Month: November 2012

Keeping with my streak of bookish posts, an interesting piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (how long it will be outside the paywall, I knoweth not) musing on the book. Nice to have the historical context. From a prof at McGill who has written, of course, a book on the subject.

Redundancy is thus not something that only belongs to “primitive” cultures; it is a basic condition of communicative reliability, of producing mutual understanding. Indeed, as the field of bioinformatics has more recently taught us, it is an elementary condition of life itself.The significance of redundancy for human communication is to my mind one of the most persuasive reasons why the printed book should still matter to us today. But it is also a compelling argument for the importance of new forms of electronic reading. Expanding the number of channels through which our ideas circulate makes those ideas potentially richer. That was the lesson of numerous medieval manuscript illustrations that highlighted the intersection of books, scrolls, and human speech to achieve a greater sense of understanding. More aspects of communication are not just quantitatively different. They are also qualitatively different. These multiple channels synthesize into something greater than the sum of their parts. The aggregation, and not the singularization, of communication is the condition of more complex thought. It is the condition of our humanity.

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The story of the book’s dominance in the 19th century should stand as an important reminder to us today. As we are overrun by computation, much in the same way as we were once overrun by books, we need to remember that what makes us unique as a species is not just our ability to communicate in complex ways through words. It is our ability to layer—or more artisanally understood, to weave—different modes of communication with one another to give those same words a deeper, more profound meaning.

The great American composer Elliott Carter died Monday at age 103. He lived through cataclysmic changes in classical music (think about it: he was age 4 when “Le Sacre du Printemps” inspired a riot in Paris in 1913) and stayed true to a modernist idiom that demanded (and rewarded) attention. One highlight of my Boston time was getting to hear James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Carter works, including pieces commissioned for his 100th birthday. The reports don’t mention it, but I bet he was composing until the end of his life.

A wire service story has appeared on the NYTimes (busy night around there, I’m sure) and many tributes to follow, no doubt.

His “Enchanted Preludes” courtesy of YouTube.

From the Times piece:

As he turned 100, he recalled a visit to the hall in 1924 to see the New York premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary work “The Rite of Spring.”

“I thought it was the greatest thing I ever heard, and I wanted to do like that, too,” Carter recalled. “Of course, half the audience walked out, which was even more pleasant to me. It seemed much more exciting than Beethoven and Brahms and the rest of them.”

Tipped by Long Reads, Elizabeth Gilbert before she won the book lottery with Eat, Pray, Love:

Gilbert: “I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten note from Harper’s! And I would hang it on my wall, like, That’s such a great rejection letter! I don’t know why I felt like I had the right to do it. I don’t know. I’ve always been really surprised—and I really remain very surprised—at people who don’t think they have the right to do their work, or feel like they need a permission slip from the principal to do it, or who doubt their voice. I’m always like, What? What? Fucking do it! Just fucking do it! What’s the worst that could happen?! You fucking fail! Then you do it again and you wear them down and they get sick of rejecting you. And they get tired of seeing your letters and they just give up. They don’t have any choice. So part of it was real confidence, and part of it was fake confidence, and part of it was insecurity. It was a combination of all them.”

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Photos from a visit to one of my favorite haunts in Washington, the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks. My first visit in 15 years, and it is as magical as I remembered, and has a beautiful modern addition in the form of an installation by the landscape artists Cao | Perrot.

More evidence for my minor but persistent grumble about the fact that on those rare occasions classical music turns up as a plot line in the movies it’s often a watch word for arch melodrama or villainous perversion To wit: in any horror movie, it’s the guy who listens to Verdi or Wagner who did it. Hannibal Lechter famously blissed out to Mozart. Another post will take up Woody Allen’s highly personal (and longtime) use of opera as coding for bad guys.

The latest effort, “Late Quartet,” avoids the horror card, but otherwise seems to hit ever cliché of the genre. From the trailer (haven’t dragged myself to see it yet) seems overwrought and a little joyless. (Contrary opinion here.) Still, there are bound to be a few yuks courtesy of Christopher Walken trying to mime playing the cello. Reportedly they worked and worked to make it seem plausible that the four were professional string players. It didn’t work. (In fairness, that probably doesn’t matter, they are great actors, which great string quartet players wouldn’t be.)

More after I see the full movie.

For a taste of Beethoven’s Op. 131 in the flesh, check this clip from The Endellion Quartet out. It is something to hear.

From Salon, a few years back, the book critic Laura Miller suggests, not so gently, that the world doesn’t need more novelists, it needs more readers.

Miller: So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say. Writers have a reputation for being tormented by their lot, probably because they’re always moaning so loudly about how hard it is, but it’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.

Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let’s face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there’s not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there’s no one left to read it.

Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug’s “10/10/10″ challenge: These two women read 10 books in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites. In her victory-lap blog post, Klug writes of discovering new favorite authors she might otherwise never have encountered, and of her sadness on being reminded that “most Americans don’t read ANY books in a given year, or just one or two.” Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and “expanded my reading world.” So let me be the first to say it: Melissa and Kalen, you are the heroes.

Earlier in the piece Miller makes the same point that Stephen King makes, if you want to be a writer, read. Oddly, I’ve never met would-be writers who don’t read. But perhaps they do exist. Statistics about reading seem almost as shaky as statistics about sex.