 2021
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those books that often appears on high school syllabi -- and I can see why: it's brutal without being savage; it's accessible without being indifferent.
I'd not read Remarque's work all those years ago. But I have now, and I'm grateful for the experience. For me, the most striking aspect of All Quiet is its universality: Remarque's characters are German, but their condition, their suffering is human. The anguish which results from reading All Quiet is not limited by nationality or creed; it is an anguish which transcends political allegiance.
There are scenes in All Quiet which are awful, tormenting: death and destruction cannot be avoided. When Remarque's characters face this destruction -- when they attempt to make meaning of it -- they fail: there is simply no place to begin their judgment. "Our knowledge of life is limited to death," writes Remarque. And really, what could be worse?
All Quiet is not a perfect book, but it is a vital one: as an introduction to the trenches, it elicits horror; as a presentation of the humanity lost in those trenches, it evokes a sense of agony and regret. Remarque's characters do not -- they simply cannot -- understand the war, and that shows: the chapters where they postulate on its meaning become twisted and confused attempts at rationality. This confusion was inevitable: for the violence and panic which it confronted was unyielding.
"What can possibly become of us?" asks Remarque.
Something to think on …
It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
— Simone Weil, born on this date in 1909
Blogging note …
There will be little or no blogging here today. I have to take Debbie to a doctor's appointment this morning and, when that is over, take her to the assisted living facility she is moving to (at least for a while). I may be able to do a little blogging in the doctor's office, but don't count on it.
Tuesday, February 02, 2021
Master of imagination …
The Gentle Genius of Thomas Howard ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thomas Howard’s genius does not reside … in his ability to grapple with philosophical definitions but in his ability to incarnate or concretize abstractions into living analogies. He shows us that the human imagination manifests itself in every aspect of our daily lives in ways that transcend and supersede the limitations of the scientific method. We have “festooned everything” with symbolic actions and gestures. “We shake hands,” he says, which is “pure ceremony.” Such commonplace rituals, done unthinkingly, nonetheless “bespeak much more than can be discerned in the functional demands of the situation itself.” They signify “our awareness that things are worth something—that they are significant.”
Mark thy calendar …
… At last! At last! Stanford spotlights William Kennedy’s “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” on Feb. 26!
It’s happening! It’s finally happening! At 3 p.m. (PST) on Friday, February 26, Stanford’s Another Look book club hold its long-postponed Another Look discussion honoring author William Kennedy, a Pulitzer-prizewinning, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. Our event for the 1978 book was one of the early COVID casualties at Stanford last spring. Now it will be rescheduled as a Zoom event (isn’t everything nowadays)?
Register here.
Q&A …
… The Hillbilly Thomists Are Back | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Tim Davis.)
Last week, the Hillbilly Thomists released their follow-up album, the exhilarating Living For The Other Side, which, if the first album didn’t convince you, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these preachers are not a novelty act, but true artists and evangelists via the medium of American folk music.
Pushing back
… More on what modern "antiracism" does to schools, or could not -- and some insight on the Kendi thing. - It Bears Mentioning.
No – I do not mean that being against racism is, itself, bullshit. I mean that a certain strain of “antiracism” these days is, yes, bullshit. And on that, we must address that a certain Mr. (sorry, “Dr.,” as he so pointedly specifies in his Twitter handle) Kendi announced last weekend that I am of a piece with the Trumpian insurrectionists. This joins him calling me a racist who “’sort of’ should look at himself in the mirror” a few months ago when speaking at Harvard. (I liked the “sort of” hedge – he knew he was “going there,” and “there” he indeed went and should not have.) That is, my 20+ years of commentary on race is the work of a self-hating black bigot whose ideas are compatible with the right-wing zealots who stormed the Capitol.
Blue and bluer …
… Meet YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
And now, for the first time in two centuries, a new chemically-made pigment of the celebrated color is available for artists — YInMn Blue. It’s named after its components — Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese — and its luminous, vivid pigment never fades, even if mixed with oil and water.
Winter magic …
… The Night of the Snowfall by Mo H. Saidi : American Life in Poetry. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
History's rhymes …
… Before the Fall - Law & Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Craveri’s book is not a narrative history of the French Revolution but a kind of portrait-collage of aristocratic lives shortly before, during and after the revolution. It is not to be recommended to those who do not have much knowledge of the French Revolution or European history of the second half of the 18th Century, for it moves back and forth in time and introduces persons and events without explanation and that will be familiar only to those already with a fairly intimate knowledge of the subject matter. It seems sometimes as if the author is writing for a coterie rather than a general audience.
Something to think on …
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
— James Joyce, born on this date in 1882
Monday, February 01, 2021
The focus of a bird …
… Poem of the week: The Owl by Edward Thomas | Edward Thomas | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.
— Hugo von Hofmannsthal, born on this date in 1874
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