But I'm whining, and I actually have something specific to ask you, which I'm clearly putting off, in the hopes I falter and won't. But here we go: I am probably breaking all Society of Fellow bylaws in putting this to you--and if you say no, as I imagine you must, it will be totally fine, I promise, I am nothing if not a gentleman--but even though I know you are simply an especially friendly person, even though I know that, given how absolutely lovely you are, you must have a boyfriend for every day of the week and two on Sunday (or girlfriend, this is the twenty first century I keep forgetting!), if I'm wrong and you are somehow single and you think you could be interested, I'd love to take you out on a date sometime. There's this great little wineshop downtown, for example, that has free tastings every Friday. Again, if you say no (or say nothing), I won't breathe a word of it again, I promise you. I just figured the only thing worse than asking would be not to. I hope you understand, and I hope you have a nice night!

 

feb 4, 2011 @ 6:00:00 pm - bookforum.com / paper trail

"Editor Hugo Lindgren continues to remake the Sunday Times Magazine, with Q and A maestro Deborah Solomon out (she’s planning to devote her time to writing a Norman Rockwell biography), and columnist Ariel Kaminer reportedly replacing Randy Cohen as the house Ethicist."

[From Bookforum]

Ah, I saved this for the announcement of Deborah Solomon's departure. I had a complicated relationship with her snarky charm--at once irritating and delightful--but I was sorry to see her go, and really, the 8 questions format. Her replacement I find to be super boring. I'm sure her Norman Rockwell biography will infuriate more than charm, but I'll have to check it out.

Remembering Joan Sutherland

'The greatest soprano of her time, Joan Sutherland was blessed with formidable technique, a voice that brought her the title La Stupenda, and an unspoiled Australian nature that kept vanity and pretension at bay.' 

In Italy to sing Alcina, Venetians went mad with delight, tore down La Fenice's flower decorations, threw them on to the stage and shouted "La Stupenda". In her autobiography A Prima Donna's Progress, Sutherland acknowledged with typical understatement the name that would accompany her for the rest of her life: "I was quite thrilled with my new title". 

In 1961, Sutherland and Bonynge leased a villa in Switzerland, a place by Lake Maggiore that allowed quick access to Milan and other European opera houses. And as a regular sufferer of sinusitis and throat ailments, the climate was far better than the damp airs of London. Switzerland was eventually to become their home. 

Also in 1961, she made her debut at the Metropolitan in New York where she sang Lucia and was mobbed afterwards on the street. In the opera house, the audience refused to cease their ovations. At the party in a hotel, an extra room had to be hired for the flowers.

[From the Australian]

This is old news, but La Stupenda was the best and this was the best obituary that came out at the time. The audio remembrance is worth listening to, too.

Pregnant women and families are sharing photos and more on Facebook, Web sites

Like many expectant mothers these days, Autumn Yates posted updates about her pregnancy on Facebook. 

“It’s nice for my extended family to see pictures from time to time of me getting bigger and little comments like, ‘34-week check-up went well!’ ” said Yates, 29, a Spanish teacher from Oakton. “I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think there is kind of a line sometimes, though.” 

For Yates, that line is somewhere around “creepy” 4-D ultrasound photos and cringe-inducing comments such as, “My cervix is now dilated [fill in the blank] inches! 

Read full article

[From Washington Post]

The culture of oversharing continues. Thanks, Facebook!

Violist Heckled Onstage - By Violist (There's A Joke in Here Somewhere)

"'About midway through a night of contemporary works, John Eichenseer, who goes by the name JHNO, was performing his Untitled, a new piece for viola and electronics, when he heard hissing, then an outburst of clapping intended to disrupt his playing, then another.' The heckler turned out to be 'Bernard M. Zaslav, a viola player with a pedigree as a champion of contemporary music.'

(Via ArtsJournal)

The Next Movie-to-Broadway Adaptation Is ... Big Fish

Remember Tim Burton's whimsical 2003 film Big Fish, starring Billy Crudup, Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney? According to the film's screenwriter John August, the movie's been optioned as a Broadway musical. "This isn’t one of those announcements where some people had lunch and said, 'Hey, maybe let’s try to do a show.' It’s written. Two acts. Amazing songs. We’ve read it and sung it forty times for lots of different people," wrote August on his blog Wednesday. "Studious readers of the blog and my Twitter feed may have noticed I’ve been in New York City a lot. This is why." Big Fish received Oscar nominations for Best Score and Best Original Music, but garnered mixed reviews from critics. And Big Fish isn't the only recent film adaptation. It's so hot right now! Carrie, The Goonies, and Dave (remember Dave?) are also on their way. [Movieline]

[via Vulture]

LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED the movie--can't wait till the adaptation arrives on Broadway!

Selected Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound edited by Richard Sieburth – review

From Guardian Books:

Nicholas Lezard welcomes a new Ezra Pound selection 

A tricky one, the question of Pound; and yet also easy. The quandary resides entirely in his vile antisemitism and his treasonous Italian wartime broadcasts, and the bearing they have on his poetry, itself studded with lines that make contemporary eyes widen with astonished disgust. And when he made a retraction much later in life – 'that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism' – it was only in conversation, and that 'suburban' hardly lets him off the hook. 

Then again, as Michael Wood once put it: 'it is impossible to take an absolute moral stand against a poet as good as Pound without deciding either not to read him at all or to read him only in terms of a moral judgment previously arrived at – no one who cares about literature, or in the long run about morality, can feel happy about these options.'

Charles Olson was, in Christopher Ricks's words, 'sickened and enraged' by Pound's prejudice, but that didn't stop him from visiting him regularly at the mental asylum he was placed in. 'Olson saved my life,' said Pound later. 

For the fact is that Pound is important, and, when good, very good indeed. He more or less single-handedly invented 20th-century poetry, or modernism, or the kind of literature that is ambitious, intellectually and musically stirring, and often haunting. The opposite, in short, of the rumty-tumty-tum school of Betjemanesque doggerel which people tend to prefer in this country. 

Of course Pound made poetic mistakes (although these are not as grave as his political mistakes); he hoped the Cantos would 'hold the world together', and indeed in my hot youth I used to think that the works contained, in essence, all world history and literature; but they don't, and I suspect that very few people indeed outside academia have read every single one. 

But they contain many, many lines of great beauty, and the 130-page selection in this handsome, splendid volume gives us a perfectly good idea of what they're like (although I looked for some of the more contentious lines and couldn't find them). They're also annotated, so the references and quotations from foreign languages which baffled readers when they came out, and completely flummox the contemporary brain, need be an impediment no longer. (Pound said they didn't matter anyway, and you could skip them until you came back to a bit you could understand.) 

But there is more to Pound than the Cantos. There are the early works, reprinted in full here, which can sound very pre-modern indeed with their thees and thous, although with hints of what was to come both poetically and less palatably. 

Then, as he progresses, the voice, which had always been assured, settles down to both great clarity and beauty. There are lines here which, once read, lodge in the head forever. This, surely, is what poetry should be all about. 'The tree has entered my hands, / The sap has ascended my arms, / The tree has grown in my breast – / Downward, / The branches grow out of me, like arms.' Or 'The gilded phaloi of the crocuses / are thrusting at the spring air'; Or, famously, the poem 'In a Station of a Metro', in its entirety: 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough', which I didn't even have to look up. He could also be funny – see his parody of 'Summer is icumen in', or 'The Lake Isle' (where he longs for a tobacco shop, or 'any profession / save this damn'd profession of writing') . . . 

Then there are the translations, both assured and audacious (not literal, but literality is not their point), and the sustained rage of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: 'All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says, / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days.' 

This is now the definitive selection, which also generously includes the introductions written by TS Eliot in 1928 and John Berryman in 1949. Anyone who cares about poetry, never mind just Pound, should have it. Although the notes could have been easier to use, and there is no index of first lines."

No one benefits from a good selected like Pound--hell, no one requires it as much as Pound does.

Hope for Khodorkovsky, and for Russia?

From NYRblog:

The paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta observed on June 3 that the pleas of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev offer Medvedev “an opportunity to put an end to the absurd saga that has been doing so much harm to the image of Russia…He cannot help knowing that every new verdict and every new denied request thoroughly undermine his own efforts to do away with so-called legal nihilism. He has to sort out this mess and move on.”

But is Medvedev in a position to do so? What happens to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will not only reveal the true depth of Medvedev’s democratic intentions, which have rightly been questioned by Russian liberals. It will above all be a measure of the president’s independence from Putin. Khodorkovsky threatened Putin’s power in 2003 by funding oppositional political parties and Putin is believed to be the main force keeping him behind bars. If Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are granted early release, it would mean that Medvedev is no longer Putin’s puppet, as many assume, but a leader in his own right. Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted that “Medvedev’s successful evolution into a bona fide politician and leader depends on a single decision [in the Yukos case].” This is probably no exaggeration.

Alexey Navalny

From The New Yorker

This profile of a Russian activist--a kind of Julian Assange, but given the level of corruption, a more banal (but no less helpful) one--makes me miss Anna: she was better.

BUT the last paragraph makes up for almost everything:

Neither Navalny’s home nor his office seems especially well protected, and when Navalny files a suit he frequently uses his home address. As I rode the metro back from his apartment, I wondered about the risks he was taking. When we first met, at a sushi restaurant near his office, he spoke about what he sees as the cowardice of liberal Russian businessmen—his natural constituency—who are too scared to stand up to government corruption. “I don’t understand this position,” he said. “First of all, it’s boring. Second of all, forgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.” He was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine. It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.” When things happened to opponents of the system, he said, it was because they showed up individually. “But if tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”

On Exile

To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement. 

All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.

.... At this point I should say that at least where literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.... Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision. No one forced Thomas Mann to go into exile. No one forced James Joyce to go into exile. Back in Joyce’s day, the Irish probably couldn’t have cared less whether he stayed in Dublin or left, whether he became a priest or killed himself. In the best of cases, exile is a literary option, similar to the option of writing. No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily—for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc.—but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while. Whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work. What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. And that’s not even to mention poets. Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there are often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions. Actors, it can be said, are always working, but it isn’t the same: the writer writes and is conscious of writing, whereas the actor, under great duress, only howls. Policemen are always policemen, but that isn’t the same either, because it’s one thing to be and another to work. The writer is and works in any situation. The policeman only is. The same is true of the professional assassin, the soldier, the banker. Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature.

["Roberto Bolaño in NYRB: "Exiles"]

P.J. O'Rourke on the Scourge of Bike Lanes

"The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn't appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet. You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle."

[From WSJ]