Month: January 2013

Listening to the Met’s Trovatore broadcast Saturday, the thing that caught my ear most (next to the impressive Di Luna of Alexey Markov) was an interview with a young soprano from South Africa who will be making her Met debut Thursday in Rossini’s Le comte Ory Pretty Yende.

Everything about her story is remarkable. She didn’t hear a note of opera until 2001, when she heard that British Airways commercial with a bit of the duet from Lakmé. The sound of operatic singing caught her imagination and the next day she asked somebody at her school what it was and how to do it. That started a path that tapped and developed what clearly are remarkable qualities: a pure and beautifully produced soprano voice, musical talent, and determination. What seems to have emerged is a poised, polished performer, one who seems born to do this complicated, unbelievably beautiful thing, sing.

The Met called her about singing the Countess in the Rossini only a couple of weeks ago; she said yes, learned the role in a week! (Telling Margaret Juntwait graciously that learning music has always been easy for her.) There’s no YouTube video of her in Rossini, but here she is (with some miserable pick-up orchestra, sorry) doing the radiant Song to The Moon from Rusalka. If the Met wants to make a lot of opera lovers happy, I think they should ease up on their IP policing attitude just once, and let a clip of her singing En Proie À La Tristesse Thursday find its way to the Web. There are only so many debuts in one opera-going lifetime that are worth remembering. This is likely to be one.

and that music from the British Airways commercial that inspired her.

NY Times theater critic Ben Brantley has a little fun with the revival of that 1953 clunker, “Picnic,” (hunky stranger comes to town, upsets the womenfolk. A story line that was already trite at the time of The Bacchae).

The male lead seems more Greek god than bad-boy drifter. As Brantley notes:

Presented au naturel or in a tight shirt ripped at the chest by an admirer (leaving a strategic view of a nipple), it’s a sight that arouses dangerous longings in lonely bosoms. From the moment it makes its first entrance, this is a torso named Trouble.

This play once passed for controversial. How times and mores have changed…

ArtsTechnica has an interesting first-person account on how a “fair use” poster child got mired in YouTube’s infringement workflow. In the various twists and turns Jonathan McIntosh relates, two struck me. First, all this “think you didn’t infringe, fill out this form” automated IP process seems disconcerting in that it hides the people behind the claims; are there people? Or just algorithms?  Secondly, if I’m following it right, part of the dispute is over whether somebody who asserts IP rights can unilaterally insert their ads, which you have to live with, or have your content blocked. Somewhat “meta” and creepy.

From the piece:

This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like.

Although my interest in Buffy or Edward is “less than absent” to steal a phrase from Robert Pinsky, I think I may have to watch his mash up for context. (Just watched it, nice piece of editing.)

Before she was a Pulitzer Prize winner and a national treasure, Eudora Welty was a 23-year-old looking for a job at the New Yorker. Letters of Note has her application letter. With this, among many other droll phrases,

“A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night…”

(Blogging summed up in 10 words.)

She didn’t get a job there, but I bet everybody in the office (Katherine White, William Maxwell, and even Harold Ross) read it with a gentle smile.

March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A. (’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase [sic] you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours,

Eudora Welty

From Brian Leiter’s Philosophy Blog, Leiter Reports, nice advice about what to do in an interview. This is for people applying for academic jobs in philosophy, but the underlying idea is more generally applicable to other kinds of interviews.

One of my colleagues has a lovely phrase to describe a key virtue in a candidate:  “She accepted the question I offered.” What this means is that, if an interviewer poses a question to you, don’t dismiss it, ignore it, or try to shut the dialogue down.

At one level, this would seem pretty elementary, who would do an end-run in an interview for a desirable job? But actually listening to the question and answering it (even if it’s to say you don’t know or you don’t understand it) as opposed to bending it to what you were prepared to say can be pretty challenging. (I might add, uncharitably, that it’s perhaps especially hard for philosophy types, of which I am one.)