Sounds & Fury

An Elite's Populist Manifesto

Book critic for The Washington Post, Michael Dirda, in a largely sympathetic, postmodern- and politically-correct review of What Good Are the Arts? — a new book by John Carey, chief book reviewer for the The Sunday Times of London, and former Oxford professor of English — outlines one of the book's central theses:

Instead of approaching artworks as showpieces, concludes Carey, we would be better off emphasizing personal participation in the arts. The activity itself matters more than the quality of the end product. Art should be "something done, not consumed, and done by ordinary people, not master spirits." It should result in community, not a fatuous sense of superiority. [...] "It is not what you paint on a piece of canvas that counts," Carey argues, "but what painting a piece of canvas can do for you."

See? Art is really about personal therapy, self-improvement, and the fostering of a perfectly equalitarian sense of community with one's fellow human beings, not aesthetics nor a revealing by a gifted artist of that which is normally hidden from and beyond the ken of us ordinary folk thereby enriching our spiritual lives in ways achievable by no other means. What's important is that art involve one as creator, bereft of any discernable talent though one may be. And if in participating in the making of art one creates, say, the equivalent of a velvet Elvis, or another C&W song exactly like the exact same five-gazillion that preceded it, no matter. The quality of the end product is of little importance. What's important is the acquiring of the proper attitude toward one's fellow human beings through the agency of one's involvement in the making of it.

Reading such imbecile, equalitarian-populist lunacy, especially coming from an obvious and privileged elite, one doesn't know whether to make sport of or skewer the lunatic.

But why one or the other? Why not both?

The real question that we need to keep in mind, says Carey, is "How does this person's love of art affect his, or her, attitude to human beings?" All too often, reverence for the divine Mozart or a heavenly Vermeer tends to reduce the rest of us to interchangeable extras on life's stage, unimportant and quite expendable.

But my dear fellow, the rest of us are interchangeable, unimportant, and quite expendable — professors of English, former or current, and book critics most particularly.

See now how that works?

There's a good fellow. I knew you would.

High-definition Clarity: An Argument Contra

Justin Davidson, Newsday music critic and guest-blogger on Alex Ross's blog, The Rest Is Noise, lodges a complaint, and asks a question:

I'm growing increasingly irritated with all the high-definition conductors, who make symphonies sound the way football games look on those coveted vast, flat screens. Digital video gives everything that comes before the camera a relentless clarity.

[...]

It seems strange to criticize an orchestra for clarity, both because it is so difficult to achieve and because we have come to accept it as the standard of textual authenticity. According to current orthodoxy, since the composer took the trouble to write all those damned little squiggles into the score (and implied a whole lot more), the best performance is the one that makes audible as much of the filigree as possible. This is, in different guises, the principle that guides performers as ostensibly distinct as authentic performance practice gurus, minimalist burblers, and Boulez and his Boulezzini. But, really, what's so terrible about letting the edges of a chord bleed a bit, or letting some of those waves of fast fiddle notes gurgle indistinctly?

To which my answer would be: it depends.

This business is a windmill I've been tilting at for some years now; mostly as it pertains to the orchestral rendering of Wagner's music. The following excerpt from this post of mine of 29 August 2004 neatly sums up my argument:

[T]he very thing that makes Böhm's Wagner so unsatisfactory (because so completely un-Wagnerian) is the orchestral transparency and razor-edged precision on which he (Böhm) insists. Böhm, it seems, reads a Wagner score as if it were a score by Mozart (of which composer's music Böhm is a master interpreter), and nothing could be more perverse than that.

[...]

Wagner's musico-dramatic and symphonic contrapuntal genius is almost always realized in the massing, rarely in details of inner line, and Böhm's transparent and razor-edge-precise readings of Wagner wherein the revealing of inner line is prominent are therefore just plain wrong (i.e., un-Wagnerian). They're wrong because while precision and the revealing of inner line in the music of, say, Mozart or Beethoven is to reveal the very soul of the music, precision and the revealing of inner line in Wagner's music serves only to reveal how the sorcerer accomplished his magic. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all, as any self-respecting sorcerer will confirm.

Almost (but not quite) the very same could be said for the music of, say, Mahler, Bruckner, R. Strauss (for the most part), and other late-period Romantics. The same, however, could not be said for the music of, say, Haydn and Mozart, nor for the music of most Classical-period composers (including for this purpose, Beethoven). For that music, it seems to me, transparency and precision are sine qua non if one is to get down to and reveal what the music is about.

So, as concerns this business, as I've above remarked, it depends.

Sunday Morning: The TV Show

CBS's Sunday Morning has been, since its inception some 27 years ago (1979), one of my very few "appointment" TV shows. In Sunday mornings gone by, it was something of a cultural oasis on network TV with regular culture segments on out-of-the-mainstream people, places, and things, including regular segments on classical music (hosted by flutist Eugenia Zukerman, ex-wife of violinist-violist-conductor Pinchas Zukerman); jazz (hosted by jazz pianist Billy Taylor); and books, cinema, and TV (by brainy culture critic and writer, John Leonard).

No more, and not for some time now. Now it's pop culture crap all the way, much of it PR-driven, with occasional culture segments on the world of the visual and plastic arts, which in the last decade or two has, in a way, become part of pop culture in the sense that it's become an In Thing for the bourgeois yuppie crowd.

Consider today's Sunday Morning culture segments, for instance. They were on the turn-of-the-century Viennese painter, Egon Schiele; on C&W singer, Rosanne Cash, daughter of the late Johnny Cash (a regular chip off the ol' block, she is, with the difference that, unlike her papa, she can actually sing somewhat); on a 10-year-old, Oakland, California Black kid who's become a big hit in Oakland's Chinatown singing in his Chinatown elementary school's productions of Chinese opera; and not a word, not so much as a fleeting mention, of the 250th anniversary of the birth of one, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

O tempora! O mores!

But Sunday Morning is not entirely without redeeming features. There are two things that make the show worthwhile tuning into if only to browse (I always tape the show so that I can fast-forward through the always intrusive network TV commercials, and lately, through most of the segments): the myriad and always beautiful "sun image" illustrations which begin and end the show and each of its segments, and the playing of the show's opening theme — the Baroque trumpet fanfare, "Abblasen", attributed to trumpeter and composer Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734) — by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on a Baroque piccolo trumpet, which playing is, I can say without fear of provoking any meaningful dissent, the most pure, the most beautiful, the most perfect trumpet playing you're ever likely to encounter anywhere.

As for the rest of it, score another victory for that ubiquitous monster: pop culture.

Musical Analysis: A Murderous Activity?

To redeem this blog from our just previous off-point post, we give you a link to a first-rate contemplation on the value of musical analysis in the understanding of a piece, or even simply a phrase or measure, of music.

Writes concert pianist and blogger Jeremy Denk of Think Denk:

People say "you are analyzing this to death!" as if discussion and contemplation of music were some sort of murderous activity, some sort of science-lab experiment in which a frog must die, pinned to the table.

I have my own gripes with analysis, believe me. But I don't think the answer is this kind of dismissal, this kind of easy getaway, as in: what's the point of analysis anyway? followed by "meet you at the Redeye Grill for martinis."

RTWT here. (Persevere. The post has a rather, um, off-point intro, but in short order gets to where it's going.)

Off-point, But Needs To Be Said

[I apologize for the following; not for the views expressed, but for posting — or, rather, re-posting — those views on a blog devoted solely to the arts. The following text was posted originally by me almost exactly two years ago (30 January 2004) on a now defunct predecessor blog to Sounds & Fury, and was occasioned by a particularly murderous Palestinian bombing of a bus in Jerusalem that resulted in a great number of Israeli civilian dead. Its re-posting below is occasioned by the devastating outcome of the just-past Palestinian democratic election wherein the Palestinian people gave Hamas — an Islamist-zealot terrorist organization devoted to the utter destruction of the State of Israel — a landslide victory which empowers Hamas to constitute and define the new government of the Palestinian people, and be their official voice. That landslide win came as a shock to almost everyone worldwide, but not to me. I expected it.]

---

With each passing year of the almost fifty-six-year-old "conflict" between the Israelis and Palestinians the real bottom-line nature of that conflict, as well as why the conflict has been so resistant to any lasting solution, becomes more and more clear. That is, more and more clear to me. To those in positions of power worldwide, even some in positions of power within the governments of the combatants themselves, the bottom-line nature of the conflict seems to have become more and more clouded and fraught with myriad and impenetrable subtleties and difficulties that defy even clear definition, hence the perennial putting forward of doomed-to-failure "peace plans," and the earnest engagement in impossible and equally doomed-to-failure Pollyanna "peace processes."

And what's become more and more clear to me concerning the bottom-line nature of the conflict is the manifest and incontestable circumstance that the Palestinians (as well as the Arab world generally) will accept as lastingly satisfactory no solution to the conflict that includes the continued existence of a sovereign State of Israel. No matter what concessions to Palestinian demands the Israelis are willing to make, no matter what they're willing to give up for the sake of peace, the Palestinians (and, again, the Arab world generally) will not be lastingly satisfied if, at the end, the State of Israel remains a sovereign and powerful entity in the region. Every Israeli concession, every partial surrender, will be (has been) looked upon by the Palestinians not as a step toward a peaceful coexistence with Israel, but as one step farther taken in the resolute march toward the Palestinians' (and once again, the Arab world's) ultimate, intractable and uncompromising goal: the State of Israel's utter destruction as a viable entity in the region.

If I'm right about that (and it's manifest I am), then it becomes immediately clear that every apparently successful step toward a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that in the end leaves Israel sovereign and powerful is merely just that, apparently successful, and in reality little more than a for-the-moment-palliative stopgap at best, and at worst, an insidious progression forward in the process of a slow suicide for Israel.

So, what then is the answer to the question of a genuinely lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? One thing that for certain is not an answer is sitting down at bargaining tables. After all, one cannot even begin to bargain in good faith with an opponent who will be satisfied only if at bargaining's end you end up dead. Bargaining conferences have been (and are) nothing but charades used by the Palestinians in an attempt to jockey for a better position in their march toward their ultimate real goal. And if I'm also right about that (and, again, that I'm right about that is manifest) that would seem to leave but a single effective strategy for Israel: an unambiguous and loudly declared promise of an overwhelming military response to any act of deadly aggression against her sovereignty or her people, ending, if necessary, in all-out war with the Palestinians (and with the Arab world as it could not help but be) with but one of only two possible outcomes: 1) Israel loses, in which case the State of Israel will cease to exist as every Israeli man, woman, and child will end up dead either at the hands of the Arabs, or, Masada-like, at the hands of the Israelis themselves; or 2) Israel wins, in which case the Palestinians and the Arab world will have no choice but to accept a sovereign State of Israel in the region on Israel's terms, hate it though they (and, I suspect, much of the rest of the world) surely would.

And what part the United States in such a war threat, and war itself if it came to that? Unambiguously determined. We back Israel to the hilt against all her enemies with whatever is necessary. We could do no less and still preserve even a shred of our moral or practical authority. In the entire world the United States has but two genuine friends: Britain and Israel. All our other "friends" — many of whom (all of whom, in the Arab world) actively but often secretly hate and / or are contemptuous of us — are contingent friends only, and would without compunction turn on us in a heartbeat if they saw any gain to be secured by doing so.

But all this is unthinkable, is it not? World War III for certain, and therefore something not to be entertained or even imagined, right?

Not right.

If things ever came to such a pass, and if the position of the United States were made unambiguously clear and in earnest, the intention and show of force would be more than enough. The rest of the world would stand back, much of the Arab world included, and offer no more than loud, aggrieved and condemnatory clucking noises at the U.N. and in the world press. Realistically, they could not do much more than that. They would, of course, hate us for our show of power in behalf of Israel, certainly, but they couldn't hate us more than they already do, or be more contemptuous of us, and so we would not only lose nothing by taking such a position, but would actually stand to gain in terms of the respect of and / or fear by other nations of the world (in the geopolitical arena, the two are the same in practical terms).

It's surely uncivilized, and a not attractive thing to contemplate, I confess. But if the history of mankind has taught anything it is that in the intercourse of both individuals and nations, when nagging push comes to ineluctable and intolerable shove, there's but a single language that all understand, and to which all respond predictably: overwhelming physical force or the real threat of same. He who carries and shows a willingness to wield the biggest stick wins.

Always.

Unexpected

I listened this afternoon, via WQXR, to the live broadcast from Salzburg, Germany of the offical gala inaugural concert (just finished) of this Mozart Year, as it's been dubbed, celebrating on this day 250 years ago the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The concert was nicely programmed — a piano concerto (#25 with pianist Mitsuko Uchida), the Sinfonia Concertante (with Gidon Kremer and Yuri Bashmet), several concert arias and several numbers from Le Nozze and Don Giovanni (with singers Thomas Hampson and Cecilia Bartoli), and a symphony (#35, the "Haffner"), all with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Ricardo Muti (why Muti was chosen to do conducting honors is beyond me) — and I found myself enjoying every bit of it having earlier made the decision to lock my critical faculty in the closet for the duration, so to speak.

I was entirely unprepared, however, for the ringing of the church bells of all Salzburg's churches at precisely 8:00 PM (2:00 PM EST) — the official time of Mozart's birth as noted by his proud papa — and the frisson of emotion and surprise on hearing them literally made the hair rise up on the back of my neck.

But that was as nothing compared with when the Vienna Singverein joined the Vienna Philharmonic to sing, "Heil sei euch, Geweihten", the glorious final chorus from Die Zauberflöte, to close the concert (also a surprise to me):

Hail to you on your consecration!
You have penetrated the night,
Thanks be given to you, Osiris, thanks to you Isis!
Strength has triumphed,
Rewarding beauty and wisdom with an everlasting crown!

At that point, I'm afraid I lost it — totally.

Helluva excuse for a Real Man I am.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang! 

Mozart: Composer, Dramatist, Spirit Of The World-spirit

The four great operas of Mozart all show paradigmatically how strongly music can mould dramatic form. The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro show further how such dramatic form can articulate a consistent, profound action. In these masterpieces, all of Mozart's eloquence and strength, his faultless response to action, his control over the dramaturgical wealth of the ensemble, his sensitivity to character in the aria, his famous ingenuity, sympathy, delicacy, and humor, his superb sense of artistic form on every level — all this is fired to cast a single dramatic conception. One cannot very well describe such a conception without lapsing into platitudes; one can find words more easily for operas like Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte, wherein the dramatic ideas are half-formed or unresolved despite very great beauties. But where the dramatist has been successful, the idea cannot be defined except as the work itself. The meaning of a complete work of art will be manifested only in the medium that realizes, consummates, or creates it. The vindication of opera as drama comes in such occasional, unique triumphs; and among these, Mozart has left our most precious examples.

—Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 1988, University of California Press

On the evidence of the Da Ponte operas and Die Zauberflöte, Mozart is one of those rare creative beings who comes to disturb the sleep of the world. He was put on earth, it seems, not merely to provide an anodyne to sorrow and an antidote to loss, but to trouble our rest, to remind us that all is not well, that neither the center nor the perimeter can hold, that things are not what they seem to be, that masquerade and reality may well be interchangeable, that love is frail, life transient, faith unstable. [...] Mozart's [dramatic] universe is itself uncertain, a maze of doorways to the unknown and the unexpected. Everywhere there are dislocations, fissures, tears, and weak spots; cynicism and disillusionment ... permeate his resolutions, corrupt his happy endings. [...] For [Mozart], the beneficence of the Creation was not self-evident, or, at least, it was necessary to reconcile it with the stations of the Cross. Tranquility must be earned, not ratified or colluded in. Evil persists even after the music has had its say.

—Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life, 1995, HarperCollins Publishers

Mozart's influence transcends history. Each generation see something different in his work. [...] Mozart's music, which to so many of his contemporaries still seemed to have the brittleness of clay, has long since been transformed into gold, gleaming in the light, though it takes on a different luster for each new generation. Without it each generation would be infinitely poorer. No earthly remains of Mozart survived save a few wretched portraits, no two of which are alike; the fact that all the reproductions of his death-mask, which would have shown him as he really was, have crumbled to bits seems symbolic. It is as though the world-spirit wished to show that here is pure sound, conforming to a weightless cosmos, triumphant over all chaotic earthliness, spirit of the world-spirit.

—Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, 1945, Oxford University Press

Mozart The Practical Musician

I still have 2 concertos to write to complete my subscription concerts [Mozart wrote three piano concertos for these subscription concerts: K413-K415]. These concertos are a happy medium between what's too difficult and too easy. They are brilliant, pleasing to the ear, natural without becoming vacuous. There are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully appreciate, yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.

[...]

[I]n addition [to the two piano concertos and a piano version of the Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail], I'm working on a quite difficult assignment; namely, an Ode to Gibraltar by [Johann Michael] Denis. It's a commission by a Hungarian Lady who wants to keep this a secret and present it to Denis as a tribute. The ode is sublime, beautiful, anything you want, but it's too exaggerated and bombastic for my fastidious ears. But what is one to do! The middle thing — the truth in all things — is no longer known and appreciated. To earn applause, one has to compose things that are so simpleminded that a coachman can sing them after hearing them just once, or so complicated that they please precisely because no sensible person can understand them.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, 28 December 1782

A Pianist Offers Some Pianistic Advice

You must not place yourself in the middle of the piano, but way up at the trebels, for in this way you have a better chance of flinging your body around and making all sorts of grimaces. You roll your eyes and smirk. When a passage occurs twice, you play it slower the 2nd time; if it comes around a 3rd time, you play it slower still; and when playing a passage you must lift your arm as high as you can, and if the passage requires emphasis, the arm and not the fingers must do this and do it with great purpose and heaviness.... She [Augsburg prodigy pianist, Nanette Stein] is eight and a half years old and she is now learning everything by heart; she has a chance of getting somewhere, for she has real talent; but she won't succeed if she continues this way. She simply won't get the necessary rapidity because she does everything she can to make her hand heavy. She will never be able to get what is most essential and difficult and the principal thing in music: the right tempo, for she has since the earliest youth completely neglected to play in time. Herr Stein [Nanette's father] and I have talked at least 2 hours about this very point. I have pretty much convinced him. He now asks my advice in everything. He used to be very taken by Becché. Now he sees and hears that I can do better than Becché, and that I am not making any grimaces when I play, and yet I play with much expression, and no one — these are his words — has ever played his piano forte as well as I have, and, besides, I always keep correct time. They are all wondering about that. They simply can't believe that you can play a Tempo Rubato in an Adagio, and the left hand knows nothing about it but goes on playing in strict time. As far as they know, the left hand always follows the right....

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, 23-25 October 1777

Category Added (Administrative Note)

For the convenience of our readers in this Mozart Year, we've created a new category, Mozart, wherein are gathered in one place all posts on this blog primarily Mozart-related. This new category is listed on the sidebar under the Categories listing where it may be accessed from all pages on this blog.

Even More On Mozart

Political Science professor Fred Baumann writes in The Weekly Standard:

Holding together with apparently effortless ease the most intensely characterized opposites is, to me, the essential quality of Mozart's music and the state of mind it engenders. Another operatic example is the famous quintet in the first act of Cosi Fan Tutte where, to the most soaring and blissful music, two couples of lovers mourn the departure of the men for war, while an elderly cynic (who, for a bet with the two men, is merely setting up a test of the women's fidelity) mutters that he'll die if he can't start laughing.

This is not mere ironic deflation of romantic pretensions. Just as we know the protestations of eternal love to be foolish, we feel their present truth and feel pity for the vulnerability they reveal. There is a similar moment at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro, where the countess pardons the count, in which much-betrayed, but still-loving, mercy balances perfectly with resignation and bitter necessity.

We get it. We feel all of it. No comment is needed.

RTWT here.

Mozart The Magician

In a mostly spot-on piece, Joshua Kosman of The San Francisco Chronicle writes:

The mathematician Mark Kac, in describing the visionary physicist Richard Feynman, identified two types of geniuses: the ordinary kind and what he called the "magicians."

"An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done, it is completely dark."

Mozart, like Feynman, was a magician.

RTWT here.

Paternal Advice — And A Response

Let me suggest that in your work you think not only of the musical cognoscenti but also of those listeners who are unmusical. You know that there are 100 unmusical listeners for every 10 connoisseurs; so don't forget to bring in the so-called popular style, which tickles the long ears.

—Leopold Mozart, in a letter to his son, Wolfgang Amadeus, 11 December 1780

Mon trés cher Pére!

As far as the so-called Popular Style is concerned, don't worry about it. In my opera [Idomeneo] you'll find music for every kind of listener — except for those with the long ears.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in an answering letter to his father, Leopold, 16 December 1780

That Harmonically Incomprehensible Mozart

In the next generation [after Mozart], although Mozart's glory was now unquestioned, [author, critic, and composer] E.T.A. Hoffmann, who loved Mozart so much he changed one of his middle names from [Wilhelm] to Amadeus, was still obliged to defend him against the charge that the harmony in the operas was often so radical as to be incomprehensible for anybody except a professional musician. Hoffmann's answer was perhaps his most brilliant essay on music. He took an example of Mozart's dramatic modulation from the cemetery scene in Don Giovanni, the E-major trio, in which the stone statue nods in response to Giovanni's invitation to dinner, and the basses of the orchestra descend to a surprising and chilling C-natural.

The professional musician, remarked Hoffmann, recognizes and names the technical procedure with no difficulty: the flatted sub-mediant holds no mystery for him. The general public, on the other hand, knows nothing of the technique, but shivers with terror at the sudden harmonic effect. It is the half-educated amateur who is puzzled by the chromatic change and is not sure what to call it. The connoisseur and the completely ignorant join hands in their understanding and admiration of the drama: the pretentious amateur is left behind by the complexity of the score. It was not to the great unwashed that Mozart's scores presented problems, and it is, in fact, the most complex of his scores — the G-minor and Jupiter symphonies, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Magic Flute — that have won the greatest and most enduring popularity.

—Charles Rosen, Radical, Conventional Mozart, 1991, The New York Review of Books

The Future Becomes Present

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:26 AM Eastern on 25 Jan. See below.]

Culture journalist and blogger Terry Teachout of About Last Night writes in his latest Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column:

The e-book is back. So are the technophobes who swear it'll never catch on. They were right last time, and they might be right this time, too. Sooner or later, though, they'll be wrong -- and when they are, your life will change.

Yes indeed. I couldn't agree more. The eBook is the book of the future. The near future. No, make that, the very near future. As I wrote in a blog post on 8 December 2003 (on a now deceased prior incarnation of this blog):

Today's conventional wisdom is that while the eBook (especially the fiction eBook) is essentially a dead-in-the-water concept at present, it will not always be so, but even when that future time arrives, the ink-on-paper volume will still reign supreme because one will never be able to snuggle up with cold, phosphor type on a glass or plastic screen in a hard plastic or metal portable case, like one can with a bound, ink-on-paper volume.

Well, I'm here to tell y'all that's a crock; one perpetrated by whomever to make all you ink-on-paper-book-loving Luddites and semi-Luddites feel more comfortable about the future of your beloved ink-on-paper volumes. Just one development is necessary for the eBook to replace almost totally the bound, ink-on-paper volume forever: a proper display screen; a screen where type and images will display in a way indistinguishable, except by physical touch, from ink-on-paper. Or display in a way perhaps even more vivid and warmly intimate.

You perhaps doubt my word on this. If so, do this little thought experiment.

Think of a paper-thin sheet of plastic on which appears a page of text (or text and images), the plastic sheet of the same size as a typical size ink-on-paper trade hardcover volume, and the page of text displayed indistinguishable in appearance from the ink-on-paper book page. Now affix that sheet of plastic to any substrate of your imagining; say, something an inch-thick, and about the same shape and weight as a standard size trade hardcover paper volume of the same thickness, and made of just about any material you like. Now place a rigid, thin, side-hinged cover on top of the whole thing.

There you have your eBook of the future. As cozy and cuddly a thing to snuggle up with as any ink-on-paper book you ever owned. Except it's not a book. It's a dozen (two dozen; ten dozen; whatever) books. And not just a certain, unchanging dozen, but a dozen that can be exchanged with any other dozen at your pleasure, one by one, by the simple expedient of plugging in the appropriate credit-card size memory module, and in a flash (PI) copying its contents into your eBook. Or be exchanged by connecting your eBook to your computer wherein is stored your complete library of hundreds or thousands of e-volumes, all of which were previously downloaded from the Web. Or be exchanged by logging onto the Web directly with your eBook, and downloading whichever volumes you desire.

And you can do this 24/7 without leaving your home, and have the volumes in your eBook in a matter of minutes. And I here make no mention at all of the other benefits of digital text such as the invaluable search function, integrated dictionary, note taker, highlighting and annotating functions, etc., etc. Nor do I make any mention of the production advantages over ink-on-paper for publishers, the inventory advantages for booksellers, online or off. And I haven't even touched on the myriad advantage for authors, and the rewards of self-publishing which with this technology will be a virtual snap.

How far off in the future is that sine qua non display technology that will replace almost totally the ink-on-paper volume forever? I of course don't really know, but I'd be willing to bet, giving odds, that less than five years out is not over-optimistic. I mean, we're talking here about a multi-billion-dollar consumer market for eBooks (machine and texts), and when a market of that dollar size is at stake amazing things can and do happen. All that's required is a recognition by the industry that such a market is for real, and here right now, not a blue-sky, if-come affair.

Well, even though those who make up that vast consumer market (that's to say, you) may not know it, that market is very much for real here and now, and waiting. Waiting for the proper display technology to make its appearance. As I said, you may not know you're waiting for it -- until you actually see it, that is -- but the industry does know, and so it won't be long now in coming.

Trust me.

From Mr. Teachout's article, and from my prior reading in other sources, that "proper display screen; a screen where type and images will display in a way indistinguishable, except by physical touch, from ink-on-paper" has apparently arrived, courtesy of a new display technology called E Ink; a display technology utilized by Sony Corporation in their soon-to-be released new eBook reader, the Sony Reader.

As much as Mr. Teachout and I agree in this matter, however, I see an immediate problem of which Mr. Teachout has taken no notice.

If you read Mr. Teachout's above linked piece, you'll see that the Sony Reader pictured there — the magic device that Sony is betting will jump-start the mass migration to the eBook — has a cardinal design error: it's not configured to present a simulacrum of an ink-on-paper book.

Why is that a cardinal design error? Well, ultimately it's probably not. But for the immediate present — the "transitional present," so to call it — a mass-market-successful eBook reader will need that familiar ink-on-paper book look and feel so that the initial transition for present book lovers will be as painless and as natural as possible.

A small detail, no doubt. But as we're all aware by now, it's in the details that God and the Devil reside.

If the E Ink display technology is everything it's cracked up to be, and Sony makes that single design change to the Sony Reader, then the eBook future will, in very short order, become the eBook present.

Once again, Trust me.

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Update (1:26 AM Eastern on 25 Jan): Now, this soon-to-be-released E Ink-equipped eBook reader looks more like (but still not quite) what a properly configured eBook reader should look like.

Crushing

For us today, perhaps the most crushing, anguish- and sense-of-loss-provoking declaration in the entire history of music is this by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the last days of his final illness (reported by Constanze Mozart, his wife, to his biographer, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Constanze's second husband):

And just now I must die when I could live quietly. Now to leave my art just as I had freed myself from the slavery of fashion, no longer chained by speculators, and could follow my own flights of inspiration and compose freely and independently whatever my heart dictates!

Myth And Essential Truth

Writes New Yorker music critic and blogger Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise:

As several essayists have observed in recent days, the Frey case exemplifies a diseased attitude toward truth in American society, which is visible all across the cultural spectrum and goes straight to the top. Bush's argument for a war in Iraq discarded literal truth in favor of essential truth. There's another name for essential truth: myth. Totalitarianism depends upon it.

On first reading, I determined I'd take a pass on making any comment on this at all, for to make even brief comment can lead to treatise-long essays on the nature and definition of fact and truth and their interconnectedness or lack of same; an exercise I've no inclination to engage in, most particularly not on this blog.

My determination notwithstanding, however, Alex's statement kept gnawing at me, and we all know just how painful that can be. So, in an attempt to make that gnawing cease and desist, I would only remind Alex that while totalitarianism depends unquestionably on untruth in the form of tendentious fictions, fictions, tendentious or otherwise, are not the same as myths, nor is myth a synonym for fiction as it, more often than not, is used and understood today. Genuine myth does indeed embody essential truths; truths inexpressible and / or ungraspable directly. That's, in fact and in truth, the first requisite, principal hallmark, and very definition of genuine myth. And while totalitarianism is, as I've already noted, unquestionably dependent on tendentious fictions to achieve its full force and effect, it is genuine art — lasting, meaningful art — in all domains that's unquestionably dependent on myth, created and / or received, for its full force and effect. That's true of all genuine art: from the time of the cave paintings at Lascaux and almost certainly before, right down to this very day. And so will it be in saecula saeculorum et in perpetuum.

There. Now do cease your niggling gnawing, and leave me be.

Pay Attention! (Administrative Note)

I continue to get eMail missives on a regular if infrequent basis (all from different correspondents) that express the same sentiment: "Your blog looks funny, and is difficult to read." When I ask those who didn't specify in the eMail which browser they're using, I invariably get the same answer as the eMails that did: "I'm using Firefox v1.xx," or "I'm using Netscape vX.xx," or "I'm using Safari v1.xx," or ... etc., etc. This despite this, and this; the link to the former ("Displaying Sounds & Fury") a prominent, permanent resident of my sidebar since this blog's inception.

Pay attention, y'all! I can't help it that all browsers don't display valid HTML and XHTML code exactly the same way. Were I HTML-XHTML Czar Of The Internet, all browsers would be compelled to display code in precisely the same way no matter on what machine or under what OS they were running. But I'm not, and they don't. Of the three browsers with which I've viewed this blog, all display differently; sometimes hugely differently. And that's just Windows browsers. I've never seen this blog displayed on a Mac using any browser, and shudder to think what it must look like displayed on that Fruit machine.

So, what's the answer?

First, I absolutely refuse to adjust the code (that is, where it's not totally controlled by TypePad, and I can adjust it) to some passable common denominator so that it displays somewhat OK on all browsers, machines, and OS's. Not my style. I spent a great deal of time on the design of this blog to get it to look just the way I want it to look (again, where I'm able to do that within the constraints imposed by TypePad), and you can see the result of that work as it was meant to be seen if you'll dump that non-standard browser you're using, and switch to the worldwide standard: Internet Explorer 6 — which is the browser I used to design the look of this blog — and set your machine and browser parameters to comport with this specification.

To the question posed above, that's the answer.

That is all.

As you were.

Not Joking

Wagnerian soprano, Jane Eaglen, writes a reminiscence of the great Birgit Nilsson in today's Slate.

Recalls Ms. Eaglen:

As I was first learning the role of Turandot [in the Puccini opera of the same name], "In Questa Reggia," the big aria [Turandot] starts with, was very daunting — a difficult aria as soon as you set foot on the stage. Joseph [Ward, Eaglen's teacher] told me that he once asked [Nilsson, perhaps the most stellar Turandot of the last century], in an elevator, how she went on and sang that aria cold, and she replied, "I just use it to warm up the voice."

Why is it I think Nilsson, famous as a jokester, wasn't in the least joking about that.