Ear Trumpet

2012-02-25T21:04:00.000-05:00

Richard Buell, who compiles Ear Trumpet (along with The Air This Week, Ear Trumpet Music Log, and euthymia) can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net

2012-02-25T20:17:00.006-05:00

* * * THE READING ROOM * * *

A certain kind of European overrates the comparative importance, in the present age of the world, of a good deal of his cultural tradition, and often of his own interest in it. For myself, as an American, I have not the least doubt that I have derived a good deal more benefit of the civilizing as well as of the inspirational kind from the admirable American bathroom than I have from the cathedrals of Europe. I do not, of course, deny the impressiveness or the many varied beauties of these monuments, nor their usefulness to the people in their time; I have enjoyed their delightful coolness and their shade from the glare of the sun on broiling days in France and Italy -- though in cold weather they are likely to be unbearable. But I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions -- while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers -- in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral. Here the body purges itself, and along with the body, the spirit. Here the mind becomes free to ruminate, to plan ambitious projects. The cathedrals, with their distant domes, their long aisles and their high groinings, do add stature to human strivings; their chapels do give privacy for prayer. But the bathroom, too, shelters the spirit, it tranquillizes and reassures, in surroundings of a celestial whiteness, where the pipes and the faucets gleam and the mirror makes another liquid surface, which will render you, shaved, rubbed and brushed, a nobler and more winning appearance. Here, too, you may sing, recite, refresh yourself with brief readings, just as you do in church; and the fact that you do it without a priest and not as a member of a congregation is, from my point of view, an advantage. It encourages self-dependence and prepares one to face the world, fortified, firm on one's feet, serene and with a mind like a diamond.

-- Edmund Wilson, in "Europe," from "A Piece of My Mind" (1956).

2012-02-25T20:16:00.000-05:00

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I. LISTS OF NOTE ...... II. LETTERS OF NOTE

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2012-02-25T00:53:00.007-05:00

"A dangerously liquid world" -- John Sutherland discusses drinking and its sequelae: here here and here.

"We're addicted to rehab. It doesn't even work" -- here.

2012-02-25T00:05:00.000-05:00

Raymond Chandler married a woman he thought was ten years older than he was, only she was 20 years older but confident enough to do the housework in the nude. The ageing process must have been especially confusing for this curious couple, but then the booze made him look ten years older and she took to wearing clothes 30 years young for her, so for a fraction of time, like trains passing, they must have looked the same age.

-- Byron Rogers in The Spectator (London), 17 May 1997.

2012-02-20T01:02:00.000-05:00

Look who's blogging -- here

2011-11-11T13:11:00.000-05:00

Talking about books. On the radio.

How it should be done -- here

2011-11-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

* * * THE READING ROOM * * *

... Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable, is a whirlpool of gray water turning upon itself for all eternity ... eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger, and she strained back against a reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders, staring into the pit, thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion or eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. I shall not know when it happens, I shall not feel or remember, why can't I consent now, I am lost, there is no hope for me. Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear. But she could not consent, still shrinking stiffly against the granite wall that was her childhood dream of safety, breathing slowly for fear of squandering breath, saying desperately, Look, don't be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.

Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily though deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motionless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of life said. Trust me. I stay.

-- Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1938).

2011-11-11T12:50:00.000-05:00

"Is happiness worth losing your memory?" -- here.

Jonathan Cott and ECT: here

2011-10-12T11:59:00.001-04:00

. . . Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till then, Truth & Eternity will appear. It is Burnt Up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not action; it is as dirt upon my feet, No part of Me.

"What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?"

O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."

I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it.

-- William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment.

I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise.

-- Kate Blake, his wife, attrib.

2011-10-09T17:41:00.003-04:00

* * * THE READING ROOM * * *

That direct stare which passes between the young and the old is high up among the classic confrontations. It prefaces one of the great dialogues of opposites, and contains a frank admission of helplessness on either side, for nothing can be done to blot out the detail of what has been, or block in the detail of what is to come.

On the one side is the clean sheet and on the other the crammed page, although the aged man knows only too well that youth isn't pristine, and that some of the ugliest marks to be found on the record were made then. As young and old survey each other, there is no envy and very little envy respectively. The young do not want to be old, nor do they entirely believe that they ever could be, and the old, generally speaking, do not wish to be young. Once through the gamut of time is enough for most people. What usually occurs is that an aged man still finds life surprisingly sweet and desires more agedness, but not a repeat full trip.

The young and the old are also sympathetically linked by their common awareness of the burdensome nature of life, because being strong and facing the prospect before us can be as daunting as being weak and facing the end of the road. In one respect, however, the old have the advantage, for with agedness comes an amazing recall of the talk and actions of youth -- exquisite, painful, shaming, triumphant or whatever.

The busy decades of work, parenthood and adult drives of all kinds promised to have obliterated these immaturities, and one of the shocks and sensations of old age is the completeness of their recovery. If the young could understand the intensity of this recall, it would be enough to make them deliberately do things worth the recalling, a kind of burying of spring's trophies to be dug up for nourishment in the winter. So the main difference in the confrontation is that the young do not realise that they are accumulating the memories which alone, in old age, will often make them interesting and tolerable to youth. For it is a bitterness which no amount of common sense can lessen, that memories are about the only thing that youth will want from age.

-- Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979)

2010-07-21T14:26:00.003-04:00

July 24, 1876. A monologue that runs unchecked, without bounds and intentions, may preserve one from annihilation but it is weakening nonetheless. It leads by repetition to inertia as, by vain discharges, it leads to exhaustion. It is a dripping away of the sap, a fistula that wastes one's forces, it is an open drain ...

-- The Private Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel, tr. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1935)

.............................................................................................................................

2010-07-15T14:10:00.008-04:00

Anthony Thwaite, in the New Statesman, on Philip Larkin -- here

2009-10-08T02:47:00.012-04:00

* * THE READING ROOM * *

Boston, 1850 ... Early in the day chambermaids are seen hanging the bedclothes out of the upper windows; at the window of a basement of the same house, I see a woman ironing. Were I a solitary prisoner, I should not doubt to find occupation of deep interest for my whole day in watching only one of the houses. One house seems to be quite shut up; all the blinds in the three windows of each of the four stories being closed, although in the roof-windows of the attic story the curtains are hung carelessly upward, instead of being drawn. I think the house is empty, perhaps for the summer.

The visible side of the whole row of houses is now in the shade, -- they looking towards, I should say, the southwest. Later in the day, they are wholly covered with sunshine, and continue so through the afternoon; and at evening the sunshine slowly
withdraws upward, gleams aslant the
windows, perches on the chimneys, and so disappears. The upper part of the spire and the weathercock of the Park Street Church appear over one of the houses, looking as if it were close behind. It shows the wind to be east now.

At one of the windows of the third story sits a woman in a colored dress, diligently sewing on something white. She sews, not like a lady, but with an occupational air. Her dress, I observe, on closer observation, is a kind of loose morning sack, with, I think, a silky gloss on it; and she seems to have a silver comb in her hair, -- no, this latter item is a mistake. Sheltered as the space is between the two rows of houses, a puff of the eastwind finds its way in, and shakes off some of the withering blossoms from the cherry-trees.

Quiet as the prospect is, there is a continual and near thunder of wheels proceeding from Washington Street. In a building not far off, there is a hall for exhibitions; and sometimes, in the evenings, loud music is heard from it; or, if a diorama be shown (that of Bunker Hill, for instance, or the burning of Moscow), an immense racket of imitative cannon and musketry.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks.

2009-10-08T02:24:00.007-04:00

A world: what belongs to us, our habitat, mental or physical; what's out there, beyond the mind and the self, the profusion of things we haven't dreamed or invented; other people; an order, a coherence, a realm, or a shape drawn on the face of chaos. It's also ... what we talk about when we are getting above ourselves. A world: most of us are lucky if we have a street or a block or a patch of garden where we know our way around; if we know where our house is situated.

-- Michael Wood, in the New York Review of Books, 14 July 1994.

2009-10-03T00:36:00.001-04:00

Justin Cartwright lowering himself to shtick? Parodist John Crace takes aim -- here.
............................................................................................

2009-10-03T00:10:00.008-04:00

Ban on baby pictures lifted.

2009-10-03T00:01:00.008-04:00

. . . . . GENESIS 1:1 AND ALL THAT

"The most rewarding journalistic year of my life" comes to an end.

2009-09-15T19:52:00.001-04:00

The man who makes personal contacts with his fellows runs the risk of being laughed at if he is ridiculous; of being contradicted if what he says happens to be untrue or to displease his hearers; of being knocked down if he is offensive; and of being simply disregarded, ignored, and disbelieved if he happens to lack the impressive personality which commands attention and inspires respect.

The writer, on the contrary, runs no such risks. He is promoted from mere humanity and has attained the apotheosis of the printed word, which still preserves something of the talismanic and supernatural quality which letters and symbols, hieroglyphs and formulas have possessed from the remotest beginnings of civilization.

Concealing his merely human physique and personality, the author presents himself to the world disguised in the magic and pontifical robes of pure verbiage. To the eyes of the multitude he offers not his own insignificant form but a vast and majestic dummy of paper ...

-- Aldous Huxley, Vanity Fair (1928) [abridged here by ET], from "Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929," ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000).

2009-08-06T14:23:00.009-04:00

"Hallucinations are never loud" -- Oliver Sacks.

No, hallucinations are loud -- here.

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2009-04-14T04:51:00.000-04:00

* * THE READING ROOM * *

William James introduces Benjamin Paul Blood (1832-1919), author of "The Anesthetic Revelation" -- here.

2009-04-14T00:01:00.013-04:00

" ... Down the other end of the room, a man is picking his way through a herd of squabbling turkeys in a cornfield, squirting each of them up the backside with a hot glue gun. A sign on the wall reads: 'Final Grooming Area.' "

Taxidermy 101: here

2009-04-11T04:50:00.000-04:00

In hourglasses the grains of sand increasingly rub one another smooth until finally they flow almost without friction from one bulb into the other, polishing the neck wider all the time. The older an hourglass the more quickly it runs. Unnoticed, the hourglass measures out ever shorter hours.

-- Ernst Juenger

There are ... two kinds of spleen; one mocking, active, passionate, malignant; the other morose and wholly passive, when one's only wish is for silence and solitude and the oblivion of sleep. For anyone possessed by this latter kind, nothing has meaning, the destruction of the world would hardly move him. At such times I could wish the earth were a shell filled with gunpowder, which I would put a match to for my diversion.

-- Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, translated by David Cairns.

2009-02-17T00:05:00.006-05:00

Not to be overlooked in the Darwin centenary. Begin reading here.

2009-01-26T00:02:00.006-05:00

QUILT

A Patriotic Lullaby

The quilt that covers all of us, to date,
Has patches numbered 1 to 48,
Five northern rents, a crooked central seam,
A ragged eastern edge, a way
Of bunching uglily and a
Perhaps too energetic color scheme.
Though shaken every twenty years, this fine
Old quilt was never beaten on the line.
It took long making. Generations passed
While thread was sought, and calico
And silk was coaxed from Mexico
And France. The biggest squares were added last.
Don't kick your covers, son. The bed is built
So you can never shake the clinging quilt
That blanketed your birth and tries to keep
Your waking warm, impalpable
As atmosphere. As earth it shall
Be tucked about you through your longest sleep.

-- John Updike, The New Yorker, 16 November 1957, p. 54.

...........................................................................................................

2009-01-25T05:24:00.005-05:00

* * * THE READING ROOM * * *

Intellectual Alpinist Fails to Encounter Deity

"The tips of my fingers just reached their aim, but only touched without anchoring themselves. As I fell back, my foot missed its former support, and my whole weight came down on the feeble left hand. The clutch was instantaneously torn apart, and I was falling through the air. The old flash of surprise crossed my mind, tempered by something like a sense of relief. All was over. The mountains sprang up with a bound ... "

-- Leslie Stephen, A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps, from "Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking" (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873)

2009-01-05T00:01:00.008-05:00

Somebody had to say it.

Composer Robin Holloway asserts in The Spectator that Met broadcasts are now "all but unbearable" -- here

Yes, but what if they were relayed -- in languages other than American English -- from outside the U.S.? Try this.

2008-07-26T23:13:00.007-04:00

Vita Sackville-West reads from "The Land".

2008-04-05T00:15:00.002-04:00

* * * * THE READING ROOM * * * *

"Are the Histories the nonfiction masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America? Probably. Are they the masterpiece of historical writing in America in any century? Certainly." -- Edmund S. Morgan on Henry Adams in The New York Review of Books, 17 November 2005.

To begin reading at once, click here.

2008-02-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

Epigraph from Michael Gruber's "Valley of the Bones":

There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and
form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.

-- Simone Weil, "Gravity and Grace."

2008-02-19T01:05:00.007-05:00

* * * * * * * * * * THE READING ROOM * * * * * * * * * *

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) on Edith Wharton: here.

2008-02-17T15:10:00.015-05:00

* * * * THE READING ROOM * * * *

"How shall we know the cultural mayhem wrought by thinking in headlines?"

Christopher Hitchens on "Fleet Street's Finest": here.

2007-11-11T01:32:00.004-05:00

Neal Ascherson writes:

"War kills. That is all it does." The words come from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, and Carolin Emcke [in Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)] has used them as the epigraph for her first chapter. Maybe she took them out of some context that would modify their meaning. I hope so, because they are not true.

War certainly kills, often lavishly. It would be easier to loathe unconditionally if that were all it does. But having lived through one enormous one, fought in a small one, and attended several others as a spectator, I can't deny that wars can make the world go round as well as spattering it with blood.

Wars destroy nations and create others; they release torrents of technological change and innovation that would normally take many decades to evolve. They bereave women and also liberate them; they shatter the isolation of communities and leave them with alien diseases and mountains of military surplus. They empower and enrich thousands of unworthy people, but they also give angry self-confidence to millions of good people who had been taught to regard themselves as worthless. Wars turn cities into archaeology and green meadows into deadly minefields, but they can also generate historic upwellings of hope and solidarity.

When they end, most men and women feel released from a nightmare and swear: "Never again!" But others, while sharing that relief, confess that they found something in war that they loved, and that they will always miss.

-- Neal Ascherson, "Do They Crave War?", The New York Review of Books, 8 November 2007.

* * * Also by this writer:

Diary: "Neal Ascherson among the icebergs." London Review of Books, 18 October 2007: here

"It ended the most devastating slaughter until the Second World War." Guardian, 1 November 1998: here

On Poland and the Church. Frontline, PBS, 1998: here

On the old. Guardian, 15 November 1998: : here

On St. Petersburg. Independent, 28 May 2003: here

On Robert Fisk. Independent, 16 October 2005: here

On the fall of Berlin. London Review of Books, 28 November 2002: here

2007-11-11T01:31:00.002-05:00

WILLIAM JAMES
"The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910) -- here.

2007-10-27T04:00:00.001-04:00

* * * * * THE READING ROOM * * * *

According to A.N. Wilson "There never was a healthier man of genius, nor one whose talk was so endlesssly absorbing."

The book in question -- here.

2007-10-23T03:47:00.002-04:00

From "The Mail," The New Yorker, July 23, 2007:

Alex Ross draws an interesting portrait of Jean Sibelius and his works ("Apparition in the Woods," July 9th & 16th). However, his statement that Finland went to war against the Soviet Union in 1941 "partly because Fascist elements had infiltrated the government and the Army, and partly because the Nazis would have taken over the country anyway" is misleading. Other than in the early nineteen-thirties, when Fascist elements unsuccessfully challenged our democratic system, Fascism did not play a significant role in Finnish politics. There were never any "Nazi-style race laws" in force in Finland, and the Finnish government's wartime policy of resisting German attempts to inspire anti-Jewish actions in Finland has been publicly appreciated by our Jewish communities. For Finland, the Continuation War of 1941-44, as it is called in our history, had its roots in the Winter War. After having attacked Finland in 1939, the Soviet Union acquired, in the Moscow Peace Treaty, important parts of Finnish territory and the right to establish a military base near Helsinki; the annexation of the Baltic countries, in the summer of 1940, demonstrated the expansive nature of the Soviet policies and left the area vulnerable to further aggression. The Continuation War, then, was a defensive struggle for my country, politically separate from the war of the great powers.

Pekka Lintu
Ambassador of Finland
Washington, D.C.

2007-10-08T22:19:00.002-04:00

2007-09-05T18:51:00.000-04:00

* * * * * THE READING ROOM * * * *

" ... The unimaginable scale of our Universe means that astronomy has never really become an experimental science, but has largely remained an observational one, having more in common with, say, archaeology than chemistry or other laboratory-based disciplines. Consequently, even though it is perhaps the oldest science, it is also in some respects the least mature. The absence of the traditional interplay between theory and experiment, the inability to perform repeated experiments under slightly different conditions, and the sheer difficulty of measuring anything at all have stunted its development compared to younger fields.

"For this reason, one often finds in astronomy certain tendencies that other subjects have largely grown out of, such as a mania for classification and nomenclature. Taxonomy has its place within the scientific method: modern chemistry owes much to Mendeleev's periodic table; botany could not have progressed without Linnaeus; and the theory of evolution was founded on Darwin's painstaking studies on the Galapagos Islands. But arranging things in groups and giving them names does not in itself constitute scientific progress, no matter how systematically it is done. The great experimental physicist Lord Rutherford dismissed this kind of activity as not science but "stamp collecting."

"This brings us to the grand debate that took place last summer under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union, and which provides the context for David A. Weintraub's book Is Pluto a Planet? The problem before the IAU General Assembly was what to do about the fact that recent investigations have revealed the presence of a number of objects orbiting the Sun that are ostensibly as worthy of the name "planet" as Pluto, which in our current textbooks is the ninth one out.

"Obviously, which objects should be called planets depends on how you define what a planet is. The solar system contains objects of all shapes and sizes, from tiny asteroids to immense gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. Where should one draw the line? The original proposal was to increase the number of planets to twelve by admitting some lowly new members to the club, but in the end the IAU decided to demote Pluto to the status of a "dwarf" planet thus restricting the number of true planets to eight. This was a controversial decision, at least in the United States, because the vital vote was taken on the last day of the meeting when most of the US delegates had to take flights home. Pluto was discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh, in 1930, so the decision deprived the nation of its only planet-discoverer.

"The 'no' decision hinged on the adoption of three criteria: that the object be round, i..e., have a shape determined by internal gravitational forces; that it should have cleared its own orbit of debris; and that it should be orbiting our own star, the Sun. None of these has any special scientific value; the resulting decision was therefore pretty arbitrary.

"Moreover, deep-space observations have led to the discovery of literally hundreds of planetlike objects orbiting other stars. These exoplanets offer much greater prospects for scientific progress into the general theory of planet formation than the few objects that happen to have formed in our own particular vicinity, so why are they excluded from the definition? In any case, what have we learned from the new nomenclature? Pluto is still the same object that it was before August 2006, and astronomers still don't understand what one can infer from its own particular properties about the general process of planet formation. Is it a planet? Who cares? In this case there really is nothing in a name."

-- Peter Coles, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Cardiff, in the Times Literary Supplement, 24/31 August 2007.

2007-09-04T13:51:00.002-04:00

* * * * THE READING ROOM * * * *

At the end of the newsroom now, Lennox Mark was still speechifying about Taylor, the decent but essentially unintelligent editor who was being fired. The ritual of the insulting speech, delivered to the victim before a drunken baying audience, had something of the feeling of a public execution. Sinclo hated bullying. In the army he had always moved in to stop it, actually getting one sadistic corporal court-martialled when he found out what he'd done to his men. Lennox Mark seemed worse than the corporal. Sinclo had to go back to school (Radley) to summon up comparable examples of oikish thuggery. He wanted very much to go up to Mark now and punch his face, as he had once punched a Radley boy who was picking on a younger child.

"Not that Tony could ever be accused of being a dedicated follower of fashion."

Laughter from the sycophants.

The present occasion was making sharply clear in Sinclo's mind impressions which had hitherto been only latent. The mist was clearing and the grotesque edifice was revealed, its gargoyles and resident monsters in all their Grimm Brothers monstrosity. The smoke coming from the nostrils of Peg Montgomery could have been from a dragon's nose. Aubrey Bird (the diarist 'Dr. Arbuthnot'), one of the last men in London to affect royal-blue shirts with white collars, was certainly an evil old fairy. L.P. Watson, whose travel books had so impressed Sinclo, was perhaps one of those knights errant caught in the tangles of a briarwood for a hundred years -- or was he simply in a snare of his own cynicism? And now, entering ostentatiously late, tiptoeing as through a minefield, with such exaggerated movements of her long, thin, pointed shoes (hand-made in Paris) was the Enchantress herself, Mary Much, her silver-blonde bob, and her long, cool, beautiful face gazing mischievously around, casting spells as she strode.

As Lennox spoke, The Daily Legion was exposed to Sinclo in all its brutality and power. And it was the power, expressed through money, of the tycoon which made sycophants of them all: including Sinclo himself. He was fully aware of that, having, on the strength of his Legion salary, taken out a mortgage on a flat he could only just afford. There did not have to be any rules, telling you things which must not be done or said. There was a perpetual atmosphere of fear, generated by Lennox and his wife, by Mary Much and by the editors ...

-- A.N. Wilson, "My Name is Legion" (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

* * * The above reviewed from the "inside" by Victor Sebestyen -- here.

2007-09-04T01:16:00.002-04:00

Mahler C Minor Symphony Led by Rodzinski

DECEMBER 3, 1943, NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE

Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Astrid Varnay, soprano; Enid Szantho, contralto; and the Westminster Choir, Dr. John Finley Williamson, director.

Dr. Rodzinski's program last night at Carnegie Hall, announced beforehand as being "dedicated to the suffering of the oppressed," was not exactly a heartening affair, even when those dead, personified by the Westminster Chorus, rose to their feet and began to sing (in English) Klopstock's "Resurrection" Ode, used by Gustav Mahler as text for the final part of the fifth movement of his leviathan-like Second Symphony. For this reviewer, the piece is pathetic, but not in the moving sense of the word, because the degree of its insistence on dramatic effect isolates it from the realm of truly important music, and thus deprives it of the right to be judged as such. If the composer had been content to let his work be simply a piece of music, it might have been either a good one or a bad one, but it would at least have stood on its own purely musical merits; however, since he insisted on making it a shocker, complete with chorus, organ, ten horns, augmented percussion, and offstage flourishes, there is no way open for us to consider it from the point of view so feverishly indicated by its creator: from the point of view of dramatic impact. Today, as a thrill-producing device, it is as outmoded as a stereoscope.

One is sorry that Mahler was fated to live and work in age when Disney and Fantasound had not made their appearance, not because he would necessarily have been interested in films as a medium of artistic expression (although he might easily have been, and why not?), but because the infinitely superior ability of that medium to express his particular kind of literary-philosophical magniloquence would have induced him to exercise his talents in fields of expression more appropriate to the art of music.

As it turned out, Mahler's architectural abilities eclipsed his creative sense of proportion, with the result that his music is not situated on a main thoroughfare of music but on a byway. Neither the thematic material of the Second Symphony nor the harmonic treatment of the material is forceful (read: original) enough to assign it to that wide avenue. What is present is a strong personal inflection capable of imbuing his expressive faculty with a high degree of eloquence. But that eloquence is employed almost exclusively to give tongue to a megalomaniacal passion for the grandiose. One has a suspicion that, given the proper circumstances, he might have qualified as a favorite with certain groups in the Third Reich, whose doctrine of glorification of the irrational conditions all esthetic manifestations of that country ...

-- from Paul Bowles on Music, edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2003).

2007-08-23T18:29:00.001-04:00

* * * * THE VISUAL WORLD * * * *

" ... And who, precisely, is Agnes Martin?

"Her semi-obscurity is exactly the point ...

"The paintings are reticent in turn -- pale, spare, barely there.
(Martin rejected the term Minimalist in favour of Abstract Expressionist, but if she wasn't a Minimalist, it's not clear
who would be.) Her pictures seldom reproduce well; and at first one looks much like another.

"Martin's basic technique stayed the same for years. She began with a square canvas -- precisely six feet by six feet -- and primed it with plain white gesso. On top of the gesso she then laid down faint horizontal lines in pencil, followed by exacting, ultra-thin washes of oil paint or acrylic. Sometimes she added vertical pencil lines, creating delicate grids; at other times, she made simple horizontal stripes. The bands of pigment were usually matt white or off-white, sometimes tinted a pale gray or yellow. Later in her career she added a nearly invisible coral pink and a faint blue pastel to her palette. And that, kids, was that.

"It is impossible to overstate their self-effacing beauty. Martin herself wrote that she believed the function of art to be "the renewal of memories of moments of perfection." Making art seems to have been a kind of meditation for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation -- "floating abstractions" akin to the art of the ancient Chinese. And it's true, though they are built up line by line, by almost imperceptible increments, that after a while her pictures begin vibrating on the retina with a strange energy -- flipping back and forth between metaphysical registers, like one of Wittgenstein's playful visual paradoxes. The sense of calm they evoke in the viewer is similar to the liturgical mood Rothko's work can produce, but Martin is less morbid, theatrical and self-consciously "profound". Facing down the void, Rothko can at times be downright bombastic. Martin is more humane and in some way stronger: smaller in scale, indifferent to sublimity (though her paintings achieve it). It's the difference, perhaps, between Lowell and Bishop.

"Yet there is no doubt that Martin's work will always be caviar -- the very palest of pale fish roe -- to the general. Who better, then, to serve as my guardian angel? The artist would no doubt be appalled to hear it, but admiring her work aloud is now a fail-safe way for the upwardly mobile poseur to signal intellectual depth and all-round ahead-of-the-curveness -- like subscribing to ArtForum and actually reading it. Martin is the sort of artist show-offs show off about, know-it-alls know about. I think I like her -- the whole chaste package -- because she was ... so seemingly unencumbered with envy or the need to strategise. Thinking about her has a soothing effect -- like imagining myself reincarnated as a smooth and shiny pebble, glinting in the sunlight at the bottom of a cold, clear mountain stream ... "

from Terry Castle, "Travels with My Mom", London Review of Books, 16 August 2007. (NOTE: Terry Castle has a blog at terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com.)

2007-08-15T17:24:00.003-04:00

Who knew? Until recently, he didn't.

"For some -- record collectors with every catalogue number at hand, theatre buffs with first-night casts memorized, children who draw precise architectural blueprints of nineteenth-century silk mills -- a cluster of facts can be both luminous and lyric, something around which to construct a life."

-- Tim Page, Personal History:
"Parallel Play": Living with Asperger's syndrome, in the latest
New Yorker (August 20, 2007)

2007-08-14T01:15:00.003-04:00

"Colors ... are never seen in isolation; they are so puzzlingly variable as to justify a curious observation made by Goethe while he was concerned with the theory of color:

'The chromatic has a strange duplicity and, if I may be permitted such language among ourselves: a kind of double hermaphroditism, a strange claiming, connecting, mingling, neutralizing, nullifying, etc., and furthermore a demand on physiological, pathological, and aesthetical effects, which remains frightening in spite of longstanding acquaintance. And yet, it is always so substantial, so material that one does not know what to think of it.'

"The elusiveness is not so much a particularity of perception as it is of cognition in general. The privilege of observing everything in relation raises understanding to higher levels of complexity and validity, but it exposes the observer at the same time to the infinity of possible connections. It charges him with the task of distinguishing the pertinent relations from the impertinent ones and warily watching the effect things have upon each other."

-- Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1969).

2007-08-05T17:21:00.000-04:00

" ... In 1956, the magazine Haiku Research estimated that there were at least four million Haiku poets practicing the art -- if that is the proper word for the tireless permutations of crows perching on a branch, frogs leaping into a pond, drops sliding off bamboo-leaves, and autumn leaves rustling in a ditch. Its stereotyped imagery and fixed number of syllables leave no scope for individuality, style, or critical evaluation. The inquisitive Mr. Enright once asked some professors of literature how they could tell a good Haiku from a bad Haiku. "We cannot," replied one of them, "the trouble is that we don't know what standards to apply. But perhaps you, from Cambridge ... "

"He smiled politely. Another suggested with a strangled cough, "All Haiku are good perhaps?"

-- Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot (New York: Macmillan, 1961).

2007-08-05T14:24:00.000-04:00

From The Private Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel, enlarged and revised edition conforming to the original text, translated by Van Wyck Brooks and Charles Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1935).

"August 26, 1868 (9 a.m.) Littre has led me to the Roman de la Rose, and the prolonged allegorical blackguardism of the last canto has left me quite wretched.

" ... The imagination is always more vulnerable to the senses, and the dream more dangerous than the reality. That is why seminarists are exposed to satyriasis, and the cloisters to nymphomania. The erotic poets cause more trouble than the women of the street. It is the mystery that excites the feelings. The unknown is a poison.

"Marriage is the graveyard of physical love, and this is a great blessing. It frees one from the obsession of carnal illusions and redeems one's freedom of mind. The generative impulse is a powerful but dangerous impulsion; it is like a cloud charged with electricity, a storm that has the power of fecundation. But above the cloud there is the blue sky, open space, the ether; above desire is thought; above the illusions there is truth; above passion and its storms is spirtual serenity."

"July 26, 1878. Two parallel paths lead me to the same result; meditation paralyzes me, physiology condemns me. My soul is dying, my body is dying. Whichever way I turn I meet a wall. Left to myself, I am consumed with sadness; and medicine also says to me, You have no further to go. These two verdicts seem to point to the same thing, that I have a future no longer and that I must pack my bags.

"This seems absurd to my incredulity, which would like to regard it as a bad dream. It is useless for the mind to say, This is so. The inner assent refuses to come. Another contradiction. I have not the strength to hope, and I have not the strength to resign myself. I believe no longer, and I still believe. I feel that I am finished, and I cannot conceive that I am finished.

"Is this madness already? No, it is human nature caught in the act; it is life that is the real contradiction, since it is an incessant death and a daily resurrection, since it affirms and denies, destroys and reconstructs, assembles and disperses, humbles and exalts at once. To live is to die partially and to be partially reborn; it is to persevere in this vortex with its two contrary aspects, it is to be an enigma.

" ... What does it matter whether it continues its play for a few moons or a few suns longer? It has done what it had to do, it has represented a unique combination, a particular expression of the species.

" ... To measure one's wretchedness is useful ... "

From the Penguin Guide to World Literature::

"Amiel, Henri-Frederic (Geneva 1821 -- Geneva 1881). Swiss writer. Of French Protestant descent, he became a professor of aesthetics, then of philosophty at Geneva. Famous for his remarkable diary, Fragments d'un journal intime (publ. posth. 1884). It reveals a delicate introspective nature of great critical and literary sensibility but paralysed by a feeling of mental impotence ... he stated that he watched his life flow by as a wounded man watches the blood flow from his veins ... "

* * * * *

Marcia took down the tray she had used for her early morning tea, but she left the cup behind on the dressing table where it would remain for some days, the dregs of milky tea eventually separating into sourness. As she was not going to the office, she changed the dress she had put on for her old Saturday morning skirt and a crumpled blouse which needed ironing, but there was nobody to notice it or to criticise it and no doubt the warmth of her body would soon press out the creases.

Downstairs at the sink she was about to wash up yesterday's dishes when she was diverted by the sight of a plastic bag lying on the kitchen table. How had that got there and what had been in it? So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it in a safe place, because there was a notice printed on it which read "To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children." They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves.

So Marcia took the bag upstairs into what had been the spare bedroom where she kept things like cardboard boxes, brown paper and string, and stuffed it into a drawer already bulging with other plastic bags, conscientiously kept away from babies and children. It was a very long time since any such had entered the house, children not for many years, babies perhaps never.

Marcia spent a long time in the room, tidying and rearranging its contents. All the plastic bags needed to be taken out of the drawer and sorted into their different shapes and sizes, classified as it were. It was something she had been meaning to do for such a long time but somehow she had never seemed to have a moment. Now, the first day of her retirement, she had eternity stretching before her. It amused her to remember Janice Brabner asking in that rather mincing, refined voice of hers, "Have you thought at all what you're going to do?"

. . . . . .

... The bed had become the place where the cat Snowy slept until his death, when the black part of his fur had taken on a brownish tinge and his body had become light, until one day, in the fullness of time, he had ceased to breathe, a peaceful end. He was twenty years old, one hundred and forty in human terms. "You wouldn't want to be that old," Mrs. Williams had said, as if one had the choice or could do anything about it. After Snowy's death and burial in the garden. Mrs. Williams had left, the work having become too much for her, and Marcia made no pretence of doing anything to the room. On the bed cover there was still an old fur ball, brought up in his last days, now dried up like some ancient mummified relic of long ago.

-- Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn.

Richard Buell, who compiles and writes Ear Trumpet, can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net.

2007-07-26T23:20:00.002-04:00

"To analyse a devotion to an art is beyond me, but here are a few observations, which I hope will explain a little why I love the music of Verdi so much.

"The variety and strength of his melodies. Verdi can, of course, write the obvious square tunes, which use many repetitions of the same little phrase and work to an effective climax. These abound in the earlier operas, and are immediately endearing: I think particularly of Parigi o cara in Traviata. But he can also write the long casual lines, a succession of apparently unrelated phrases, which repeated hearings discover to have an enormous tension deep below the surface. The wonderful 'conversational' duet at the end of Act I of Otello is a case in point.

"The perpetual 'unobviousness' of his harmonies. Verdi has the gift, which only the very greatest have had: that of writing a succession of the simplest harmonies in such a way as to sound surprising and yet 'right'. The accompaniment to the Egyptian trumpet tune in Aida is an extreme example of this. Then later in his life he developed a new kind of harmonic originality, which I can most easily describe by reminding the reader of the astounding string accompaniment to the bell strokes in the last scene of Falstaff, and the obscure Ave Maria 'on an enigmatic scale' from the Quattro Pezzi Sacri.

"His attitude to the voices on the stage and the orchestra. This seems to me to be perfectly right. The voices dominate, and the orchestra is in the background -- but what a background! In the later works especially, the orchestra has a range of colours wider than with any other composer. For soft shading, the Nile scene in Aida is inimitable, and no one has ever made the orchestra roar so terrifyingly as at the beginning of Otello.

"In the construction of his later works Verdi seems to have discovered the secret of perfection. At the beginning of his life he accepted the convention of the times in the sharp definition of the numbers, and he balanced these numbers brilliantly. Fundamentally, he never changed this attitude, but later on the numbers melt into each other with a really astonishing subtlety. The fact that the most famous composer alive today [i.e., Stravinsky, in 1951] dismisses Otello and Falstaff 'because they are not written in numbers' shows, it seems to me, that he does not know the works very well.

"And so on. I have no space to write about his vitality, his breadth of humanity, his courage, his extraordinary career which developed into an almost divine serenity. I should like to end with a personal confession. I am an arrogant and an impatient listener; but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced it is my own fault. Verdi is one of these composers."

2007-07-07T10:25:00.000-04:00

Robin Holloway, writing about the late Regine Crespin and her performance of the Wolf/Moerike song "In der Fruehe":

" ... Crespin is equally at home at a much lower storey. [RH has just described the Hugo Wolf Society recording by Tiana Lemnitz.] This is the unidealistic version; as always she is richly sexual -- the very timbre as well as her masterly deploymant of it (listen to the chalumeau of 'Nachtgespenster' and 'laenger') make one see and feel the disordered bed, the sultry night, the sensual coils."

-- from "Song on Record," ed. Alan Blyth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

2007-06-12T17:10:00.000-04:00

With some translations you lose so much in the original.

2007-06-08T20:46:00.008-04:00

Ear Trumpet totters onto the scene once more, and in yet another manifestation. ET's first appearance, as a newspaper column, was back in 1972, when we were all very young -- Seiji Ozawa's appointment as BSO Music Director was greeted with enthusiasm -- how little we knew! -- and there was something called the underground press. But that is a story (perhaps) for later on ...

rb